India's Digital Push Badly Needs to Focus on Its Citizens

Denial of failures could scuttle the transparency and convenience the programme pledges

- Rohini Mohan

BENGALURU - Visitors to India are often struck by dhoti-clad farmers using WhatsApp, coconut sellers accepting QR code payments, and city folk hailing tuk-tuks over Uber.

But last week, as I watched an elderly neighbour battle with a counter-intuitive website to convert her precious property licence into an e-document, I took pause. The meet-cute of tradition and modernity hides underlying hardships Indians face during the country's digitalisation drive.

In 2009, India's digital transformation was given a concerted push with the introduction of the Aadhaar biometric ID. Six years later, in 2015, this juggernaut gained more speed when the Indian government launched the Digital India programme - an initiative to digitalise all sectors, from schooling and travel to policing and pensions.

Operational efficiency was the chief benefit - with some government services faster now that file-and-pen systems have been replaced with computers and the cloud.

A senior bureaucrat from a state in north-east India told me that in the past year, a Global Positioning System-based app that recorded the attendance of teachers in around 70,000 government schools only if they were at the location had ensured that they turned up for work on time to avoid pay cuts.

"It eliminated the practice of proxy or fake attendance like no other system we have tried before," he said.

GREAT DIGITAL STRIDES

A centrepiece of India's digital transformation is its payment system. The country went from being heavily cash-dependent six years ago to now accounting for nearly half of all global real-time digital transactions. The opportunity to serve a once-unbankable segment has also spawned a fintech boom.