A technological blueprint for better government
Mar 12th 2016 | From the print edition
Your turn now
Rebooting India: Realising a Billion Aspirations. By Nandan Nilekani and Viral Shah. Allen Lane; 337 pages; £20.
IN A month or so, India will have registered a billion residents—the latest stage in the creation of a complete identity database of what will soon be the world’s most populous country. Aadhaar, which means “foundation” in Hindi, matches names with fingerprints and iris scans on a scale that has never been seen before. Reimagining government with such technology at its core will be key to meeting the mounting aspirations of India’s citizens, according to two of the scheme’s architects, Nandan Nilekani and Viral Shah.
If the Domesday Book, an 11th-century survey of England, was commissioned to raise funds for government, Aadhaar’s most useful purpose is to help their disbursement. Making sure each farmer gets one dose of subsidised fertiliser and all poor families their share of rice is fiendish without knowing who they are. Many of those who are entitled to government handouts live in one of the 600,000 Indian villages with no banking facilities.
Serving the citizenry in a country where 59% of births are not registered, and many people can’t read, is a task that has been a costly failure. Rajiv Gandhi, a former prime minister, once claimed that just 17% of subsidies reached the right people: not so much a leaky bucket as a sieve. A patchwork of rival ID schemes, from driving licences to ration cards, electoral rolls and tax-registration numbers, did not serve the purpose of making each and every citizen visible to the state.
Much debate about public policy is about the principles behind it: which citizens should pay how much tax, for example. “Rebooting India” is a welcome detour to the often-overlooked realities of how these principles translate into reality. A government benefit which requires days of trekking to receive, and then a bribe to unlock, may not feel like much of a benefit at all. Women who can access a subsidy without the involvement of their husbands or brothers are in quite a different position than those who cannot.
Aadhaar is transforming the way many citizens interact with the state. It allows the government to pay benefits directly to over 200m bank accounts linked to its database, so cutting out layers of corrupt and inept middlemen. That will feel much more tangible, to the average Indian, than a tax break here or a new subsidy there.
“Rebooting India” is at its best when it delves into the veritable sausage-making that is large-scale government IT projects. (Mr Nilekani, one of the authors, knows more than most about what it takes to deliver these, having co-founded and then run Infosys, an Indian IT giant.) How do you coax a reluctant bureaucracy to adopt a new technology that might erode its privileges? How do you resist those who want to turn it into something more comprehensive than just an ID scheme—and therefore make it more likely to fail? Given Aadhaar’s relatively smooth implementation, civil servants across the world would do well to seek inspiration from it.
Its potential is vast but mostly unknown. It is described as a “platform” in which an “ecosystem” can thrive, much like the iPhone is a platform for apps. Beyond subsidy payments, a few such applications for Aadhaar already exist: one allows citizens to track in real time which bureaucrats are physically at their desk. If that is not helpful, other uses that have not yet been thought of undoubtedly will be.
There is the occasional whiff of naivety. The book’s title alone suggests that India’s governing apparatus could be improved if it could just be turned off and on again. And how can a government that is so inept as to need recasting be trusted to avoid the Orwellian possibilities of a billion-strong database? Police have already nagged to get access to its fingerprints and have been rebuffed—for now.
If Aadhaar is indeed as revolutionary as the personal computer, it is frustrating that the second half of the book veers into other ways IT can help deliver government services. The authors’ suggestions on how road tolls or India’s court system could be better run with added tech savvy are correct, but their solutions to other problems, such as managing health records, lack Aadhaar’s elegance.
It is a credit to Aadhaar that the book, while fascinating, feels like primary material for a weightier tome. The high politics of the scheme are glossed over, particularly the election of Narendra Modi halfway through its implementation (Mr Nilekani stood unsuccessfully as an MP for the rival Congress party). The chronicles of a revolution, if indeed this is one, are best not written by the perpetrators.
