Sameer Kochhar
Editor-in-Chief, Inclusion
Editor-in-Chief, Inclusion
You may recall our advertisement in the last issue of Inclusion that essentially said that a large number of Indians are poor and the reason given for that by the policy makers is that they do not have a bank account, Aadhaar number, Internet, computer etc. (if they do not have bread, why don’t they eat cake?). Meant as a satirical commentary on policy responses to poverty, it is even surprising to find recommendations like creating cloud computing for the poor or giving them tablets as minuted recommendations in Department of Information Technology’s first meeting on e-Inclusion. An example of the distance between Bharat and India if there ever was.
I was recently invited by SEWA to address their annual general meeting and took the opportunity to experience their work firsthand in a couple of villages. Barely literate salt pan workers were discussing branding and business strategy. With a one million rupees capital, their turnover was 45 million rupees last year and they had just negotiated a 1 billion-rupee loan from a bank. They have been training the daughters of the workers on data-entry, who in turn have found employment with the village Panchayats. Cannot think of a better response to poverty and exclusion. This issue of inclusion carries many such stories of empowerment from SEWA.
Other than the good work being done under Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), micro-insurance seems to be a disaster area, with neither the Ministry of Finance nor the regulator pushing the insurance companies. If one simply Googles “IRDA and financial inclusion/micro-insurance,” one would be hard-pressed to get any results. Absolutely the reverse is true if one Googles “RBI and financial inclusion.” Little wonder, Life Insurance Corporation does not even consider insurance for the poor as a key result area. Commitment to micro-insurance should be a key deciding factor while appointing the new chairman of LIC.
Our last issue on Aadhaar sparked off many a debate within the government and other stakeholder communities. It also helped put all the unanswered issues on the front-page of mainline media. At long last, Aadhaar is going through the acid test! Unfortunately, the debate is still being hijacked by issues of administrative control and autonomy rather than on how quickly we can provide an identity to the bottom 600 million Indians. Just exactly why we need to photograph them, fingerprint them, iris scan them for proving poverty and their need for government subsidies, that too seem to be getting capped at 32 rupees a day as definition of poverty, which now seemingly is undergoing correction.
The fallout of the 2G and CWG episodes is taking its toll with quite a few departments deciding to roll-back reforms and handling projects with no/little involvement of the private sector. Spending worth billions of rupees is being planned on mega-projects for many of which the government clearly lacks the skill sets or capacity. A senior technocrat cited the “Golden rule – he who controls the gold (government) decides the rule.” Repercussions of this statement in a democracy can be pretty dangerous. Other government departments have become pretty stringent with levying penalties and revoking bank guarantees etc. Are we throwing the baby out with the bath water? lWhen I met Nandan Nilekani six months or so after he took over as chief of UIDAI, his question to me was that with him joining the government, what has changed? I said, the general public has a lot of expectations from him - from poverty alleviation to education, he seems to be holding answers to all problems that have plagued India since independence. And my biggest challenge? he asked. Delivering on those expectations was my answer.
Two years down the line, this has turned true. Aadhaar is today expected and ‘loosely’ positioned to be the sole panacea that will transform governance, make Bharat part of the growth process, plug leakages and slippages into welfare schemes and bring about prosperity all around. What is essentially an identity number has been over-romanticized as an ‘enabler’ to put India on a fast-track growth path by virtue of becoming a pivot around which all anti-poverty measures will rotate and also deliver. While Nandan's contention is that he has not promised any such thing, the fact is that he has also never denied the frenzied media reports on UID as a fix all solution. There seems to be a demand generating industry at work for UID and the UID enabled.
It is feared that UID is attempting to impose technology to foster centralisation rather than promote de-centralisation and coming up with magical remedies in technology for problems that perhaps have solutions only in governance reform and institutional regeneration. Sometimes, technology can even be used as a quick bypass to constitutional provisions. Panchayati Raj Institutions being deprived of their right to 'identify' its people as the main UID registrars is a case in point. Focus is instead on 'identifying the already identified' who open bank accounts or have ration cards or even PAN cards. Arguments for conditional fund transfers instead of unconditional fund transfers and technology duplication efforts like the Aadhar enabled RuPay card to do exactly what all cards do anyway are some of the cases in point.
The Planning Commission has started the consultations for 12th Plan and has formed several committees consisting of experts. One such committee on formulating the department of IT plan has over 60 members and no visible representation from civil society or consumer groups - coherence of discussions notwithstanding. Yet other sub-groups are being formed ministry wise to look at their need for ICT rather than having an overall perspective on an underlay of ICT for the 12th Plan that can result in a virtual silo-busting within the government schemes and can actually make this plan different from the earlier ones and hopefully ranking it higher on delivery and inclusive growth.
There is also little clarity as to how the government will integrate the UID with the National Population Registrar (NPR). Considering the multifarious agencies and the issues involved in the work of capturing biometrics and digitizing the demographic information it certainly is a gigantic task. Is does not seem to have happened at least in Tembhli where the information captured by private enrolment agency for the card is not quite at par with the details earlier collected by the census enumerators.
To end on a lighter note, a close associate of mine who hails from Kumaon hills was recently given an Aadhaar card. His biometrics, photo and other details were captured at the time of application. The person who delivered the card demanded a photo identity to match the photo on the Aadhaar card and handed over the card on seeing his PAN Card ! So much for biometric technology.
I was recently invited by SEWA to address their annual general meeting and took the opportunity to experience their work firsthand in a couple of villages. Barely literate salt pan workers were discussing branding and business strategy. With a one million rupees capital, their turnover was 45 million rupees last year and they had just negotiated a 1 billion-rupee loan from a bank. They have been training the daughters of the workers on data-entry, who in turn have found employment with the village Panchayats. Cannot think of a better response to poverty and exclusion. This issue of inclusion carries many such stories of empowerment from SEWA.
Other than the good work being done under Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), micro-insurance seems to be a disaster area, with neither the Ministry of Finance nor the regulator pushing the insurance companies. If one simply Googles “IRDA and financial inclusion/micro-insurance,” one would be hard-pressed to get any results. Absolutely the reverse is true if one Googles “RBI and financial inclusion.” Little wonder, Life Insurance Corporation does not even consider insurance for the poor as a key result area. Commitment to micro-insurance should be a key deciding factor while appointing the new chairman of LIC.
Our last issue on Aadhaar sparked off many a debate within the government and other stakeholder communities. It also helped put all the unanswered issues on the front-page of mainline media. At long last, Aadhaar is going through the acid test! Unfortunately, the debate is still being hijacked by issues of administrative control and autonomy rather than on how quickly we can provide an identity to the bottom 600 million Indians. Just exactly why we need to photograph them, fingerprint them, iris scan them for proving poverty and their need for government subsidies, that too seem to be getting capped at 32 rupees a day as definition of poverty, which now seemingly is undergoing correction.
The fallout of the 2G and CWG episodes is taking its toll with quite a few departments deciding to roll-back reforms and handling projects with no/little involvement of the private sector. Spending worth billions of rupees is being planned on mega-projects for many of which the government clearly lacks the skill sets or capacity. A senior technocrat cited the “Golden rule – he who controls the gold (government) decides the rule.” Repercussions of this statement in a democracy can be pretty dangerous. Other government departments have become pretty stringent with levying penalties and revoking bank guarantees etc. Are we throwing the baby out with the bath water? lWhen I met Nandan Nilekani six months or so after he took over as chief of UIDAI, his question to me was that with him joining the government, what has changed? I said, the general public has a lot of expectations from him - from poverty alleviation to education, he seems to be holding answers to all problems that have plagued India since independence. And my biggest challenge? he asked. Delivering on those expectations was my answer.
Two years down the line, this has turned true. Aadhaar is today expected and ‘loosely’ positioned to be the sole panacea that will transform governance, make Bharat part of the growth process, plug leakages and slippages into welfare schemes and bring about prosperity all around. What is essentially an identity number has been over-romanticized as an ‘enabler’ to put India on a fast-track growth path by virtue of becoming a pivot around which all anti-poverty measures will rotate and also deliver. While Nandan's contention is that he has not promised any such thing, the fact is that he has also never denied the frenzied media reports on UID as a fix all solution. There seems to be a demand generating industry at work for UID and the UID enabled.
It is feared that UID is attempting to impose technology to foster centralisation rather than promote de-centralisation and coming up with magical remedies in technology for problems that perhaps have solutions only in governance reform and institutional regeneration. Sometimes, technology can even be used as a quick bypass to constitutional provisions. Panchayati Raj Institutions being deprived of their right to 'identify' its people as the main UID registrars is a case in point. Focus is instead on 'identifying the already identified' who open bank accounts or have ration cards or even PAN cards. Arguments for conditional fund transfers instead of unconditional fund transfers and technology duplication efforts like the Aadhar enabled RuPay card to do exactly what all cards do anyway are some of the cases in point.
The Planning Commission has started the consultations for 12th Plan and has formed several committees consisting of experts. One such committee on formulating the department of IT plan has over 60 members and no visible representation from civil society or consumer groups - coherence of discussions notwithstanding. Yet other sub-groups are being formed ministry wise to look at their need for ICT rather than having an overall perspective on an underlay of ICT for the 12th Plan that can result in a virtual silo-busting within the government schemes and can actually make this plan different from the earlier ones and hopefully ranking it higher on delivery and inclusive growth.
There is also little clarity as to how the government will integrate the UID with the National Population Registrar (NPR). Considering the multifarious agencies and the issues involved in the work of capturing biometrics and digitizing the demographic information it certainly is a gigantic task. Is does not seem to have happened at least in Tembhli where the information captured by private enrolment agency for the card is not quite at par with the details earlier collected by the census enumerators.
To end on a lighter note, a close associate of mine who hails from Kumaon hills was recently given an Aadhaar card. His biometrics, photo and other details were captured at the time of application. The person who delivered the card demanded a photo identity to match the photo on the Aadhaar card and handed over the card on seeing his PAN Card ! So much for biometric technology.
