Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations (2 page)

Indian society is vastly complex, made up of a million smaller Indias—rich, poor, urban, rural, multi-ethnic, multilingual. A truly democratic society is one in which every citizen of these million smaller Indias is included in the mainstream, able to benefit from government services and participate in the country’s development. We need to fix our country’s problems at great speed, at scale, with high quality, while providing solutions that are easy to access, independent of geography, and low-cost. Technology, the great leveller, is our only hope of meeting these goals.

When it comes to speed and scale, consider that Facebook successfully manages a database of one billion users; at one point, it was adding 100 million users roughly every five months.
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WhatsApp reached 900 million users much faster. Today, we can top up our mobile phones for as little as five rupees, the most common amount for a top-up in the country. As a result, more people can own a mobile and make calls. We leapfrogged past landlines, and went from no phones to almost everyone having a phone in the span of fifteen years. Aadhaar will cover the entire country in less than ten years.

The ability of technology to deliver low-cost solutions is especially important in a developing country like ours, and this approach has already proven its worth many times over. For example, withdrawing money from a bank used to take anywhere from ten minutes to an hour, and cost the bank an estimated Rs 50 in processing fees; with the advent of ATMs, the same transaction can be completed under five minutes at
a cost of only Rs 15. The money saved in transaction costs is enough to pay for the set-up and maintenance of ATM machines. The National Stock Exchange (NSE) and the National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL) have helped us make the switch to a fully electronic online stock-trading system, bringing down the costs of trading and storing securities to a fraction of what they were a decade ago. In the five years from 2000 to 2005, the cost per transaction at NSDL crashed from Rs 23 to Rs 5, an even sharper decline if adjusted for inflation. It now stands at Rs 4.5.
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Another attribute that makes technology-driven solutions so attractive is their ability to transcend the limits of geography. Today, we are a nation on the move. In the last two decades, India’s urban population has exploded, thanks to a steady influx of people migrating from villages and small towns in search of education, employment and a better way of life—at last count, India’s migrants numbered over 300 million.
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Technology has managed to keep pace with this exponential rate of migration—for example, a mobile phone connection registered in an Andhra Pradesh village works smoothly in Bangalore. Your bank account may have been set up in Mumbai, but you can check your bank balance anywhere in the country.

In comparison to this fluidity, government services remain highly rigid, inescapably tethered to a physical location. Nandan contested the 2014 general elections from the Bangalore South constituency; in the course of his election campaign, we met many people who had recently moved to the city and couldn’t vote because their voter IDs hadn’t been transferred from their original location. Migrants who move to cities find that their village ration cards won’t allow them to obtain subsidized foodstuffs from city ration shops. Pension payments can only be collected from specific bank branches. The private sector has successfully employed technology to deliver services that transcend geographical barriers; it is time the government followed suit.

The speed at which technology can evolve is the subject of Moore’s Law, the famous prediction by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that computing speed would double every eighteen months—a vision
of exponential growth that has largely been realized. The average smartphone today is more powerful than the computers that put the Apollo astronauts on the moon. Five years from today, they will be more powerful than the supercomputers of the last decade. Over the last few decades, the internet has become a thousand times faster while computer data storage has become a thousand times cheaper. These developments have resulted in the emergence of cloud computing, where you can rent high-powered computers from Amazon and Microsoft for twenty rupees an hour—the cost of a few cups of tea. Today, YouTube probably generates more data through uploading and streaming videos in a few days than the medical industry does in an entire year. While they’re getting cheaper, faster and smarter, computers are also getting tinier and more ubiquitous, embedded in everything from shoes to clothes, eyeglasses to robots. These are the key attributes of technology we need to consider when designing solutions to India’s many challenges.

Within the past two decades, popular culture has acquired a new, reliable trope—programmers hacking away in a small garage or dorm room, fuelled by soda and junk food, creating a start-up that eventually takes over the world and rakes in billions. It’s a testament to the power of the idea that a small, committed team can achieve what many large organizations cannot. When Google paid over a billion dollars for YouTube, it was acquiring a company that was one of the largest consumers of bandwidth on the internet, while it employed only around forty people. When the popular photo-sharing app Instagram was bought for a billion dollars by Facebook, it had only twelve employees. What if the same start-up model could be applied to solve the problems of governance as well?

As alien as it may sound, India has actually nurtured a proud tradition of start-ups within government ever since Independence. The very first of these was the Atomic Energy Commission, founded by the physicist and bon vivant Homi Bhabha, as atypical a ‘sarkari babu’ as one could
hope to find. With a small, dedicated team of colleagues, he built India’s indigenous atomic energy programme, meant to meet the country’s power needs and bolster national security. Another outstanding example is that of Vikram Sarabhai; the organization he established, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), continues to win plaudits to the present day, with successes like Chandrayaan and Mangalyaan under its belt. In her book
Vikram Sarabhai: A Life,
Amrita Shah writes:

By 1970, his list (of space applications) had expanded to include agriculture, forestry, oceanography, geology, mineral prospecting and cartography . . . This was Vikram’s dream: linking technology with development, serving the needs of the masses while nurturing a highly sophisticated work culture and scientific abilities. One of his favourite phrases was ‘leapfrogging’. It referred to his great faith, along with Bhabha and Nehru, in the ability of technology to enable developing countries to circumvent the long, arduous processes followed by the Western world.
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India’s self-sufficiency in foodgrains and milk are also the results of start-ups: the Green Revolution, powered by scientists like Norman Borlaug and bureaucrats like M.S. Swaminathan, and supported administratively by the Indira Gandhi government, is responsible for the former, while Operation Flood, spearheaded by Verghese Kurien, made India the largest milk producer in the world. In both cases, seemingly intractable problems were tackled by small teams that were given strong administrative support—the results speak for themselves. Fast-forwarding to our own experience, a dedicated group of bureaucrats and technical specialists working in tandem were able to build and deliver on the promise of the Aadhaar programme—handing out a unique identity to every one of India’s 1.2 billion residents. Around the same time as Aadhaar, the Bharat Broadband project was also launched, aimed at connecting 250,000 villages with fibre-optic networks. Aadhaar was deliberately designed from the very start for scale and speed, and over 900 million people now have an Aadhaar number; Bharat Broadband’s design inefficiencies, on the other hand,
led to a gridlock, and the project is still floundering. Getting the design right in the beginning is key.

We propose that a team of 100 carefully selected individuals can fix all the major problems that ail India. How would such a system work? Let’s say the prime minister identifies ten grand challenges that India faces. Each idea can be the nucleus of a ‘government start-up’. Ten enterprising leaders are given charge of each of these problems. They, in turn, form ten-member teams of the best brains within government and domain specialists from outside government to apply out-of-thebox thinking that can deliver innovative solutions. We give examples of such potential solutions throughout this book.

Any new government project should be treated, in essence, like a start-up that needs to stake a claim for itself. The officials in charge of such a project need to display a considerable amount of entrepreneurial savvy. A true entrepreneur will figure out all the government processes and follow them to the letter. He will navigate the byways of the bureaucracy, keep his multiple masters happy, get his project mentioned in every important speech and every government document of relevance, get his bills tabled in Parliament and enacted as law, secure his budgets, cooperate with investigating agencies, respond to court orders, answer Parliament questions, tirelessly provide information sought in RTI requests, build general consensus with multiple interest groups within government as well as citizen groups outside, find allies who will support him when under attack, and do all this while staying focused on hiring the best team and building an organization that is dedicated towards achieving a well-defined goal.

The standard manual of ‘business as usual’ must be thrown out of the window. A bureaucracy consisting of officials who are experts in administrative procedure alone will not be able to cope with the kind of large, complex projects that our government needs to tackle. While there are many talented, hard-working and honest bureaucrats, we must recognize the shortcomings of this system as well: a hard-coded hierarchy that places a premium on seniority; territorial battles; a bias for complexity; the shortness of tenure that creates short-term vision;
the idea that power lies in commanding the largest number of people with the largest possible budget; and inter-service rivalry.