10748 - NITI offers rewards in cashless push but changing govt narratives prove digitisation a tall task - First Post

NITI offers rewards in cashless push but changing govt narratives prove digitisation a tall task

Sindhu BhattacharyaDec, 15 2016 19:15:22 IST

New Delhi: The ever changing government narrative after the demonetisation decision on 8 November has once again thrown up an interesting question: Is it mulling imposition of some sort of charge/levy for cash transactions? A senior government official today first said that more and more incentives would be given by the government to push digital transactions so that cash use declines. He then hinted that some internal discussions may take place on putting a charge/levy on cash transactions to make them less attractive than digital payments, before finally retracting and ending with a caveat that these thoughts were all his own, not the government’s.

NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant. Image courtesy PIB

So as of now, there is no clarity if such a move is even being contemplated within the government. But if indeed there is a though, it would be a rather fanciful one since the government’s own estimates show that only 5 percent  of all payments for personal consumption by Indians are done digitally as of now. Imposing a charge on 95 percent  non-digital payments would be quite impractical.

Meanwhile, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said today that digital transactions were a parallel mechanism, not a substitute for cash transactions. He said this while making his opening remarks at the 5th Meeting of the Consultative Committee attached to the Ministry of Finance. The subject of today’s meeting was “Shift to Digital Transactions”.

So from becoming a cashless society to examining a possible levy on all cash transactions to admitting that digital cannot be the only way to transact – the government narrative changes by the hour. Jaitley also said in his remarks that less cash can be gradually substituted to the possible extent through digital payments/transactions and that the government and the RBI have taken various steps to bring down the cost of digital transactions.

That the government is at its wits’ end with its stated aim of turning India digital overnight is apparent. It must surely be a gradual process. To a question on what kind of redressal mechanism it has devised for problems with digital payment modes like e-wallets, Niti Ayog CEO Amitabh Kant first said the consumer courts will decide these matters before conceding that an alternative method will have to be devised to ensure speedier redressal. He was addressing a presser on the various incentives the government has announced for promoting digital payments through government backed instruments.

To a question over the unpreparedness of the National Payment Corporation of India in handling secure digital payments - it was reportedly recently hacked by Legion – Kant said all digital transactions via government backed instruments were based on two-factor authentication, making them secure. He gave the example of Aadhaar based payments – where even if someone gets to know your Aadhar number, that person cannot misuse the payment gateway since thumb impression or iris scan is still needed for payment to be completed.

Kant read out a host of incentives the government will dole out to citizens making digital payments (and shunning cash) from 25 December this year. There will be daily and weekly cash awards for consumers as well as merchants beginning Christmas Day, provided any of the four government backed payment instruments are used for transactions between Rs 50 - Rs 3,000. The incentives are available on payment by RuPay card, through UPI, through Aadhaar enabled payment systems and through USSD. The caveat is this though: these incentives only apply on people to merchant and people to government transactions, not for people to people or B2B transactions. So you cannot transfer money to an e-wallet, for example, and become part of the bumper prizes being rolled out.

Lucky Grahak Yojana for consumers:

I) Daily reward of Rs 1,000 to be given to 15,000 lucky consumers for a period of 100 days

II) Weekly prizes worth Rs 1 lakh, Rs 10,000 and Rs. 5,000 for consumers who use the alternate modes of digital payments

This will include all forms of transactions viz. UPI, USSD, AEPS and RuPay cards but will for the time being exclude transactions through private credit cards and digital wallets. Bumper prize: 3 mega prizes for consumers worth Rs 1 crore, Rs 50 lakh and Rs 25 lakh for digital transactions between 8 November, 2016 to 13 April, 2017 to be announced on 14 April, 2017

Digi-Dhan Vyapar Yojana for merchants:

1) Prizes for merchants for all digital transactions conducted at merchant establishments

2) Weekly prizes worth Rs. 50,000, Rs 5,000 and Rs. 2,500

3) Mega draw on 14th of April

III) Mega prizes for merchants worth Rs 50 lakh, Rs 25 lakh, Rs 12 lakh for digital transactions between 8 November, 2016 to 13 April, 2017 to be announced on 14 April 2017. Announcing ‘Lucky Grahak Yojana’ and ‘Digi Dhan Vyapar Yojana’, Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant said both the schemes would cover small transactions between Rs. 50 and Rs. 3,000 to encourage every section of society to move to digital payments and the government will spend Rs 340 crore in all for this christmas gift.

Giving details on digital transactions post demonetisation of Rs. 1,000 and old Rs.500 notes, he said PoS transactions witnessed a jump of 95 percent since 8 November (till 7 December). RuPay card transactions were up 316 percent and e-wallet by 271 percent, while both Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) witnessed increase of about 1,200 percent each. All forms of transactions through UPI, USSD, Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AEPS) and RuPay cards will be eligible for lucky draws, he said.

Meanwhile, Jaitley also outlined the steps taken post demonetisation to encourage digital payments. He specifically mentioned about the MDR (merchant discount rate) charges which have been brought down significantly in case of transactions up to Rs.2,000 made through debit cards i.e. 0.25 percent in case of transactions below Rs. 1000 and 0.50 percent in case of transactions between Rs. 1,000 to Rs. 2,000. The Finance Minister mentioned that incentives announced by the government last week relating to discount of 0.75 percent in case of purchase of petrol/diesel through digital payment has shown a very encouraging response from the people, by and large.

10733 - India tries a Moonshot - Statesman

India tries a Moonshot

• Narain D Batra
  December 15, 2016 | 03:57 AM

Digital India has been called a moonshot project that draws together the best human and private-public capital to achieve a goal that was previously thought to be impossible: Total transformation of society.

Digital India, based on Aadhaar, focuses on three fundamental areas  --  access to digital infrastructure as a utility, services on demand, and digital empowerment of citizens through access to information. With more than a billion UIDs and growing, Aadhaar is the world’s largest database.

It has captured the imagination of the people of India. Besides the government, private enterprises, including some places of worship, have begun to use Aadhaar to prevent fraud and facilitate transactions. For example, a Hindu temple in Almora, Uttarakhand, makes Aadhaar cards mandatory for getting married. Temple priest Hari Vinod Pant told  The Times of India, “There have been instances when couples who came to the temple were found to be underage and it turned out they had eloped to get married. There have also been cases of Nepalese underage girls coming here to get married. So the temple committee took the decision of checking Aadhaar cards before agreeing to conduct the wedding.”

Indian Railways, one of the world’s largest railroad networks, a transport system that carries more than 22 million passengers a day, is planning to link subsidised concessional tickets for senior citizens and the underprivileged with Aadhaar to prevent fraud. 

But Digital India means much more: all railway structures and operations must be totally digitized and automated to eliminate deadly train derailments, such as the one that happened to Indore-Patna Express that killed scores of passengers.

In a major reshaping of the public health system, Aadhaar numbers will be used as unique patient identifiers in a new electronic health records system. National identification numbers will be generated and assigned to all health facilities, beginning with public health facilities.

To encourage the use of Aadhaar, the Reserve Bank of India has asked banks to ensure that all new transactional cards, effective from 1 January 2017, are also enabled to process payment using Aadhaar-based biometric authentication. Under the financial inclusion scheme, Jan Dhan, any Indian above 10 years who does not have a bank account can now open one in their name with an opening deposit of zero in any registered bank. Demonetisation has awakened the mostly dormant Jan Dhan. Bill Gates of Microsoft is not the only foreign observer who believes that India will “move away from a shadow economy to an even more transparent economy.” The whole world is watching.

There have been concerns about the misuse of biometric data. Aadhaar uses the highest available public key cryptography with built-in tools to prevent meddling. Just like the US Military, Aadhaar uses layers of firewalls for data protection. Besides, Aadhaar databases are segregated. Segregation adds to security.

Entrepreneurs regard India’s digital venture as an extremely bold initiative. Jack Hidary, a senior advisor at Google X Labs, speaking at EmTech 2016: The Digital Future, called India a moonshot nation that is “going through a radical transformation the like of that we have never seen.” A moonshot, he said, is an initiative that aims to achieve a goal that was previously thought to be impossible because it attracts the best human capital and finance from long-term investors.

Sharad Sharma, co-founder of iSpirit, said at the conference, “India is entering a phase of innovation that is substantially different from what we have seen until now.” Aadhaar, he stated, will create other digital possibilities such as “the presence-less layer, which means I can open a bank account and establish who I am without doing in-person verification.” Aadhaar will enable millions of people to use their e-signs for paperless transactions. It has made possible the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a debit card system that is a less expensive alternative to MasterCard and Visa.

With 650 million smartphone users, it is expected that within a year, mobile cash will become all-pervasive in India, especially when the “digital consent” becomes an operational and integral part of the cashless payment system. As reported in LiveMint, Mr Sharma said, “We are data poor right now, but we are putting in place a new system to manage digital consent, so nobody can aggregate data about you without a digital permission token from you. This is going to be the largest country-scale system in the world  --  a techno-legal solution… a very modern approach, which is a techno-legal sort of solution to manage privacy.”

While the government uses Aadhaar to ensure the delivery of benefits and services to residents, albeit with a special focus on the underprivileged, business enterprises are developing Aadhaar-based apps for the nation’s burgeoning e-commerce. That is drawing Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and others to collaborate and compete with Indian enterprises to reach rural India. Consider this: in 2014 Jeff Bezos of Amazon invested $2 billion, and in June 2016 he pledged another $3 billion, to build a logistics network to cover the entire country to have a major stake in the online market expected to grow to $110 billion in the coming decade, according a Wall Street Journal report.

Google and Tata Trusts have trained thousands of female trainers and sent them to rural India on motorbikes to help rural women to learn the use of smartphones and tablets for building their small home-based businesses.

Women in India lag far behind men on social media, e-commerce and mobile connectivity. Parents discourage girls from having smartphones. They fear that young girls might go astray or do something that might shame the family. For their own self-interest, it is important for IT companies, therefore, to educate people and remove their fear of smartphones, especially by women so that they can fully participate in opportunities created by Digital India. Once men see that women are using smartphones for socially useful purposes, their hostility will diminish. That is the hope for Digital India: Give every woman a smartphone and see India transform.

The writer is Professor of Communications, Norwich University.

10708 - Want state to be cashless model: PM - TNN

Want state to be cashless model: PM

TNN | Updated: Dec 11, 2016, 07.24 AM IST

GANDHINAGAR: In his first address at 'Shree Kamalam' after becoming the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi told assembled state BJP functionaries on Saturday, that he wanted them to turn Gujarat into a model state in adopting digital financial transactions. "I wish," said the PM, "Gujarat, which has given the country a great development model, also becomes the role model in adopting Aadhaar and mobile-based banking." The PM's visit ahead of state assembly elections was attended by over 1,000 BJP workers. 

All state BJP functionaries including CM Vijay Rupani, deputy CM Nitin Patel, ministers, state BJP president Jitu Vaghani, all MPs and MLAs of the party in state, district BJP office bearers, as well as chairmen of different government corporation boards attended the meeting. 

In his brief speech at the state BJP headquarters in Koba, Gandhinagar, Modi also congratulated BJP state party workers and office bearers for their victory in elections of local bodies at a time when the opposition was loud in criticizing demonetization. 

Modi said, "Though the by-elections in the local bodies was a not a key affair, but after 8/11 (post demonetization) Gujarat BJP's victory in elections of local bodies has spurred national debate. We also won in elections of local bodies in Rajasthan and Maharashtra." 

He advised Gujarat BJP to work cautiously in the upcoming statewide panchayat elections and in 2017 assembly elections, without becoming overconfident due to the recent results. 

Rationalizing demonetization, the PM said, "Official data showed that two-third of Rs1,000 notes go out of circulation and remain stashed in lockers." 

"Only one-third of Rs1,000 notes were in circulation," said Modi, adding, "Crores of rupees were parked without productive use." "As oversupply of potatoes or tomatoes in the market brings down their value, so oversupply of currency led to devaluation of the rupee," Modi said. 

Speaking about tackling the after effects of demonetization, Modi said, "There is great need for raising Aadhaar card and mobile banking awareness in the country, now after demonetization." 

Modi said, "I appeal to all MPs and MLAs to go among the masses and train them in digital financial transactions. If people can learn to use WhatsApp or other mobile apps, they can also learn digital banking given a chance."

10675 - Digital payments set to become the norm and cash the exception in India - Hindustan Times

Digital payments set to become the norm and cash the exception in India

ANALYSIS Updated: Dec 02, 2016 19:46 Ist

Arvind Gupta

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Digital India programme is an attempt to create a digitally empowered society, with financial inclusion contributing to a robust formal economy. The main idea behind this vision is not just connectivity, but about how to leverage that connectivity in enabling consumers, small businesses, traders and farmers to harness technology to maximise efficiency and productivity.

The data exhaust that this digitisation will produce can be leveraged for a host of applications. The Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-mobile trinity and cashless initiatives are the backbone of the reforms and development agenda.

Demonetisation will give a much required push for consumption to be digitally driven and payments to go cashless. Banks can open new accounts using Aadhaar-linked e-KYC mechanisms. Consumers can make payments to merchants using the Unified Payments Interface.

Read: Demonetisation pangs will last for a quarter, but benefit India in long run: FM

Merchants will benefit from receiving payments digitally at the lowest costs possible. They can raise invoices with GST-enabled software and get appropriate tax credits in their bank accounts. Tax collections will increase and evasion will come down as electronic transactions grow. Small business owners and micro-entrepreneurs will have greater capacity to act as mini-multinationals in their own right reaching out to make transactions, offer services and interact with other parties in new forms of collaborations across traditional geographical boundaries along the supply chain.

The demonetisation of old currency is a bold move not only for economic and security reasons but for offering an inflection point to leapfrog a few generations into the future and take ownership of the digital industrial revolution.

The challenge that lies ahead for FinTech disruptors is to ensure that consumers use digital payments as comfortably as they have used cash.

Read: What black money? Govt may be in for shock after demonetisation

The first few weeks after the demonetisation announcement saw a multifold increase in usage of cards, mobile wallets and mobile payments. Digital infrastructure is being rolled out faster than ever. For digital methods to be sustainable and as acceptable, pervasive and inclusive as cash, they need to be low cost, work in poor connectivity environments, on basic feature phones and offer the same level of trust as cash. With frugal innovation unleashed by the IndiaStack, is a set of APIs that allows governments, businesses, startups and developers to utilise a unique digital Infrastructure to solve India’s hard problems, these challenges can be overcome by entrepreneurs.

Read: Demonetisation gains uncertain, says Nobel laureate Paul Krugman

India is heading towards a digitally empowered society where digital payments are set to become the norm and cash the exception.

Arvind Gupta heads the BJP’s Information & Technology cell.

The views expressed are personal.

10645 - ICICI Bank seeks to digitise 100 villages in 100 days - TNN

ICICI Bank seeks to digitise 100 villages in 100 days

TNN | Updated: Nov 29, 2016, 09.03 AM IST

MUMBAI: ICICI Bank on Monday said it will run a project to transform 100 villages across the country into digital villages in as many days. The project envisages enabling villagers to use digital channels for banking and payment transactions. 

ICICI Bank will open accounts for all and enable cashless payments to retail stores through messaging-based applications that can run on basic phones. "Besides creating a cashless payment system, we will provide vocational training and credit linkages to make villages digital," said Chanda Kochhar, MD & CEO, ICICI Bank. She added that the bank would draw from its experiences in Akodara village in Gujarat's Sabrakanta district where it ran a pilot project on digital villages. 

In the next 100 days, the bank will provide vocational training to 10,000 underprivileged villagers from largely agrarian states The announcement is part of the bank's continuing effort to provide a digital ecosystem across the country, including rural India, in the wake of demonetisation of high value currencies, Kochhar said. To provide mobile banking access to the underprivileged, the bank plans to use SMS and USSD banking solutions. USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) is a technology that enables communication between the mobile phone and the bank's servers in a manner similar to how a mobile user checks his balance talktime.

In the first phase, ICICI Bank will use tablet-based banking and Aadhaar-based e-KYC to help villagers open accounts without submitting physical documents. All adults in the villages will have savings accounts, which will be linked to Aadhaar to enable direct transfer of government benefits. There will be dedicated branches and ATMs of ICICI Bank to service these accounts and mobile banking will be available in regional languages. 

The bank plans to replicate the Akodara experiment where it introduced a measuring, tracking and payment solution for members of a milk cooperative society and its members for sale of milk. In the 100 villages, activities like payments to farmers from mandis and payment from farmers to labourers, among others, will be brought under digital payment ecosystem. The bank will also set up point of sale (PoS) machines at seed and fertiliser outlets for cashless transactions using RuPay cards.

In the second phase, villagers will be trained in income-generating activities like dairy, agriculture equipment repair, hand embroidery, dress designing and sandstone cutting, among others. These trainings will be of up to 30 days. Finally, the bank will provide credit to improve opportunities to earn a livelihood.

10562 - The cost of digital exclusion - Live Mint

Thu, Oct 27 2016. 01 16 AM IST

The cost of digital exclusion

The state of being not connected is leading to mass exclusion of at least a billion people in India

Osama Manzar

Photo: Hindustan Times

Ram Avatar Singh lives in a remote village in Jharkhand. He is one of the 400 million people who live in extreme poverty in India.

India’s population of the poor is equivalent to one-third of all of the world’s poor. Ram Avatar’s village is in an area where no road exists. As a matter of fact, one in every three people who live in rural India lack access to all-weather roads. Ram Avatar is also one of those 300 million people who have no access to electricity and he is incidentally also one in the 40% (or approximately 500 million) Indians who do not have access to a mobile phone or the Internet. Interestingly, Ram Avatar’s wife is among the 72% Indian women who do not have access to any kind of digital devices, including a mobile phone.

Amid the much talked-about Digital India age, it may be interesting to look at what it means to be a Ram Avatar, a daily-wage worker who would not be able to get his or his family’s next meal if he misses even a single day of work. If he is not cheated and paid for his work, Ram Avatar earns no more than Rs200 a day, provided he is lucky enough to get work.

For all kinds of critical and necessary online and offline digital services, someone like Ram Avatar has to travel more than 10-15km to reach the nearest market or small town. For example, if Ram Avatar needs photocopies of some papers that he has to mandatorily attach while applying for a government entitlement, he may need to fork out Rs250 for one set of photocopies. Why Rs250? Because, Ram Avatar has to forgo a day’s wage worth Rs200 and pay another Rs30-40 for travelling from his village to the facility to access the service and get back home, besides paying Rs10-20 for the photocopying service.

For the same photocopies, if I want to get them done in Delhi, I would not have to pay more than Rs2-5 because the facility would be available at a walking distance and I wouldn’t need to take leave from work to get that done.

On another occasion, when Ram Avatar was required to get his Aadhaar card made—for which he, again, needs to travel a distance of 15-20km to reach the nearest Aadhaar Kendra—the most talked about digital tool called the biometric machine could not take his thumb or finger impressions because intensive labour has changed the lines on the inside of his fingers over a period of time. Several of Ram Avatar’s community members are facing a similar problem. Although they have received their Aadhaar cards, their identity proofs are often rejected when they apply for an entitlement because their thumb impressions “do not match” those on the biometric device.

The state of being not connected, and being deprived of necessary infrastructure like roads, railways, electricity, telecom and the Internet, is leading to mass exclusion of at least a billion people in India.

Take, for example, the institution of panchayat, which is the lowest level of constitutional democracy where people choose their members to run village councils. There are about 250,000 panchayats in India encompassing some 650,000 villages and almost all of them are living offline lives.

Similarly, educational bodies represent a size of 1.4 million schools, about 7-10 million teachers and several millions of children—most of them are offline and not accountable.

The same would be the case with hundreds of thousands of health and sub-health centres across villages where hardly any specialized doctors go. However, providing a broadband connection in village health centres can bring expert health advisory to Ram Avatar and save him several days of wage work which he would otherwise lose out on, on account of travelling to a distant hospital in the hope of improving his health.

This is where the onus on the Digital India programme is critical and urgent. Every day of delay in the implementation of the programme and every day of being disconnected costs the poor.

I had mentioned in a few columns earlier that the National Optic Fibre Network is supposed to provide 100Mbps broadband Internet line to all the panchayats for its use and for further distribution in villages. However, the project has been delayed at several stages and is further being delayed without any sense of accountability to the poor. It is because of this delay that millions of Ram Avatars, who live in our villages, are paying 250% extra for every digitally-enabled service.

Lack of accountability of government officials is leading to the exploitation of people’s inability to access a medium for information. The people who are holding the information are not facilitating the transfer of information from top to bottom in a free and barrier-free manner. Rather than being more accountable, these information-holding personnel use the power they wield to exploit those who are not informed, educated or literate.

If the Digital India programme is made available to the poorest of people in a seamless manner—not just in terms of technology but also in terms of access to the medium and knowledge of the tools—accountability can be brought in. When people have access to rights-based information/entitlement, they are able to ensure accountability from their government representatives.

Osama Manzar is founder-director of Digital Empowerment Foundation and chair of Manthan and mBillionth awards. He is member, advisory board, at Alliance for Affordable Internet and has co-authored NetCh@kra-15 Years of Internet in India and Internet Economy of India. His Twitter handle is @osamamanzar

Osama Manzar

10534 - ‘Digital India’ to be theme for India International Trade Fair - Hindu Businessline

‘Digital India’ to be theme for India International Trade Fair

S RONENDRA SINGH

Govt to showcase success, involve public to highlight Digital India programme

NEW DELHI, OCTOBER 14:  

The 36th edition of India International Trade Fair (IITF), one of the biggest fair held in India, will have ‘Digital India’ as its theme this year,

This will be for the second time that the fair, which is annually held between November 14 and November 27, will have a theme based on the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet projects. The theme for last year (35th edition) was ‘Make in India’.

According to sources from the government, the theme pavilion would be developed in hall number one in Pragati Maidan, and communication has been sent to all State Chief Secretaries and Secretaries of Line ministries for showcasing Digital India initiatives.

“There will be industry interaction via seminars, panel discussion and tech-talks during at the event. Success stories of grass root level contributors/ achievers of Digital India movement, especially by women and backward section of the society, will also be highlighted during the event days,” said one of the source.

There will also be games/ demonstration of services/ highlight of achievements till now and also awareness programmes like ‘Digi Swachha Abhiyaan’ – e-Waste collection and contest/ quiz on social media, said an official.

“With around 1.50 lakh footfalls expected per day during this 14-day event, the government wants to showcase the meaning and impact of DI on women, students, dalits, farmers, employment and many others to be woven into a story,” said one source.

Digital India is one of the biggest programmes of the Modi government and has achieved manifold successes in each project under DI such as Mera Aadhaar, Meri Sarkar (MyGov) and Mera Digital Locker.

For example, there have been 103 crore Indians enrolled with Aadhaar number, more than 35 lakh are using MyGov to assist government and more than 20 lakh people have stored and shared two or more documents through ‘Digital Locker’.

“When I see IT products for common people like e-scholarship, e-hospital and Jeevan Praman, I get personal satisfaction and Digital India on an automatic role,” Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister of IT and Law, told BusinessLine saying he appreciates the people involved in these projects.

(This article was published on October 14, 2016)

10473 - Microsoft plans Aadhaar-enabled products for Digital India - Deccan Herald

Microsoft plans Aadhaar-enabled products for Digital India

Bengaluru, Sep 22, 2016, DHNS:

Microsoft has evinced plans to build Aadhaar-enabled products for the Digital India initiative, and showcase them to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. When asked about Aadhaar project, Microsoft India Chairman Bhaskar Pramanik said that the company is ready to align with the government in this regard. “We are ready to make our devices Aadhaar-compliant, as they will help citizen service delivery become smoother, going forward,” he said.

“We can think about Aadhaar-embedded Skype, where it can be used to verify citizen identity. Right now, you verify your ID using OTP (one-time password), but it could be verified using your iris,” he added. Pramanik said that the company is focusing on talent, innovation and market in the country to lay thrust on Digital India.

Pramanik said that he received the privilege to be a part of a great Indian journey, from main frame computing, to the mobile-first and cloud-first world. “With our mission of empowering every individual and organistion to achieve more, Microsoft India has done phenomenal work in partnering the Digital India game plan,” he said, pointing out that health, agriculture and education are primary focus areas for the company in the country. “We have already tied up with the Andhra Pradesh government in education. We are soon signing an MoU with the Punjab government as well,” he said.

Microsoft Research India and Microsoft India Research and Development are also conducting research with interdisciplinary approach. “We have been conducting research in natural language processing. Here, we have been doing lots of work in the space of artificial intelligence and machine learning,” he said.

10281 - How digital will save India: Unlike China, India’s economic revolution will come from services not manufacturing - TNN

How digital will save India: Unlike China, India’s economic revolution will come from services not manufacturing

July 28, 2016, 2:00 AM IST Nandan Nilekani in TOI Edit Page | Edit Page, India | TOI

Bengaluru: Conventional wisdom for the future of India is that we must grow like China, Japan and South Korea. That we must build large companies creating thousands of jobs and exporting goods. I believe that domestic consumption, not exports, will drive India’s growth. The economy will be services-led and not manufacturing-led. Small businesses will lead rather than large corporations.

Serendipitously, this condition has arisen at a time when the globalisation trend is reversing. Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric recently noted, “Globalisation is being attacked as never before.” Protectionism is growing around the world. Brexit is the latest proof of the challenge. India’s exports standing at $22.17 billion in June have slowed for the 18th consecutive month.

In the meanwhile, a key component of delivering services, the mobile phone, is becoming the universal electronic product in everybody’s hands. India is selling 25 million smartphones per quarter and the anticipation is 700 million smartphones in hand by 2020. Internet penetration is growing. With 332 million internet users India is now the second largest internet market, ahead of the US.

Another building block in India is the Aadhaar number – the world’s largest digital infrastructure for establishing unique identity. The system has a billion people and can already authenticate 100 million transactions per day. Aadhaar is the only billion-user platform outside the US and the only government one.

Designed in 2009 as an online identity platform for all Indian residents, Aadhaar provides open Application Programming Interfaces or APIs, which can be integrated easily into any electronic device. These APIs enable online authentication using a fingerprint or iris. Recently Samsung introduced an Aadhaar-compliant tablet with a camera that in a single click performs iris authentication.

With the 2014 introduction of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Jan Dhan Yojana for financial inclusion, more than 290 million bank accounts are linked to Aadhaar today, and several billion dollars of benefits and entitlements have been transferred to people’s bank accounts electronically in real time.

The arrival of New Age platform aggregators – from Amazon and Flipkart for small merchants to Uber and Ola cabs for taxis – will create a huge digital footprint that could be leveraged by individuals and businesses to secure credit. Such platform aggregators will also create jobs, not as monolithic large organisations, but as millions of small entrepreneurs connected to a platform.

These platforms enabling seamless transactions give the service economy a big boost. India is the largest young country in an ageing world and will continue to have a young population for the next 25 years, whereas China has started ageing.

Indians will either migrate or do outsourcing work. Care providers around the world will come from India. There will be doubling of GDP growth in housing, education, health – all services. Services are labour intensive and their incremental return on capital is much faster than manufacturing. And then there will be services like tourism that create jobs – Thailand, for example, has 25 million international visitors per year while India has only 8 million.

Many economists have suggested that India should copy China, but it cannot. When China started its development journey, it had no established competition. Global overcapacity challenges India. For example, China has steel capacity of 822 million tonnes and India has 86 million tonnes. Recently the India government had to protect its steel industry by introducing minimum import pricing. Normal competition without tariffs will be difficult in many sectors.

India’s manufacturing and agricultural sectors are fragmented due to excise and other taxes and also due to a lack of infrastructure, cold chains, storage processing and more. Yet India has a single market for banking, telecom, insurance and capital markets.

Consider, to launch an insurance policy or a mortgage in the US, one must go to 50 regulators. In the EU one must go to all member countries. China has a single market but no free movement of labour. India’s free market for labour combined with single market for services is the reason why services is the country’s biggest growth area. The only place where India can achieve economy of scale is in services. This is apparent in the dramatic growth of service tax.

The India Stack – a set of programming interfaces built on the trifecta of government-created people’s bank account of Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and mobile phones – in brief JAM – enables paperless, presence-less and cashless transactions. The Reserve Bank of India introduces Unified Payment Interface on July 31, allowing all payments to be made by mobile phone, which backed by JAM will lead to dramatic leaps in productivity.

Dramatic consequences will follow creating thousands of startups and billions of dollars of capitalisation. Four shifts will happen. First, banking at scale because everything a bank can do, individuals can do on a mobile phone. Second, investment at scale – people can buy a mutual fund on the phone with one click. Third, credit at scale where entrepreneurs can get a loan with just a click by aggregating their own data. And fourth, skilling at scale – as platforms happen, India will have thousands, millions of people gathering skills to operate in this new economy with great strides in reading and math literacy happening at scale.

World trade may be shrinking and barriers may be emerging among nations, all making movement of labour difficult. India with its vast unified market, youthful labour force and growing digital platform-backed services alone is poised to build a new power economy.

This essay is adapted from a speech delivered at Microsoft Think Next 2016 in Bengaluru on June 23, 2016. Reprinted with permission from YaleGlobal Online

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

10261 - Ajay Bhushan Pandey appointed as CEO of UIDAI - Live Mint

Last Modified: Thu, Jul 21 2016. 05 25 PM IST

Ajay Bhushan Pandey appointed as CEO of UIDAI

Ajay Bhushan Pandey, a 1984 batch IAS officer of Maharashtra cadre, has been serving as director general of UIDAI since August 2015

Aadhaar is a 12 digit unique number, linked with an individual’s demographic and biometric information, which serves as an authentication tool throughout India. 

Photo: Priyanka Parashar/Mint

New Delhi: The government appointed Ajay Bhushan Pandey as the chief executive officer of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the organization behind the Aadhaar.

Aadhaar is a 12 digit unique number, linked with an individual’s demographic and biometric information, which serves as an authentication tool throughout India.

The appointments committee of the cabinet approved the elevation with effect from 12th July.

Pandey, a 1984 batch Indian Administrative Service officer of Maharashtra cadre, has been serving as director general of the organization since August 2015.

UIDAI was founded in 2009 under the previous United Progressive Alliance regime with former Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani as its chairman, who resigned in 2014 to take part in the general elections.

As of 15 July, about 102 crore Aadhaar IDs have been generated.

The appointment holds significance as Aadhaar is the centrepiece of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Digital India programme launched last year.

The government has been trying to link many of its major development and subsidy schemes with Aadhaar to reduce leakage and duplication.

Under Pandey, UIDAI had been working on enrolling children in the Aadhaar ecosystem, who can then be linked to various development schemes.

Under his tenure, UIDAI will also have to deal with the legal cases involving privacy and parliamentary issues that Aadhaar has been embroiled in.

Kshitiz Golya

9956 - ‘Digital India augurs well for data centre business’ - Financial Express

‘Digital India augurs well for data centre business’

There is an accelerating shift of IT services from traditional enterprise data centres into the co-location, managed services and consuming IT as a service

By: Sudhir Chowdhary | Updated: May 9, 2016 7:19 AM

Data centres are an important part of infrastructure and there are several sectors spurring this growth, says Sunil Gupta, executive-director & president of Netmagic, an NTT Communications company and a leading managed hosting and cloud service provider. “There is increased demand in this niche segment on account of a number of government-led initiatives, such as Digital India, Startup India, adoption of JAM (Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar, Mobile),” he tells Sudhir Chowdhary in a recent interaction. Excerpts:

How do you look at India’s data centre market today?

With the growing economic and technology transformation today, India’s data centre market is witnessing a healthy growth. According to the latest estimates from Gartner, the Indian data centre infrastructure market will total $2 billion in 2016. I see tremendous opportunity in this space and right now we are growing faster than the market.

Data centres are an important part of infrastructure and there are several sectors spurring this growth. Digital India, Startup

India, Stand Up India, adoption of JAM (Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar, Mobile), and the roll out of the national optic fibre network for the Digital India initiative will rub off positively on the data centre business. Emerging technologies like Big Data, analytics, software-defined everything and Internet of Things (IoT) has led to accelerating demand of data centre consolidation and virtualisation.

Growing e-commerce businesses, startups and large enterprises alike expect data centre companies to host their IT infrastructure so that a company uses whatever is needed (like real-estate, connectivity, IT systems etc.) on a subscription basis. Also, more and more companies are becoming aware of disaster recovery, resulting in them approaching data centres. Then, there is increased demand of global companies to have their data centres in India to operate their corporate offices in India, besides having their data centre in their head quarters.

How do you see the data centre industry evolving especially in the wake of the e-commerce boom?

We do realise there is a huge demand for data centre resources from a large number of startups in the industry. All cloud providers including large and small provide them plain vanilla cloud capacity, but what they ultimately need is to be able to put their IT applications on a hybrid IT infrastructure, which may be a combination of in-house data centre, outsourced hosting, private cloud and public cloud of various vendors. We are working with these players and planning to create product bundles where we will not only provide our cloud offerings and manage hosting, but also provide the value added cloud offerings of other competitors, while still giving a single inter cloud interface to manage all these instances.

What new technologies do you think will lead to innovations in the datacentres?

There is an accelerating shift of IT services from traditional enterprise data centres into the co-location, managed services and consuming IT as a service. Consumption of IT as service is driving new technologies, which can be broadly referred to as software-defined everything (SDE). This (SDN) is changing the way networks are built and managed. It is enabling agility and security with reduced operational cost and complexity, in networks. SDN is transforming the landscape in the data centre by enabling connectivity mechanisms simply not feasible using legacy options.

While cloud computing is surely the buzzword today, however, enterprise customers want to approach their IT with a personalised experience. What kind of cloud driven innovations are you bringing in to augment this?

Netmagic provides cloud computing services to clients through— SimpliCloud, a world-class compute within-the-cloud offering. SimpliCloud enables online provisioning, management and pay as-you-use model for IT Infrastructure via the web, anytime, anyplace. Netmagic Solutions is among the few cloud computing service providers that can deliver the real power of the cloud at your fingertips. We use state-of-the-art server infrastructure and high-speed backbones to provide cloud hosting services.

Customers looking for managed private cloud service can now overcome the entry barriers typically encountered for private cloud adoption. Netmagic’s new SimpliVPC (Virtual Private Cloud) will provide customers with consistent performance under their control, and facilitate the flexibility to play around with their virtual pool of resources at will. This new service will leverage Netmagic’s common service bus architecture to readily provide all Netmagic infrastructure services. Customers will be able to leverage the true value of hybrid clouds at ease by integrating with Netmagic public cloud services.

Today’s startups are interested to go with minimum capex/opex and maximum RoI. How can Netmagic help in this direction?

Startups generally enter the market with limited capex focusing on running their core business and they prefer the third-party to take care of their back-end operations, which enables them to yield scalable and profitable business. At Netmagic, we provide managed hosting services for organisations who are looking forward to everything on a subscription basis, without they heading to purchase anything on capex. We take care of all their hassles of AMCs and maintenance of servers, and equipments of data centre.

Furthermore, customers can leverage the pay-as-you use offerings and pay even on hourly basis, and optimise opex cost by using infrastructure as in when necessary for businesses. This allows scalability as in when required, without incurring capex.

How are Netmagic’s offerings different from what other competitors are offering to the enterprise community today?

We have been a pioneer in the Indian IT infrastructure services space since the last two decades. We were the first to launch services such as cloud computing, managed security, disaster recovery-as-a-service and software-defined storage. Netmagic also delivers remote infrastructure management (RIM) services through NTT Com’s Global Management One service to global customers across Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific region.

Our business is a combination of multiple businesses—cloud player, end-to-end managed services and co-location services provider to all our clients including medium, large, very large and global enterprises. And, to manage this 24×7 complex hybrid IT environment, Netmagic also runs network operation centres, and the customer gets everything from a single player like us.

We are hugely focused on customer needs and manage 24×7 supporting multiple technologies equipped with skill-sets across various platforms. We have also invested heavily in R&D, for example, our cloud orchestration is totally developed in-house by us, and this enables Netmagic to scale up and bring in more new features before my competition could bring in.

Also, we are also investing heavily in automating our business processes to provide a seamless experience to our customers. Our customers not only buy quality services from us, but they also buy quality experience.

Lastly, what’s interesting is the entrepreneurial passion and startup element remains in our DNA that always propels us to keep ourselves updated and relevant to our customers’ needs. Our employees are flexible, and hard-working with a customer-centric approach.

9473 - Aadhaar Bill Fails to Incorporate Standing Committee’s Suggestions - The Wire

Aadhaar Bill Fails to Incorporate Standing Committee’s Suggestions

BY AMBER SINHA ON 10/03/2016 • LEAVE A COMMENT

The new Aadhaar Bill does not address many issues raised by the standing committee that reviewed the original bill, including data-collection irregularities, and privacy and security issues.

In December 2010, the UPA government introduced the National Identification Authority of India (NIDAI) Bill in parliament. The Bill was meant to provide legislative backing to the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), a central government agency mandated to assign a 12-digit unique identification (UID) number, or Aadhaar, to all Indian residents. 

The Bill was referred to a standing committee on finance, headed by BJP leader Yashwant Sinha, which took evidence from the Ministry of Planning and on the UIDAI from the government, and also sought the view of the National Human Rights Commission, the Indian Banks Association and researchers, such as Dr Reetika Khera and Dr. Usha Ramanathan. The committee subsequently deemed the Bill unacceptable and suggested a re-consideration of the scheme as well as the draft legislation.

The Aadhaar programme has been plagued by issues of privacy and security, and has led to a public interest litigation being filed by retired justice of the Karnataka High Court K.S. Puttaswamy in the Supreme Court. Although the BJP had criticised the legislation and the project when it was in opposition, it has, since coming to power, decided to use the Aadhar as the identification technology for its welfare schemes, including Digital India and Jan Dhan Yojna. But the government is restricted by a October 2015 Supreme Court order prohibiting it from making the Aadhaar mandatory for availing services. A big question the government has had to answer is the lack of a legislative mandate for a project of this size. To prevent any further delays, the government withdrew the NIDAI and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley introduced The Aadhaar (Target Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill, 2016 on March 3. The new Bill appears to be a rehash of the old draft and none of the suggestions made by the standing committee have been taken into account.

Suggestions ignored

The Sinha-led committee had taken great exception to the continued collection of data and issuance of Aadhaar numbers, while the NIDAI Bill was pending in parliament. The report pointed that the implementation of the provisions of the Bill and continuing to incur expenditure from the exchequer was a circumvention of the prerogative powers of the parliament. 

However, the project has continued without abeyance since its inception in 2009. The new Aadhaar Bill ignores many of issues identified by the committee, some of which I have listed below.

One of the primary arguments made by proponents of Aadhaar has been that it would be useful in providing services to the marginalised sections of society who currently do not have identification cards and are thus not able to receive state sponsored services and subsidies. The committee’s report pointed out that the project would be unable to achieve this as no statistical data on these sections of society were being used by the UIDAI to provide coverage to them. The introducer systems that was supposed to provide Aadhaar numbers to those without any form of identification has been used to enroll only 0.03% of the total number of people registered. Further, the Biometrics Standards Committee of the UIDAI has itself acknowledged the issues caused due to a high number of manual labourers in India, which would lead to sub-optimal fingerprint scans. A report by 4G Identity Solutions estimates that while in any population approximately 5% of the people have unreadable fingerprints, in India it could lead to a failure to enroll up to 15% of the population. Thus, the project could actually end up excluding more people.

The report also pointed to a lack of cost-benefit analysis being done before embarking on the scheme. It also made a reference to the report by the London School of Economics on the UK Identity Project that was shelved due to the huge costs involved in the project; the complexity of the exercise and unavailability of reliable, safe and tested technology; the risks to safety and security of registrants; security measures at a scale that would have resulted in substantially higher implementation and operational costs; and the extreme dangers to the rights of registrants and public interest. The standing committee insisted that these global experiences remained relevant to the UID project and needed to be considered. However, the new Aadhaar Bill has not addressed these issues.

The committee also came down heavily on the irregularities in data collection by the UIDAI. It raised doubts about the ability of the registrars to effectively verify the registrants and a lack of any security audit mechanisms that could identify issues in enrollment. Pointing to news reports on irregularities in the process being followed by the registrars appointed by the UIDAI, the committee deemed the memorandums of understanding signed between the UIDAI and the Registrars as toothless. The involvement of private parties has been under question already with a many doubts being raised over the lack of appropriate safeguards in the contracts with these contractors.

Perhaps the most significant observation made by the committee was that any scheme that facilitated the creation of a massive database of the personal information of the country’s citizens and its linkage with other databases should be preceded by a comprehensive data protection law. The committee acknowledged that in the absence of a privacy law that governs the collection, use and storage of personal data, the UID project would lead to data abuse, and the surveillance and profiling of individuals. The current data protection framework in Section 43A under the Information Technology Act, 2000 are woefully inadequate and far too limited in their scope. While there are some protection mechanisms built into Chapter VI of the new Aadhaar Bill, these are nowhere as comprehensive as the ones articulated in the Privacy Bill, which is still in draft stage. Additionally, these protections are also subject to broad exceptions that could significantly dilute their efficacy.

Amber Sinha is a policy researcher at the Centre for Internet and Society.

9308 - eGovWatch: Top 10 Digital India initiatives by the government - Financial Express

eGovWatch: Top 10 Digital India initiatives by the government

By Rashi Varshney on February 2, 2016

• MyVisit: Book an appointment with a government official MyVisit.gov.in is a platform through which the public can make appointments with government officers online, without having to stand in long queues or wait for references. The portal and its mobile app, is integrated at all central government offices and ministries through which even the bureaucrats can interact with their visitors. The visitor details are automatically saved in a database as well. The portal has a simple registration form with the help of which citizens can make appointments with government officers. 
• PayOnline: Payment portal for all government payments An electronic receipt portal, PayOnline is fully compatible with smartphones or tablets. The portal is a comprehensive platform for all government payments – inter-ministerial, vendor transactions or small payments by citizens of India for government services, which can be made electronically. The portal offers netbanking services from more than 67 banks. With an e-payment portal now in place, all the government departments are likely to adopt the platform leading to making government transactions cashless.
• eSign: Sign documents with Aadhaar eSign offers the functionality to authenticate users and perform the digital signing of documents using Aadhaar eKYC service (biometric or OTP) while submitting documents to agencies. Hardware tokens are not required to be used.

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- See more at: http://computer.financialexpress.com/photos/gadget-gallery/egovwatch-top-10-digital-india-initiatives-by-the-government/15643-8/#sthash.ez93PElW.dpuf

9234 - DEITY working on alternative authentication means along with Aadhaar to revive Digital India projects - Economic Times

DEITY working on alternative authentication means along with Aadhaar to revive Digital India projects

Surabhi Agarwal, ET Bureau Jan 1, 2016, 04.29AM IST

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court's restrictions over the Aadhaar project has taken the wind out of several marque projects under the Digital India programme, including the Digital Locker project. The department of electronics and information technology (DEITY) is now working on alternatives that will act as means of authentication along with Aadhaar to revive some of these projects.

According to a senior government official, there are around five projects under Digital India for which alternatives are being discussed currently.

Take for instance the DigiLocker project, which is a way to store, receive and authenticate documents on the virtual locker on the Internet. It made a good start after being launched by the Prime Minister in July this year only to have stagnated in the following months due to the uncertainty over their linkage with Aadhaar.

The number of users registered on the platform swelled by 71.8% to 8,96,527 at the end of July but has been registering low single digit growth since August - when the first Supreme Court order came on Aadhaar restricting it use. At the end of December, the number of users who are on the DigiLocker platform 10,50,335.

The official said that for Digilocker, authentication means such as PAN card, e-KYC of the banks, and digital signatures are some of the other options which are being considered. "Even without the Supreme Court's mandate, we have to give other options to citizens since some of them many not have access to Aadhaar," the official added. The person said that by linking these projects only through Aadhaar, the government doesn't want to make it mandatory in any way. "But, the inherent advantage that Aadhaar had of seamless authentication can't be taken away," said the official adding that with authentication means, the government is adding a layer which is the same as verifying documents in physical world.

Other projects which are inherently linked to Aadhaar include esign, Jeevan Pramaan or Digital Life Certificate for pensioners, and Digitise India, the government records digitisation drive project among others.

While Jeevan Pramaan is a biometric enabled system built on Aadhaar for over 10 million pensioner families in India to provide digital life certificates for disbursement of their pensions, e-sign is designed to enable authentication of documents on the fly and on a real-time basis through the Aadhaar authentication platform.

It is being pitched as a convenient alternative for the current process of getting a digital signature, which is cost intensive, time consuming and relatively unsafe.

Similarly under the Digitise India platform, the government has roped in common citizens to digitize its physical records through the crowd sourcing model. The identity and authentication of the crowd agents is done through the Aadhaar number and their remuneration is also credited to their Aadhaar linked bank account number.

ET has reported earlier this week that the government is getting ready to convince the Supreme Court about the use of Aadhaar in improving governance. The Cabinet secretary will helm the drafting of a strategy along with senior government secretaries on extending Aadhaar to more government services.

9226 - Govt launches 22 new schemes under Digital India programme - Live Mint

Govt launches 22 new schemes under Digital India programme

Initiatives in areas such as digital infrastructure, digital empowerment and on-demand govt services unveiled

Saurabh Kumar and Moulishree Srivastava

Union minister for communications and information technology Ravi Shankar Prasad launches the new initiatives at an event in New Delhi on Monday. Photo: PIB

New Delhi: The government on Monday expanded its Digital India programme, launching new initiatives and broadening the scope of existing ones, to make more services accessible to the masses.

The 22 initiatives launched under the Digital India programme include projects in the areas of digital infrastructure, digital empowerment, on-demand government services and promotion of industry.

Under the programme, Prime Minister Narendra Modi plans to provide government services online, expand Internet connectivity to rural areas and boost manufacturing of electronic goods in the country.

“If the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government is remembered for laying down national highways, the Narendra Modi government will be known to have laid the digital highway of the country,” communications minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said while launching the initiatives in New Delhi.

The services launched on Monday include electronic payments for government services, a geographical information system (GIS)-based decision-support system, a request for proposal for selecting private cloud service providers for government departments, the setting up of an online laboratory for students to perform virtual experiments for all Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) schools, the incubation of 10 projects in the area of chip-to-system design and the development of a native operating system that will support text-to-speech technology for nine regional languages.

The government also announced the start of a new data centre for the National Informatics Centre (NIC) in Odisha entailing an investment Rs.189 crore and eight new software technology parks with an investment of Rs.78 crore. The new centres will take the total number of such parks in India to 62.

Prasad awarded three states and 55 districts across the country for significant contributions towards digital inclusion and innovative solutions.

“We would want all states to study the success of other states and emulate,” he said. He urged district magistrates and information officers to cooperate at the ground level to improve e-governance.

The government is also working on the concept of digital villages—rural areas that will have telemedicine facilities, virtual classes and solar power-based WiFi hot spots.

Speaking at the function, information technology secretary J.S. Deepak said digital governance is the best way to reach the remotest corners of the country.

“The basic objective should be to scale, because unless services are taken to the masses, digital inclusion will not succeed as asymmetry of information leads to asymmetry of opportunity,” he remarked.

Deepak said the curbs put on the use of Aadhaar unique identification number programme has made it difficult to implement Digital India initiatives.

The Supreme Court has through two orders limited the use of Aadhaar to the public distribution system, the distribution of cooking gas and kerosene, the rural jobs guarantee scheme, the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, central and state government pensions and the Employees’ Provident Fund Scheme. The issue of whether Aadhaar violates privacy has been referred to a constitution bench of the court, which is still to be constituted.

Prasad said the communications ministry is committed to the launch of the payments bank of India Post by March 2017.

The Reserve Bank of India in August gave initial approval to 11 entities, including India Post, to set up payments banks within a period of 18 months. Prasad requested Kavery Banerjee, secretary, department of posts, to adhere to the timeline.

Banerjee, in her address, said the department of posts is working towards making all postal transactions real-time and rolling out citizen-centric services. She announced that the current banking customers of the postal department will have access to mobile and Internet banking by early next year.

Communications minister Prasad also announced that state-run Mahanagar Telecom Nigam Ltd (MTNL) will offer free roaming services for incoming calls across the country starting 1 January.

Saurabh KumarMoulishree Srivastava

9202 - Digital India’s Promise And Potential For The Unbanked - Swarajya

Digital India’s Promise And Potential For The Unbanked

Arvind Gupta

Arvind Gupta (@buzzindelhi) is a Co-Founder of Digital India Foundation, Eisenhower Fellow for Innovation, currently heading the BJP’s Information and Technology Group. The views expressed are personal.

22 Dec, 2015

#DigitalIndia has brought India’s marginalised populace to the centre stage in the newer domains of technology and financial innovation.

India’s marginalised populace now appears to have assumed centre stage, even in the newer domains of technology and financial innovation.  This is largely owed to #DigitalIndia’s vision of empowering a billion Indians, most of whom live in villages across the country and speak languages other than English. The real push has come from combining the newly-created Jan Dhan accounts, the Aadhaar identity infrastructure and the ubiquitous penetration of mobile phone technology.

This new formidable vehicle for government reforms seems to have created new spheres of engagement for policy makers, the Reserve Bank of India, economists and technology innovators, all at once. At a recent discussion on Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile (JAM), participants spoke of the immense potential of these three pillars to render financial technology in the aid of the poor and excluded.

The winning combination of JAM with Digital India has kick-started a major disruption in banking and payments like never before. With Digital India, the unveiling of the promised revolution of a less cash-oriented society, financial inclusion and a savings culture may finally be at hand. A society that relies less and less on cash-oriented transactions, certainly bodes well for the economy in the long run.

To start with, a bank account for every household in this vast country is a means of pulling the financially excluded families into the mainstream. 99.7% of India’s households have already been granted access to banking accounts. This trend is only expected to grow with the regulatory innovation that has now unleashed 11 new payment banks to reach the people at the fringes of financial inclusion.

Coupled with the payments bridge that links each Aadhaar number with a bank account, an effective channel is fast emerging to route intended benefits to the poor and at the same time make many of these small accounts viable. Importantly, more firepower has been added to the inclusion drive as well by the move to grant licences to a set of small finance banks, who by virtue of their very licensing conditions are required to focus on the unbanked and poor.

These entities ensure a sustainable financial structure because their licenses have been granted based on their years of experience in creating viable business models centred around small-value transactions. In combination with the new connectivity solutions and smartphones, more and more people may well have a 24/7 bank in their pocket in the months and years to come. An under 35-age group that makes up over 65% of the population is the perfect demographic to make this technology-driven change widely accepted.

Among other spin-offs, the growing number of IT-driven governance systems under Digital India are set to deliver benefits in cash and kind in a a manner that cuts down the leakages as we saw in the past and puts more disposable income in the hands of the poor. In the process, the financially excluded may now see more reason to start giving attention to their bank accounts.

New-age airlines have been hailed for devising ways to incentivise passengers carrying no baggage and sharing the benefits of its operational efficiencies with the consumers. It is time banks and regulators learnt from these consumer-friendly practices and started adopting schemes to encourage a less-cash ecosystem. Instead of flagging tax payers who make aggregated credit card purchases of Rs 2,00,000 per year for potential scrutiny, regulators are thinking of providing incentives to those who actually spend a substantial portion of their income in cashless transactions. This change in approach can not only reap efficiency gains but also ensure transparency in monetary transactions between the state and citizens.

Arvind Gupta (@buzzindelhi) is a digital entrepreneur, Eisenhower Fellow for Innovation, currently heading the BJP’s Information & Technology cell.

9196 - Infrastructural, legal issues are hurdles to Digital India’s success - Live Mint

Home » Industry

Last Modified: Tue, Dec 22 2015. 03 35 PM IST

Infrastructural, legal issues are hurdles to Digital India’s success

Concept huge responsibility on law ministry to ensure laws are updated and not ambiguous for someone to misuse, say analysts

Srishti Gupta and Harveen Ahluwalia

The Digital India initiative aims to provide Internet access to remote parts of the country through a wireless network.

New Delhi: The implementation of many e-governance projects is no measure of the success of the Digital India initiative, as experts are of the view that it has been unable to make the desired impact due to legal and infrastructural issues.

“The Digital India concept is glorified by India but it is a huge responsibility on the shoulders of the law ministry to make sure that the laws are updated and not ambiguous for someone to misuse,” Ashish Chandra, general counsel of Snapdeal, said at the 43rd National Convention of Company Secretaries organized by the Institute of Company Secretaries of India held in New Delhi on Friday.

“The legal challenges that Digital India might face are that the laws are still outdated. There are spectrum issues, data privacy issues and product liability issues,” he added.

The Digital India initiative aims to provide Internet access to remote parts of the country through a wireless network.

“It is not a Digital India but a bureaucratic India; not from the government’s side but from a legal aspect. Though certain laws have been made like IT Act, yet the laws are not keeping pace with the changing technology,” he said.

Speaking at the event, Premkumar Seshadri, executive vice-chairman and managing director of HCL Infosystems Ltd, said the concept of digital divide has changed with respect to the number of Internet users from across the nation.

“Digital power, in the hands of the citizens, is the first step towards the empowerment of the citizens. We have been able to make things easier by bringing transparency in the processes, making them online and removing human intervention,” he said.

Seshadri also emphasized that with the digitized Aadhaar unique identity number project, real-time e-governance has emerged. The legal case against Aadhaar violating privacy is to be heard by a yet-to-be-constituted constitution bench of the Supreme Court.

However, the execution speed of digital initiatives will have to be expedited. Law secretary P.K. Malhotra said Digital India is an ambitious project launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but in reality, it has been going on for more than two decades. “But the government can’t succeed unless the entire industry participates as a whole,” he said.

In a session on ease of doing business, experts echoed that rules and laws that will lead to an environment that fosters easy business needs to be emphasized.

“There is a lack of time frame in the government and even when there is a time frame, nobody follows it. There is a certain inability in the department to take calls because the architecture of legislation is complex,” said Ketan Dalal, chairman of the direct tax committee of Indian Merchants Chamber, a lobby group.

Dalal believes that in India, there is a tendency to over-legislate, which becomes an impediment to business. “We have to move faster. Everything has to have a time limit. There is a need for a holistic approach,” he said.

India ranked 130 among 189 nations in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business 2016 rankings. The National Democratic Alliance government has launched a drive to improve the country’s business environment, speed up approvals for businesses to boost manufacturing and job creation, and bring transparency and stability to tax rates.

srishti.g@livemint.com

Srishti GuptaHarveen Ahluwalia

9172 - Road to digital India begins in B'luru: CM - Deccan Herald

Road to digital India begins in B'luru: CM

Bengaluru, Dec 15, 2015, DHNS

The number of mobile users have touched 5.4 crore, making Karnataka the leading state for its e-governance initiatives, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said at an event here on Monday.

Speaking during the two-day regional conference on ‘Minimum Government - Maximum Governance,’ Siddaramaiah said that the State government’s mobile governance initiative ‘MobileOne’ is not only being replicated by other state governments but also by the Union government. “The road to Digital India begins from Bengaluru. We are now working on something unique for the country. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly said that state governments should map their department databases with Aadhaar to address irregularities. Karnataka has become the first State, where this work is speedily underway. Many of our departments have been mapped with Aadhaar and duplicates are being removed,” he said. 

Launched last year, the ‘MobileOne’ platform sees as many as one lakh hits or downloads on a daily basis and the number of transactions are also picking up. A team of experts from United Nations (UN) also showcased this mobile governance initiative at their headquarters in New York, recently, he added. 

“MobileOne can now be extended to citizen audit platforms, rural asset creation programmes or services that entail a G2C (Government to Consumer) or a G2B (Government to Business) engagement,” he said. 

Other e-initiatives

Another award winning project, e-Sugam sees 30 lakh forms being generated every month. This has enforced accountability and reduced corruption by making traders act as agents of the government for indirect tax collection. “Now, tax collections are in the range of Rs 40,000 crore per annum, through five lakh returns. It has eliminated about 1.5 lakh visits by traders everyday to government offices. Projects like Bhoomi, Sakala, Mojini, e-Khajane, e-procurement and e-swathu are changing the nature of transparency and governance in the State,” he added. 

In fact, over 35 per cent of India’s IT exports coming from Bengaluru alone and the State would soon be in the forefront of ushering ‘Governance through Accountability, Transparency, and Innovation’ or GATI, he added. 

Representatives from the government and private sector are participating in the two-day conference, where e-initiatives and its implementation in platforms such as Aadhaar, urban transport, m-Governance and various start-up companies are being showcased.