Tech for governance isn’t new
The BJP government is celebrating the completion of eight years in office. Among various achievements Central ministers are highlighting is the extensive use of technology for the benefit of the poor. Speaking at the inauguration of the drone festival in New Delhi last week, PM Modi compared the use of technology in the past and now. In his view, technology was portrayed as anti-poor and was considered ‘part of the problem’ before 2014. ‘There was an atmosphere of indifference regarding the use of technology in governance’ before he came to power. As a result, the poor and the middle classes suffered the most. This was because technology in earlier times was meant for the elite. Now, the government is ‘making technology available to the masses first’. The message the PM gave was two-fold — India started using technology in governance only after he came to power and the poor were deprived of the fruits of technology if at all it was used before 2014.
Sidestepping problems with Aadhaar and Internet connectivity in rural areas, the PM envisions ‘Har haath mein smartphone, har khet mein drone’.
Making simplistic generalisations about technology or looking at it narrowly from the point of digital technologies or through the prism of the pre-2014 and post-2014 framework is problematic. India has had a complex and complicated relationship with technology since Independence or even before that. The use of science and technology has been part of public discourse right from the days of Mahatma Gandhi who was wrongly portrayed as anti-technology. He was only opposed to the use of machines to replace working people and not technology, per se. Nehru, of course, was a great proponent of applying science and technology for the welfare of people and national development. This vision was translated into the development of research laboratories and technology-based public sector projects — from atomic energy and space to pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. These very institutions have helped India hold its head high in critical areas of technology development in the past 75 years, the most recent example being the Covid vaccines.
The use of technology came into focus in the 1980s during the regime of Rajiv Gandhi. The technology missions he launched aimed at using technology in sectors ranging from oilseeds to immunisation. It was also the time when the world was witnessing the PC (personal computer) revolution and the advent of information technology. A series of projects was devised to make creative use of these developments to improve public utilities like telephone services, banking, weather prediction and so on. This was done through projects like passenger railway reservation, digital telecom switch, banking computerisation, development of supercomputer PARAM etc. None of them called for the need for people to own a device like a PC or access to a communication network (Internet did not exist in India then), yet they benefited the common man. It was done ahead of the computerisation of airlines reservation. So, technology benefits were not aimed at elites first.
At the sub-national level, stellar examples of technology use and diffusion come from southern states in the post-liberalisation era. In Karnataka, Chief Minister SM Krishna pushed a novel project of digitising all land records under a project named Bhoomi. The digitisation of about 20 million rights, tenancy and crops (RTC) records ended petty corruption and a plethora of litigation. The records could be accessed through Bhoomi kiosks in small towns. Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu built a statewide network to connect government offices and single-window kiosks for all government utilities. Such e-governance projects were then copied by other states. Babu introduced some of his ideas of using digital technologies for governance at the national level as co-chair of the IT Task Force formed by PM Vajpayee.
Calling all such pre-2014 e-governance projects and ideas elitist and not benefiting the poor is fallacious. All of them may have had problems and were not perfect, but they were key stepping stones in India’s technological journey. As mobile phone prices fell and Internet access became affordable with low data prices and marketing innovations, like ‘chhota recharge’, digital technologies and applications have zoomed in the past two decades. The advent of Aadhaar provided the government with a tool for the delivery of targeted subsidies. But soon, the biometrics-based identification system, combined with mobile phone connectivity, found its way into applications in government and private sectors beyond subsidy delivery.
The Modi government counts JAM (jan dhan, Aadhaar, mobile) as one of its key achievements. It also boasts of the spread of the digital payment eco-system through innovations like UPI, without mentioning that it needed a bitter pill of demonetisation and was not a result of demand-led organic growth. The use of Aadhaar has been made so ubiquitous that even the educated are left wondering what the UID number they share with companies, banks etc is meant for — identification, authentication or authorisation. The recent press note (withdrawn hastily) of UIDAI advising people not to share their ID numbers with all and sundry has added to this confusion. Cases of fraud in the direct benefit transfer system are being reported due to biometrics cloning and phishing.
Just as demonetisation forced the adoption of digital payments, the pandemic forced further use of digital tools for applications like online classes and e-health. In both cases, poor connectivity in rural areas and access to devices posed hurdles. Several images of students climbing trees with their phones to connect to the Internet for online classes or the elderly for biometrics authentication went viral. The plan to connect every village with fibre optics has made slow progress, and its service provider, BSNL, is being made to die a slow death. Sidestepping problems with Aadhaar and Internet connectivity in rural areas, the PM envisions ‘Har haath mein smartphone, har khet mein drone. Har ghar samriddhi’ (smartphone in every hand, a drone in every field, prosperity in every home). Welcome to a technological utopia.
