Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations (3 page)

Why is government so byzantine? The Federalist Papers, published in 1787–88, discuss at length the design decisions made during the drawing up of the American Constitution. In Federalist Number 51, James Madison, the fourth President of the United States, expounds upon the controls that must be necessarily placed on the government:

But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself
.
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This is the challenge that lies before us. How do we usher a new class of people into government without weakening the structure of governance, while simultaneously harnessing the energy of the start-up culture? We believe that our experiences with Aadhaar will highlight some parts of the solution.

Shankar Maruwada, former head of demand generation at the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), who has spent his career thinking about marketing in India and the Indian customer’s psyche, tells us that his team did a lot of ground research and spent a good six months travelling across the country before Aadhaar was officially launched. The team built a picture of the real India from both rural and urban perspectives. He says, ‘We found that India’s biggest brand is the “
sher chhaap
”—the symbol of the government.’ People really do believe that the government has their best interests at heart, and trust it implicitly, even if the frontline workers and officials they interact
with are corrupt or inefficient. A tremendous reservoir of goodwill and faith has been built despite our creaking and outmoded public service systems. If the government were to embrace technology and radically redefine the way it interacts with its subjects, imagine the kind of positive energy it could generate, an energy that could power our country to new heights of achievement and prosperity.

This book is fundamentally about the ways in which technology can be employed to transform our government and create a series of new, citizen-friendly public institutions, based on our experiences building the Aadhaar project, the world’s largest social identity programme. The economist Lant Pritchett, a friend of Nandan’s, calls India a ‘flailing state’, one where the head is functioning but has lost the connect with its limbs; a condition in which ‘the everyday actions of the field-level agents of the state—policemen, engineers, teachers, health workers—are increasingly beyond the control of the administration at the national or state level’.
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We are a ‘booming economy and democracy with world-class elite institutions’ while simultaneously contending with ‘chaotic conditions in service provision of even the most rudimentary types’. Our country cannot become a global powerhouse unless we resolve the contradictions and bridge the gaps that are distorting our society.

The first part of our book focuses on the idea of Aadhaar as a platform upon which to build a new class of services. These include an electronic payments network, a redesigned social security system and the electronic Know Your Customer (e-KYC) service. We then examine the idea of technology as a tool for institution-building, focusing upon the Goods and Services Tax (GST) and Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) as the building blocks of a single market. Later, we take a look at the electoral process in India, both in terms of the way elections are run and contested—in the latter context, we look at how technology has given birth to the concept of the party as a platform. Finally, we turn to the bigger picture, looking at how technology can be used to answer some of India’s most pressing governance concerns such as justice, health and education.

President Pranab Mukherjee provided an excellent analogy to
explain the impact of technology on government. During Mukherjee’s tenure as finance minister, Nandan met him to submit a report on the issue of subsidy reform, and emphasized the importance of technology platforms in solving some of the most complex problems that India faces. Mukherjee immediately understood the point, turned to the various other ministers and secretaries, and explained, ‘See, it is just like a railway platform. Different trains pull up at a railway platform, each with a different destination, and people get on and off depending on where they are headed. In the same way, the technology platform is a central location where various state governments, institutions, and citizens can gather. All government services and schemes are offered on the same platform, and citizens can enrol for all eligible services in one place.’

The challenge that lies before us is to create the platform that allows every one of India’s 1.2 billion people to get on a train headed for the destination of their choice.

Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong with their seeds. Only society never gave them a base to grow on.

—Muhammad Yunus,
Creating a World without Poverty

TEMBHLI VILLAGE IS a small, dusty hamlet in Maharashtra’s Nandurbar district, close to the Gujarat border. Inhabited mostly by Bhil tribals and fifty kilometres from the nearest town, Tembhli did not have proper roads or electricity, and its residents either laboured for a pittance in the nearby fields or migrated to other states in search of employment. Then, in late 2010, Tembhli underwent a dramatic makeover. Roads were asphalted, fresh coats of paint were slapped onto buildings, water pumps were fixed and the village got its first-ever electricity connection. All this was in honour of the fact that Tembhli was chosen as the place where the Government of India would flag off the ambitious Aadhaar programme. In a function attended by the then prime minister Manmohan Singh and several other dignitaries—including Sonia Gandhi, president of the Indian National Congress—Ranjana Sonawane, a thirty-year-old housewife, officially became the first Indian resident to receive an Aadhaar number. The villagers hoped that their Aadhaar numbers would enable them to do the
simple things—keep track of their government records, open a bank account, ensure that nobody was fraudulently claiming their benefit payments—that had been denied to them so far.

The sight of a beaming Sonawane posing for photographs holding the official card on which her unique ID number was printed wasn’t particularly novel—we’ve seen similar pictures every time a new government scheme is launched. What was different was the power of that number clutched so proudly in Sonawane’s fingers. Firstly, Aadhaar is the only universal identity available to all Indian residents, even those who do not possess any other form of identification, making them visible to the state for the first time. Secondly, Aadhaar is that rare government scheme that was not designed to address a single need. Instead, it is an open identity verification system that can be plugged into any application that requires an individual to prove who they are, whether they’re enrolling for a rural job guarantee scheme or opening a bank account. No other identity scheme has used biometric identity verification—using a person’s fingerprints and iris to validate their identity—on such a large scale. And finally, Sonawane was not required to present her official card every time she wanted to use her Aadhaar number—as long as she knew what her number was, her eyes and fingers were sufficient to declare to the world that she, and she alone, was Ranjana Sonawane of Tembhli.
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Ranjana Sonawane was the first of over 900 million Indian residents—over two-thirds of the 1.2 billion-strong population—who now have Aadhaar numbers.
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For those of us in the audience that day in Tembhli—or on the stage, in Nandan’s case—she was a symbol of the remarkable journey we had undertaken in the past fourteen months as part of the Unique Identification Authority of India, the organization set up to implement the Aadhaar scheme. Many talented individuals, from government agencies and private companies alike, made personal and professional sacrifices to become part of the programme. We’d set up shop in half-built offices and semi-furnished apartments, gulped down endless cups of coffee as we worked late into the night, and travelled the length and breadth of the country to meet chief ministers and CEOs alike, all because we were committed to an idea—the idea
that every Indian deserves an identity, and a way to answer that most fundamental of questions: Who am I?

It took less than five years for Aadhaar to reach over two-thirds of the country; that’s more people acquired in a shorter time than WhatsApp, the mobile messaging application, which was bought by Facebook for $19 billion. In those five years, we at the UIDAI built the entire framework of the programme from the ground up, and had to work with multiple government and private agencies to achieve our goals on time. And we did all of this entirely within the ambit of the Indian government, working within the same system that so many scathingly dismiss as sclerotic, old-fashioned and inefficient. We found people with vision, commitment and a passion for change wherever we looked. This, in our opinion, was one of the great victories of Aadhaar.

In 2010, a man named Farooq Alam signed up to receive an Aadhaar number in New Delhi.
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He was a migrant labourer from Uttar Pradesh, with a wife and family he had left behind in his quest to try and make a living. He was not sure of his own age; like 59 per cent of children born in India,
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his birth had never been registered, and he had no birth certificate. Without proof of his age, Ali wasn’t able to obtain a voter ID or a driver’s licence. In fact, Ali had no form of identity documents at all. After he completed the enrolment process, he was asked how things would change now that he possessed a document that proved who he was. ‘Maybe some benefits,’ he said, while his coworker Gulzar Khan was far more blunt, ‘I never had ID, so I never thought about what it would mean, but now that I have it, I think that at least people will know who I am if I’m killed in an accident.’

This is what it was like to be one of the millions of Indians who possessed no identity documents, who had no way of proving who they were, and whose birth, life and death were completely invisible to government authorities. This lack of identity manifested itself in a thousand missed opportunities, both large and small. These ‘invisible’ Indians could not be employed in the formal labour market without
identification, consigning them to physically demanding, poorly-paid jobs in the country’s vast unorganized labour sector. They could not register as voters, and so had no say in choosing their leaders. They could not legally sign up for any of the government welfare schemes meant to benefit the poor. They couldn’t drive a car, travel out of the country, get a SIM card for a mobile connection, open a bank account or provide any documentation if the police stopped them on the street. They remained mired in poverty, unable to find any way out of their circumstances.

The barriers to entry for obtaining any form of identification were insurmountably high for most of India’s poor. Every major form of ID in India required you to already be in possession of at least one other form of ID, be it a birth certificate, a voter ID, a PAN card or a ration card. The Kafkaesque complexity of merely trying to prove who you are meant that the underprivileged who are most in need of the government’s social safety nets simply fell through the cracks.

To make things even more complicated, not all these forms of ID were available to everyone—you need to be above eighteen to have a voter ID or a driver’s licence, for example. And none of these documents was universally accepted as a proof of identity. This meant that every time you wanted to carry out any transaction that required identity verification—say, opening a bank account—you would have to painstakingly assemble an entire sheaf of documents that were required by the bank for this process, and fill out a set of forms that were only applicable to that bank. The whole rigmarole was tedious, costly and time-consuming, again placing these services out of reach of those who needed them the most.

Identity verification was equally painful from the bank’s end, requiring a great deal of effort to be expended. Worse still, whether it was banking or any other service, all this data would end up in a silo. In other words, the data you submitted when applying for a driver’s licence was not accessible to the passport office if you applied for a passport—you had to go through the whole process all over again. Such opaque, inaccessible data systems meant that it made it hard to find and remove errors, increasing the potential for fraud to go unchecked.
Fake beneficiaries and ghost workers existed in the thousands, created to illegally withdraw benefits, while the intended beneficiaries were cheated out of their dues and remained invisible to the system.

If the fruits of India’s economic progress were to truly reach every resident of the country, our invisible millions would have to emerge from the darkness to which they had been relegated and take their rightful place as part of the formal financial sector. At the same time, government benefit schemes were haemorrhaging billions of rupees—for instance, nearly Rs 300 billion disappeared every year from the public distribution system for wheat, rice and kerosene. These leakages had to be staunched if such aid programmes were to become truly effective. It was against this background that the Government of India launched a scheme to issue a Unique Identification Number (branded as Aadhaar, which means ‘foundation’ in various Indian languages) to all 1.2 billion residents of India. As we explain in the following diagram, this number is meant to be universal—unlike other existing forms of identification—and can serve as the sole information required for identity verification in order to obtain a host of government services and benefits. By reducing the cost of identity verification and developing an inclusive platform for enrolment, the goal of the programme was to make every Indian, no matter how poor or marginalized, visible to the state.
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Many decades ago, the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi had famously declared that for every rupee spent by the government, only 17 paise reached the intended recipient, with the rest lost to corruption. The increased transparency and accountability brought about by the Aadhaar programme will go a long way in plugging these leaks. The Aadhaar number can serve as the basis of a model in which benefits are directly transferred to the recipients; in the next few chapters, we explore multiple scenarios in which such a model is now being utilized. The direct benefit transfer system allows for better tracking of resources and greater transparency, eliminating the problem of ghosts and duplicate identities along the way. This system, while being simple and convenient enough for anyone to use, also provides the high levels of security that government regulations demand.

Providing a universal identity and propelling the creation of a direct benefit transfer system were two of the immediate outcomes envisioned when the Aadhaar scheme was first proposed. Given the transformational power of technology, we anticipate that an individual should soon be able to use their Aadhaar number for an untold number of applications that require identity verification.

‘Such a “national grid” would require, as a first and critical step, a unique and universal ID for each citizen. Creating a national register of citizens, assigning them a unique ID and linking them across a set of national databases, like the PAN and passport, can have far-reaching effects in delivering public services better and targeting services more accurately. Unique identification for each citizen also ensures a basic right—the right to “an acknowledged existence” in the country, without which much of a nation’s poor can be nameless and ignored, and governments can draw a veil over large-scale poverty and destitution.’

Words from the UIDAI’s mission statement? No. These words are taken from Nandan’s earlier book,
Imagining India
.
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As far back as 2008, Nandan had devoted serious thought to the question of a national ID programme. Around the same time, the government had taken its first steps towards implementing such a programme, an idea which had first been mooted in 2006. The UIDAI formally came into existence on 28 January 2009, and Nandan’s involvement began almost immediately, despite the fact that he was not officially appointed chairman until later in the year.

In the summer of 2009, Viral was living in Santa Barbara, California, surfing, playing Ultimate Frisbee, nursing a serious burrito habit and working for a Boston-based start-up while also taking finance courses at his alma mater, the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he had completed his PhD in computer science and engineering. As part of his studies, he was given the chance to attend a conference in New Delhi organized by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER). It so happened
that Nandan was also attending the conference; the two bumped into each other in the hallway, and introductions were made by the economist Ajay Shah, who told Viral, ‘Nandan is working on something really important and you need to be a part of this.’ That hallway encounter led to a fifteen-minute meeting in the lobby of a New Delhi hotel, where Nandan explained in detail what this ‘something important’ was. Viral returned to the US; his start-up was acquired by Microsoft, and deciding that he didn’t want to be a cog in the corporate machine, he began scouting for other opportunities. One option was a postdoctoral fellowship in the mathematics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), but this required a change in his visa status. In September that year, Viral found himself back home in Mumbai, doing the rounds of the US consulate, spending time with his family and taking long walks on Marine Drive. In the midst of this enforced holiday, he reached out to Nandan to find out what was happening with the Aadhaar programme. Nandan replied, ‘Why don’t you come to Delhi and get started?’ Viral landed in Delhi, spent his first day there attending a meeting at the offices of India Post, and within the month found himself working as an unpaid volunteer at UIDAI—all thoughts of MIT and fellowships now forgotten. It would be six months before he got an official title—Manager, Financial Inclusion—and a pay cheque.