What the world needs to learn from India’s digital transformation

I'm nyree Woods dean of the blavatnik school of government and it is truly a pleasure to welcome here to the school Nandan nilakani thank you and indeed rohini milakani who spoke here at the school last night it's wonderful to to have you both here was born in Bengaluru and as many many of you know his story founding a computer system company in 1978 and then in 1981 joining forces with others to create Infosys a company which is synonymous for some with India but which you have been so part of in different variations across the theme but what London is even more known for I would say across the world is for the extraordinary way he led the introduction of the digital identity system in India adhar and then subsequently the way he's built from that digital public infrastructure the payment system in India um nandan's been listed twice by Time Magazine as one of the hundred most influential people in the world he's been listed by others as one of the 100 most influential thinkers in the world he's won so many prize is that I won't well excuse me take up our time tonight listing all your prizes trust me every every major prize London you've written two books one imagining India the idea of a renewed Nation and then two rebooting India realizing a billion aspirations and in those books you lay out an extraordinarily positive view of India which is so interesting to everyone in this school because you're very honest and brutal about the problems India faces then you lay out this honest vision of a way and if I can quote you in your book um rebooting India a team of a hundred carefully selected individuals can fix all the major problems that ail India now I don't want to cause any marital Discord here but last night explained to us that sometimes people bring a CEO mindset to government and it's hard to make work so I'm starting I'm opening um with a tricky question which is walk us through that journey of this vision of fixing all of India's problems the 100 brilliant people that could do it and where you are at now well I didn't necessarily mean that in a CEO structure I just meant that if the assist if there are many people in the government and outside who have the you know the will the ability the the ability to think of solving this they can be done and they're they're not just in one organization there are many organizations in Civil Society they're in government their markets so I think that's really what I was alluding to but my journey in this happened uh because I got an offer in 2009. to join the Indian government uh to lead the aadhaar project it was it's called the uidai which is the organization and other was the name we gave it to it after I joined and at that time I was at Infosys I'd been a co-founder and I'd worked there for almost 30 years so I took up this new challenge to give every Indian a digital an ID it was not digital it was a unique ID and that's how I landed up with this role this is the first time I was actually working in the government so I had always been a private sector person till then so I had to figure out how to operate in this new environment and also get this done and that itself was a large Story by itself of how how we got it done and in about five years we reached about 600 million people which is the commitment I had given when I started and I think uh then we had a election Prime Minister Modi came I also met with him and he he's actually the biggest champion of digital India and so I think now 1.3 billion people have the ID and it's widely used every day maybe 80 million times so it's now become a foundational Bedrock for a number of other things which we can talk about so well let's let's start with with what's so special about this system why is it that countries around the world should really think about what India's done on public digital infrastructure when they could just ignore it all and let Google and Amazon run their commercial platforms so what tell us about that I think our thesis has gone up dramatically especially after the pandemic because we order things online get our food delivered to us we have our relationships online we learn online we play online you know everything is online we have meetings online so when when you're when your life has become so digitally intense uh just as you have in the physical world a set of rules and protocols on how to create a sort of a shared and infrastructure you need the same thing with the digital world and in some sense what we have done is build those building blocks idea in particular I'll tell you why because uh when we started we had you know in many states in India there were only about half the births had birth certificates because people are born in villages they couldn't come to the city to get the certificate and so on so now if you live in a village all your life it doesn't matter whether you have an idea or not but if you're going to start moving around migrating going to the city and so on then suddenly ID becomes a very precious thing for you and you needed to open a bank account board the train get a job answer the policeman when he stops you and so on so we realized that I I mean the government realized that ID was a huge thing so that was one thing which had to be solved how to give IDs to people who don't have any IDs now that's not an obvious question in the west where 98 percent of births are registered at the time of birth but if you don't have birth registration done as robustly as you would like it then you have to figure out a way to give them IDs you know sort of at that point in time and the second was the government was increasing its welfare spending and to give and it is directed at individuals and if you're doing welfare spending to individuals then you need to be very precise in making sure that the right people the people get it the deserving people get it it goes directly to them and so on so we are solving two issues inclusion of people with no ID and creating the plumbing for a very modern uh transfer system so both these things grow that and every country has the same issues anyway in fact we found that in the pandemic in pandemic people wanted to many countries had wanted to send money and give money to people but they would send checks in the mail which would take weeks and they would send them to people who are already wealthy so you know you not only have to do in real time you do it flawlessly and you do it the way that the money goes to the people who deserve it so all these are all lessons we're learning that this kind of Plumbing actually is hugely beneficial for running a modern society how did you manage to keep it to the kind of economic and social realm and stop at becoming a tool for the police security surveillance and monitoring as it is in many other countries well the you know the ID system uh was the this organization that the government set up the uidai was uh in the Planning Commission which we don't have that anymore but it was and I reported to the prime minister so it was really set up with the express purpose of solving this issue and it was also meant for any Resident so this was not uh this was one of the things we learned is that you have to distinguish in government between foundational idea and functional ID foundational ID says 90 is 90 or John is John or Ashok is Ashok or Muhammad is Muhammad or whatever and functional ID is that which allows you to drive a car board a pla you know go abroad or you know pay your tax or whatever so we essentially separated these two layers and said look we'll only focus on the foundational idea and then the respective Department which say issues passports will then do the necessary checks for passports the election commission will decide whether the person eligible to vote the passport the you know the driver's license guys will test him to give him or a driver's license so the separation of foundational ID from functional ID was actually uh one of the root design principles which helped us how important was speed I think you you said somewhere you know that speed was important in order to stop all the other parts of government bandwagoning onto the project well you know you you know you you get anything done you did you need some momentum and speed momentum all the same and you know it it's important to reach a critical mass quickly uh make sure that uh you know it's out there and it's working so that other people will then adopt it and you know you deal with I mean you're dealing in the world where people in power change bureaucrats change so how do you how do you guard this against all that so you have to think through the strategy for doing that and when they're into remote um became prime minister you had run for election in 2014 in in Bangalore and so you know you've been on different parties and such like how did you persuade the prime minister to let you keep going well at speed well first of all I didn't persuade him I think he knew exactly what the technology was capable of doing secondly had already left the government by then so I did call upon him uh in July of 2014 and he was very gracious he gave me a meeting we had a chat he asked me a lot of questions and he actually I think he already was convinced but I think it was good I met him too and he's been a big proponent of digital India and ID is part of that because I sit back and I think so what have won this room well what are the vital components obviously there's the tech there's the tech skills there's the vision and goal but you refer to yourself quite often as the sales guy so you need the sales guy as well yeah yeah and so so tell me about the team like the team that yeah so we actually assembled a very unique team for this unique project uh I had on the one hand I had some of the best bureaucrats in the country my dear friend and colleague ramsevak Sharma was the icoad senior is officer from jharkhand and he was my CEO and I had a lady called ganga who was a top auditing account service person who was my CFO and so on so I had a great set of people from the government who in sunsets self-selected themselves because they had to be slightly risky to even join this project so for a risk-averse person this was not a great thing to join because you know where this is a headache so there are all people who had the desire to make a difference and then I had a very good set of people technologists from other Arma srika NADA money of them all with impeccable technology skills and business skills like Shankar who the marketing guy so we assembled this Motley crowd of you know great bureaucrats and great Technologies and obviously they were culturally very different because because government is formal hierarchical Etc and the technology you guys were all walking around in shorts and first names so it was a bit culturally different so the way we were able to bring this together was by setting audacious goals because you know when you have when you want to unite people the different backgrounds into a common Mission the mission has to be bigger than any of them so that's why in August of 2014 within the month of my joining we came out in the cabinet meeting and said we're going to issue 600 million IDs in five years which everybody said why in government if you're not supposed to make commitments because you know control over things so I said I'm going to do the commitment so the commitment of 600 million in some sense unified everyone because they say oh my God we better do this so so I think having audacious goals is very important to unify people and you saw that in the you know covet times and all when there's a large Big Goal then people submerge the differences and work together Galvanize that and now that now that the wider government's aware of it and what's going on they can't help it obviously has that slowed the process are there more I read one account which sort of said what's amazing is the way you manage to move fast enough to avoid it becoming a tool for corruption which has happened in other countries right you know in quite the reverse it made corruption more difficult for retail corruption yeah right yeah you know corruption at the point of giving somebody money so earlier the thing was that suppose you have to give money to somebody in a village the money would be sent to some person in the village you would physically hand it over and that creates opportunities for you know so this system the money is put into the bank account so it's electronic and then they can go to any what's called as a business correspondent who has a device where they can authenticate themselves and withdraw money so what that does is when you create a network of BCS and you have Choice the bargaining power shifts from the supplier to the Citizen and that essentially makes it both quick and and pretty efficient to reach the money and for them to withdraw it and today that system has done you know billions of dollars of transactions and it's all traceable oh yeah yeah so so you said retail corruption were you inferring that wholesale corruption continues I didn't say that I said that this is a problem this is a solution for retail club right right um one last question then I'm going to open it up to the audience to to pick up questions um David Seamus who was head of the Obama Foundation has come to speak each year in the school and he says to everybody in the room if you live in a democracy it's your duty to run for office at least once because otherwise you're just free writing as a citizen right you're expecting others to do it you're not prepared to do it yourself the really interesting challenge to everybody he then goes on it's extraordinarily successful man to explain that he's run three times and lost all three but that this taught him a lot so you ran for office it's a pretty unusual choice for somebody with your background and success in business can you tell us about why you ran and and what you learned from The Experience would you do it again I ran because of hubris hubris yeah tell us about that yeah because uh you know I I thought I could ever at a Midas Touch or something so I was successful in business and had gone to the government and successful in this project I thought I could do anything so why not you know you can do this too that's one level the hubris part the the reason the reason for doing it was I I believed at that time that maybe if I want to get more of this done then I need to be in the system and I need to have some legitimacy of being elected so that I can actually get public policy stuff done so where are the logic for that but I think in a way it's good that I lost it's a dodged a bullet and uh in the years after that I worked on many more things uh like you know I was advisor to npci which built the UPI platform I'm an advisor on the ondc I'm really doing a lot of things so contributing to the whole idea of creating digital public infrastructure without necessarily being you know a politician what did you learn from running for office that perhaps might have might subsequently have helped you work with government was there anything how to work with government and figure out in the previous five years right so I knew that part but I realized that to be a politician uh one is it's extremely time consuming because you're dealing with so many people I mean the election that I thought I actually got for 400 000 votes so I didn't do that badly but the other guy did better which is what our elections are about you got 600 000 votes so so uh but I think you realize that it's it's very intense and also from my perspective it was not strategic enough it was a lot of somebody coming and saying I want a job or I want to you know get this okay so whereas I want to work on issue that had a longer lead time four or five years and bring change so actually I found this my current model much better where I'm advised people and enable things last question from me and then to the audience so you learned in government that it would have been useful to know when you were in emphasis I did by the way I went back to info the chairman so I did use that knowledge well let me tell you what I learned when I go into government right so the first thing I learned was that uh you know it actually business is relatively simpler because everybody has the same motive profit right so were they running a steel company or a software company to make profits increase earnings reduce costs improve earnings per share you know the the rules of the game in business are the same in every business so you can actually change your job and still be successful and it's also a smaller group of people who are aligned to the same goals uh when you go into the public space first of all there's no definition of success the definite success for this ideology is is failure for the other ideology so this is success and second is that you have to do a huge amount of consultation so when I did the ID project I went to every state met with the chief minister all the bureaucrats talked about the idea program why it's beneficial for them I met all the banks All The Regulators all the politicians all the journalists all the lawyers so I did hundreds of meetings ngos activists everyone just to tell them this is coming and why it's good and the because I spent a huge amount of time building this consensus I was able to get it done without it not stumbling and did the consultations change any of these so what we did was we we came up with a thesis which is a very minimalistic thesis because one thing one one Pitfall in government is that you uh Union private sector is that you make the projects over ambitious and then they collapse under their own weight so we came up with a design that would have only four Fields the name address date of birth sex that's it and email ID and phone number is optional and everywhere I went people will say we went to the help industry we would say why don't you add blood group we went to some other well five minutes they wanted to add poverty level and somebody else would say why don't you add something else so he said no so being able to say no and maintaining the minimalism of your design is super important because what happens otherwise they say okay why don't you collect this and then suddenly you have 45 different pieces of data you want to collect and then it goes nowhere so I think minimalism was a an important part of this and uh I think that was and then we took this minimal design and presented it and by the maybe by the 10th iteration all the questions were repeating so I knew that we had it because for every question for the 11th meeting if I they asked me 10 questions I had answers for all ten so then you know that this thing is now design brilliant your questions my name is Sharda srinivasan I'm a doctoral student at the school what do you see UPI India in the next 10 years that is not happening right now well I think uh first I think the idea as I said aadhar 1.3 billion people uh 80 million transactions a day on that the kyc was there the kyc enabled opening of bank accounts and opening of mobile connections so in the last 10 years thanks to the jandan yojana program of the Prime Minister Modi and government there's been massive Financial inclusion so 80 people now have bank accounts and thanks to the mobile revolution of jio and Airtel and so on this massive so that's been done right so everybody has the ID number a bank account and a mobile phone then UPI enabled digital payments so there are 9 billion payments a month happening on UPI 300 million people use it and about 50 million Merchants take payments using UPI so that's fixed that now the CH the next thing will be how to now what happens is when this happens you when it leads to digital footprints and now we we have something called the data empowerment architecture which allows people individuals or businesses to use their digital Footprints what we call as digital Capital to get access to services so a small business can use the data of their lending or the data of their payments or their you know payments received or invoices paid and use that give it to A lender to get access to credit so suddenly this is going to democratize credit and millions of businesses will get access to credit who so far were not getting access to credit who relied on informal credit so this will mean you create much more broad-based economic growth because if 10 million businesses who hire five people each hire two more people because they have extra credit they are 20 million jobs so the idea is you've broad-based growth by creating digital capital I think the idea of digital capital is a New Concept because we are used to land labor Capital all that but digital Capital which is a byproduct of your digital transactions and using that to get better Services is I think going to essentially be a big part of India's economic growth then there's the whole issue of AI building we are building something called AI for Bharat where uh billing the the largest open source database on 22 Indian languages which is again free to use by anyone so that's going to allow you to have conversion language translation into Indian languages and with voice so tomorrow you can speak to the computer in Hindi and get an answer in Hindi or Canada or so that will make access even better and then there's ondc which is shaping up the whole uh e-commerce by creating open Commerce so I think all these things and the summer couple in the pipeline will essentially create a digital Society but which is also competitive innovation-led many players you know those kind of things your story um India story still do we're very well done congratulations um as this platform that has been built at hyperscale um the model of free users okay begins to get more more effective how do you how does India intend to manage the land grab or the spacecraft I mean you can build businesses out of this at scale um is there is if somebody wants to buy it what would you do buy the the call what would India do no I think if you look at it the ID system is entirely government-owned and they provide ideas or service they charge for the ID charge for the kyc so it's it's about it's 100 government Department the payment system is a non-profit company owned by the Banks under the regulator so that's not you know it's a non-profit the people who have applications on that could be for-profit players so you have people like Google and Walmart with phone pay and paytm and all and they compete in the market to get consumers and you know consumer can go from one to another you know click of a button so it's a competitive market on that side uh the data empowerment again is you use your own data there's no central body which controls anything it's just a set of protocols so there's nothing here which is for a private company to take over the company offers India you know something that's too big to refuse how will India how to interview with you if a private company wants to offer a better payment system they're welcome but you're saying what if you've got a government that decides to privatize it is that yeah what if what if you get a a new government decides to privatize it you know the currents structures are essentially creating non-profits we call them as National information utilities which are you know will always remain public utilities the question is interesting in the sense that in the 60s lots of Public Utilities people would never imagine would be privatized and lots of them did become privatized in the 80s and some poorly sure okay when I I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing I'm just simply saying that um the the sub that there is a big challenge that if the unmonetized benefit is so powerful somebody could offer India pricing country fuse yeah but I think the I think there's a universal acceptance that the value of these platforms in providing benefits to a billion people is so it obviously generates economic growth but also so socially and politically valuable that it's not related to me why you would do it yeah it's a short question on persuasion actually who was against Indian Jesus transformation who was a guest obviously inertia plays against it but uh was there any group of interest groups against it what were the obstacles are just bureaucratic and inertial obstacles well one and of course the uh the challenge was as I said how do we create a horizontal infrastructure which cuts across Departments of government that's that's really the tricky one uh there would have been some interest groups but they were not a fully recognized that this was against their interest so that was an advantage in some sense and they were they were for different things there are different interest groups so it's not like one interest group so the the people who had an issue with ID and inclusion of like bank accounts and direct were once said the people who didn't want the say the payment system would be somebody else so it's not that there was the same set of uh people but the thing is to navigate through all this and make it happen I can't tell you more because the public forum uh very good yes my name is Prashant Mr evening fellow at Central cross College here in Oxford my question is that now that a lot of information has now been linked to aadhar and kyc's Etc have been joined together so what is the data security which you are providing here because it is a lot of data which is available and it could be yeah when the data is already there in the respective systems other does not have that data other is a pure ID system so when the banking system uses aadhaar to do a kyc the data remains with the bank when the healthcare system does it so this is what we mean as a Federated data architecture where it's not a panopticon collecting data in all in the middle it's just an ID system that used for verification and then it's up to the banks to have the data security which they would have had anyway with or without other and so on so I think the architecture is actually a very distributed Federated way to have the data so that there is no data captured in one location sorry you've got did that answer your question yes but just to follow up on that was that we do see a lot of digital scams coming up now I mean I think we have to be constantly uh guarded against cyber security issues we have to be fishing the more easy you make technology more likely somebody will you know do some fishing and convince someone to do the wrong thing so all those are risks are definitely there you have to deal with it are we are we building up something on that that is yeah I think so I mean are you saying is it perfect I'm not so sure but definitely it's it's uh it's it's pretty decent excuse me excuse me yes well shoulder Oxford internet Institute uh you mentioned AI for a bar art but um could you talk a little bit more about AI in India and what I have in mind is um you're presumably following the prime minister's thoughts on this does he have a strategy for AI for India are the particular business opportunities that you see in the coming years are there any particular companies or does the fact that there's English language so much used in India does that with these language models does that have particular opportunities do you think for India going forward well I I think the number of areas where AI is being used already even before generative AI came along uh the AI for balance has been running for one and a half years and building all the AI for language translation in 20 to Indian languages and anybody can use it a startup can use the name we can use it uh the other system actually uses AI for liveness detection so when you do an Adan authentication and you do a face Authentication checks that it's a live person and not a photograph and so all that is AI based all our tax systems use AI for compliance management to make sure that tax fraud is reduced so there's a lot of actual use of AI at large scale a private sector is beginning to use AI though I don't have I don't know how much is the penetration of that now with generative AI also I think there's a huge opportunity both in terms of uh information reasoning and all that for example one of the applications which has been built recently which in fact Satya nadala keeps showcasing is we combine AI for bharatus language AI with chat gpt's reasoning AI and fed it all like data that you know all the rules for for Farmers so farmer on his mobile phone in Hindi can ask some question which gets converted into English using the language AI the question is asked of charge GPT which gives the answer gets translated back and is uh and his work is spoken to the person so he doesn't have to be doesn't have to be you know literate he just has to be able to speak and that's quite powerful so I think there are many such things that are happening now which is applying this at scale to making information accessible to people in their own languages and another thing which we are working on is how do we use AI in learning to improve language fluency for people for kids because one of the challenges is how do we improve people's fluency in their mother tongues and in English that will all be using learning AI he'll be in for anything that will help large-scale development to happen thank you yes my name is I'm a doctorate student here at the VST so my question is a little bit follow-up to the Alia question um when you were rolling out UPI did you encounter the politics of identity politics of identity sorry UPI sorry as you rolled out Epi you mean by the intentions or people are saying that you know like this kind of group doesn't belong I mean this this you can't issue identity to this particular segment of population no foreign we had to make it extremely inclusive so we we uh a number of things we did one was of course it was an ID for a person it was not about with any Resident was eligible to get the ID and uh even homeless people could get an ID if they just said my address is under the bridge you know so it was really designed to be super inclusive and we use technology to ensure that somebody didn't enroll twice what happens in many systems is that we put a lot of barriers at the front end and therefore make it difficult to get in and then once they get in it's it's you know nothing can be done we've flipped it around and made it very easy to enter the system produce backend technology to ensure that there was no duplication so which are flipped around use technology the back end to remove duplication and use the ease of use of the front end and we build a system that could enroll one and a half million people a day and did it have a kind of equalizing function yeah yeah yeah yeah of course do you think is your yeah no absolutely I think whether uh you're a billionaire or whether you're just a farmer you both have only one ID yeah right yeah at the back hi my name is Julian I'm a research fellow at Oxford University and I've been working quite a bit on India recently in the UPI more specifically and uh we've seen that as you describe UPI has generated a huge growth of the platform economy India with a lot of players plugging into this infrastructible Plumbing to describe phone P PTM but I would argue that this has essentially created very much of a new Urban growth with a lot of tech companies uh flourishing in cities like Bangalore that you know I guess better than anyone and you you've been saying that this new ID system or the UPI system will help the financial sector for instance reach out to underserved markets but I'm wondering is um are we witnessing the sort of uh the transformation of urban India where uh Tech is going to help Urban people especially in the tech center create new market create new growth regime but is it not going to also increase this gap between rural India and urban India in the edge of the tech economy if you look at the transaction patterns and I think uh phone pay actually publishes the data and a database called pulse it's across the country it's not particularly the big cities maybe not be as high but certainly it's used everywhere and uh so we have enough data on the geographic spread of these transactions but what is important so I think you will see both Urban rural small town everything but what is important is that now those for example the vegetable vendor who takes UPI payments is more comfortable taking UPI payments than taking cash because she thinks it is safer because the end of the day she doesn't have a cash sitting with her which can be extorted from her or stolen from her so I think the people who need it most are embracing it which is why there are 300 million people using it now what they will experience next is now using their digital footprint they will get I get access to loans and today they pay a very high amount of interest on the loans they get to buy the vegetables every morning so ultimate end game is if the small Trader can get access to credit on a daily basis do you think the financial system in India is uh willing enough to adopt this new risk type no because as long as I mean if you can give a loan using a digital footprint and you have a mechanism for getting it back why not it's it's one more opportunity because earlier without technology you only gave loans to big big guys because that's you could only assess their credit risk and small people because the transaction costs are very high and you didn't have data to assess the risk you didn't give loans so what this is doing is opening up credit markets to underserved communities and individuals so that will actually lead to much more broad-based economic growth that's our thesis anyway you talked about language mission in India and we see that you know in the world I think more than 60 of the internet is in English language and India accounts for a large population but [Music] have that much of chunk of our languages there so uh you know like now you know have we have do are we generating any kind of mechanisms to be able to create that knowledge resource in in the uh you know local languages in those 22 national languages or is it that we need to fall back on English only and double up through that look the tools exist what we're building is tools right building the capability to translate 22 Indian languages now it's up to different sectors to apply it in their sector and convert Knowledge from English to those languages they can do that very easily for example this technology is being used by Indian judicial system to convert uh all judgments and witness statements in nine Indian languages so suddenly all their Legal Information is coming out in different Indian languages so it's up to different sectors to implement it what we're providing is a set of Open Source AI tools which anybody can use for example that are there it's English keyboards that we have but this is you can do voice translations you don't you need to have keyboards that's what the language is it'll allow you document translation um you know I think we are not solving the hardware problem in Samsung so that I'm assuming that the keyboard will be there and with touch screens you don't really need keyboards in that sense so so I think those are all entry issues and uh but also it can read handwritten documents so today for example uh you can take a a witness statement which is written in Hindi and using this AI you can read it do a character recognition and make it make it Hindi and then convert it also so all those are getting sorted out with these so but somebody has to do it these are all tools it's up to different sectors to adopt it which we hope will happen hello uh my name is vibhuti I work at the babatnik school as a case writer um one issue with ID systems in a country uh like India is that people can have different uh names or ages or details on different forms of documents uh and those inconsistencies have the potential to have their application for some form of welfare uh rejected especially uh in like rural parts of the country if a particular population is marginalized or uh living in extreme poverty uh how do you design a system that has the capacity uh to be flexible uh and account for those kinds of on-ground inconsistencies okay we have 1.3 billion people on it people can enter with any name they want but once you enter with that name that's your name so it's not that you know because you only have one ID right you only you have only one ID so people can choose their name when they enter and that becomes the name for life or if they can go to court and then say my name is James so after that that ID is used by them everywhere so it's that's not a issue I mean like think about it when people went to America in the 19th century they went from all over the world they went from Ireland and Poland and whatnot and they all landed at the Statue of Liberty and they had a very long unpronounceable name from Eastern Europe and the guy there said no from Livonia or Mark Wiseman or whatever that's it right so what's the name a name is what so when you entered the new world of America you you got a new name similarly here when you enter the digital world you start with the name you can start with whatever name you want but then you have that name in the system that's it and my wife grew up in the same small town that you did in karwar in fact and my question is while we are growing up did you have a vision that you would achieve something very safe this week so take us back to the 12 year old Nandan nilikani what did the 12 year old Nandan nilakani aspire to read one more book and what might have you been reading at that time I know okay so things literally I mean obviously English literature for kids or non-fiction another voracious reader in those days there was nothing else there was no TV there's no mobile phone there was no tick tock and and when did you when did you begin your journey into the computer industry that's why I went to IIT and I graduated from there and there was only job which didn't require any special skills so so I chose that right yes so uh there's absolutely no problem with the security of the other data collection and storage part but most of the Departments authenticate the other data but keep a parallel data with them so they know that it's other authenticated I don't see much of other words also being established so this when the Departments interchange things so they refer to do it offline but that's actually not and also now you have a concept of what's called virtual other ID where you don't give the other number you give a a tokenized version of it and you can use that everywhere but it's not used enough activities even after these many years of adopting this can be well I think I think uh you know I think the other core system is all safe as you know but I think we have to educate people who use it to also have the same levels of security well I think it's important a lot is there only a is there only a management solution to that it's not a technological solution I mean it's there's a yeah I mean there's a I mean it's legally not allowed so that's one one part of it and the technological solution is to go to complete tokenization so that you don't use the ird but getting a number out itself is complex telling people now we're going to have a tokenized version of the number is even more complex so I think that will take some time to see print as a practice so when we talk about tokenization my name is Shelly I am achieving fellow here and I work in team Tech space back in India so when we talk about tokenization uh there has been a lot of talk about AI but I think we have forgotten blockchain's capability also in terms of integrating it with the credit system the finance system and the data how do you see that Fanning out like coming future in India where where the lending and the credit part can also be associated with the banking system and uh and people are having different identity rather than civil score maybe a token or a social identity where they they can be known just on the basis of their digital identity whether they can be given a credit or not necessarily agree with blockchain right so so I think the way it works is that there's something called the data empowerment architecture which has an entity called the account aggregator the account aggregator is somebody who is regulated by the central bank and acts as what we call as a consent manager so it's think of it as open banking on steroids the consent manager sits between for on behalf of a consumer orchestrates the data for them so if I want a loan I go to my consent manager my account I can say get my bank statement from bank X get my social media details from Twitter get my tax returns from the tax system or get my insurance premium paid from the system I can go to disparate databases and get data which the account aggregator does on my behalf and it does this in real time so I can get it like assemble this from four five sources and each of them signs and encrypts the data and gives it to you to the person you want to get the loan from and then they are given specific consent to decrypt that and use that data to make a credit assessment so this allows you at population scale to give people access to credit or whatever they want follow-up question what would be the policy and regular regularly fill that's already done it right there's a whole uh architecture regulation RBI allowed this there are eight license providers there is a protocols that have been published so it's already in place and you can go to an organization called sahamati which is uh it's a website family.org or something so where they have all the rules of this game and and so in practice do the account aggregators sell everything can't read the data right they're only a pass through it's encrypted and digitally signed through them so they can't see it sorry I meant the person that they send it to they there's a What's called the consent artifact which specifies what they can do with the data and they can use it for one transaction keep it for one week whatever that's specified because if they violate that then they are liable to be not in the system so that's the risk they take right and is that happening what's happening yeah people being kicked out of the system because they're violating the right now it's maybe doing about eight million transactions so not yet but I'm sure but I'm saying there are enough there are checks and balances for that I mean this is far more robust than anything else in terms of financial data my name's Rohan I work in engineering on energy policy in India and energy analytics basically uh I speak up a little bit oh sorry um of my questions uh you mentioned literacy and I was wondering how does this new digital transformation can help uh provide more accessible and affordable education to people in rural parts of India where teachers and or schools might be a scarce resource yeah so that's actually what the government did with the deeksha program which was rolled out especially uh in the pandemic where they made uh content uh they made it possible for digital content to be widespread also what India has done is that it's QR code at all its textbooks so we India prints about 600 million textbooks a year in the public sector Public Schools and in those each textbook every topic is has a QR code with it so they are approximately 20 QR codes per textbook that means that 12 million QR codes out there which are readable and anyone and now there's architecture anybody can build an application and they can use this as an address to show some content on solar system or whatever the topic is so actually the infrastructure is there for getting this out the thing is the devices are not there and it's more that issue because they're only about 700 million smartphones in India and many people don't have smartphones and even families that have smartphones if there's a competition for that resource because you know because you have only one phone so the you know the maybe the the manual house is working with it then you can't use the phone so there's some there's a lot of it's more access issues the technology in place to deliver any content in any language to anyone uh very easily you know that the infrastructure but one option for that is about maybe these customer access centers where people can go and use a common shared device around yeah sorry I have a question around um you know informal firms trying to access Credit informal businesses trying to access Credit through you know this digital Revolution so for example if there is a small street vendor as in when they have a digital footprint you could potentially you know easily provide access to credit but how do you get to that first step so if is there a lot of government subsidy needed to bring a lot of these informal businesses in the system because at onset you don't have any information about their credit history so is that a challenge is there a lot of willingness from the government to subsidize this I think what's happening is um individuals and businesses are getting or on onboarding into the system uh through uh because they they need it for their work right so everybody gets an ID then they use the ID to get a bank account then they use ID to get a mobile connection then they use UPI to start receiving payments because they have the bank account then there's some company which has provided them this service so they know that this particular vendor has sold you know a thousand rupees a day of vegetables or whatever because the data is there and that person also buys the vegetables digitally pays for that so that you know what they have sold and what they're buying and then they can then share that data to get credit so it's like a step-by-step Journey I mean it's still early days on this lending thing it's not yet reached that but the ultimate end game is every small business will be able to use the data in real time and get credit in small amounts like a daily credit because what this does is it one it gives you scale right billion people and all that but it also allows you for small transaction size and for small time size so you can get 100 rupee loan per day per person so then once that then that creates the momentum to get credit to everyone and also an incentive to join the formal economy we now have an incentive to join the formal economy technology officer for the UK government um my question is that so it seems that the the order store is one of the success of hitting that 600 million um identities enrollment in five years unlocked confidence that these digital public infrastructures could be built at scale so my question is when you're designing order were other digital Public Services like UPI things in view at that point was it a case of solving identity first and then figuring out what's the next thing and what's the next thing yeah I think the ID project was conceived in the government in 2006 and I joined in 2009. it was not necessarily meant to be a digital ID but since we were there we made it a digital ID and at that time it was just that you get that done get account bank account opening then get the mobile connection done and get did it cash transfer done these were the big things we had to do and UPR was only conceived in 2013 and implemented in 2016. so there was a four five year lag between the two ideas and UPI was done by npci which is a non-profit company I'm an advisor to them and so they had worked with aadhar on the direct benefit transfer so we already knew how they knew how to implement new technology so they were able to make the leap forward and incidentally all this Tech is built on open source software so it's very high high volume low cost open source technology yes hi my name is Arun so I don't live in Britain I'm actually traveling from California on holidays with my family here I have a compliment on a drive we're a popular tourism destination here that's true that's true place I'm just taking a train it's wrong even to Oxford so UPI is brilliant but I have a gripe and I think I probably speak for some British or American going to India and trying to get some coconut water from the vendor and I take my Visa card out and they look at me like I'm from some Stone Age you know so I don't think so how how does India plan to make sure that we are not left out in America [Laughter] it's clearly a high priority for you by the way this has been solved you can when you land at the airport take money off your credit card and put it into a UPI wallet and then pay from the wallet so it's already done CIO or anyone any any area any well they initially launched it for any citizen of a G20 country which is most people here anyway but yes actually frankly it's it'll ultimately be coming so you will land in the airport you open a UPI wallet transfer money from your car to the wallet and then pay from the wallet to the to the coconut vendor they want to know you're from America [Applause] associating that with my Airtel number that I use so just traveling on gwr and I was paying somebody in India actually keeping some English tea and you know that's really really great problem solved um next question there was one here Flavia and I'm a lecturer here at this school so I think I'm going to talk a little bit about social protection or social welfare um so you mentioned that having this Plumbing in place is very important and critical for for expanding the social protection so what would you say to other countries were you know how did it help convince governments to expand social protection um is it a plumbing enough well see this project when it was conceived was also when more and more uh social protection programs were being launched so you had the uh pension plan for old age pension and Widow pension you had the nrega for unemployment work and so on so this Plumbing came in handy to address that and then the plumbing was designed to be agnostic to the program so anybody could use the plumbing and it'll just it just make a list of beneficiaries and you could use it right and then the state governments realized that this was a very efficient Plumbing for them to deliver their social protection benefits with their branding on it it helped you know politically also so I think everybody sort of caught on to that thing and then of course during the pandemic it was used for 160 million beneficiaries so totally in the last 10 years about 210 billion dollars has been transferred through these Plumbing pipes we also it was also used for uh energy subsidies so you know India has about 150 million people who buy cylinders liquid liquefied petroleum gas cylinders so earlier the price of the cylinder was subsidized but it was not visible so 900 rupees cylinder would be sold at 600 rupees and there was a lot of Fraud and diversion because people would bite at 600 then give to the restaurant at 900 and all that so that was fixed by unbundling the subsidy from the price so now you you buy a cylinder for 900 rupees and you get a 300 rupee cash subsidy in your bank account so effectively pay 600 but through unbundling and why that's important is that now the cylinder business can be a market business so it can be sold at market price the same thing can be done and the other benefit of this is that you can tomorrow if you decide that rather than giving the 300 rupee subsidy to a hydrocarbon you want to give it to solar you can just switch it because of the cache so I think the Strategic value of unbundling the subsidy from The Price is very important and that's par what's been done design of this product yeah so you can do that for electricity subsidies here for example you know you had a gas subsidy I don't know how you gave it around but you probably reduce the price of the gas whereas this is a keep the market price but give the subsidy to those who deserve it in the bank account I keep expecting a question from Nigel Shadwell that I'll come back to you yes my question is uh more broad like uh do you think we can have some sort of a universal identity too fancy area but as we go like digitally more and more we are seeing this problem of our artificial identities like ports and maybe there are some more to come in the future but at the same time the private players in the market like the big techs they already have more data about nearly everyone in the world who access Internet uh than any government so do you think it's possible like for the the globally the global is still the governments to come together and make some the minimalistic idea of some basic identities for all the people so that that can also help technology a lot of Technology problems obviously governments have to agree there's Sovereign number we can have 80 billion numbers we can have the whole world on it hahaha that's a joke [Laughter] very good yes hi I'm a research fellow in Department of primary care it's a very good example of how digital transfer transformation is happening but my question is today do you do you see in future this transformation is translating in health sector because health is Health in India is like such a complex model and we don't have this kind of system in the head do you think is it possible like it's happening uh the national health authority operates in the one of the world's largest Insurance schemes and it has about 400 million people on it all entirely digital and they also have architecture for electronic health records that can be portable and they have an architecture for interoperable services so I could do uh ask for a tele consultation from any app and get it from any doctor so a lot of this infrastructure is being put in place but it's I think scaling it up will take some more time but yeah there's a whole architecture for health I listen to your example back in the day Tim berners Lee and I were charged to open up data in the UK and the open data work and we established many good things but on the way there was always this imagination that we'd have and ask us one service that government digital service would provide a powerful identificatory framework for the for the UK um in the end we did get to promote open banking which is kind of Europe's haltering attempt to give some of the subset that you have with them with the India stack so my question is what advice would you give the UK to try it by the UK you're not done in the county the notion of unified identity assignments assist although we provide and carry around many variants of them there is no sense of the network effect you would get now you know in a sense you were able to LEAP generationally um the incumbency we have here so I'm just interested in what your seats well I think uh you have to create a use case first of all it has to be a voluntary ID and you have to create sufficient use cases for people to embrace it and I think that that's how I would not do it mandatory of forcing and all that and one example is uh you know uh this uh you know when you enter the US for example they have that system for inter I don't know what it's called global global entry now global entry does face recognition and all and every time I go to the US the lines in global entry are longer than ever so people are quite willing to have their ID and do Global face recognition because they can enter the country faster so when there is a benefit then you you know people always stayed off privacy with benefits so I think we need to create a compelling use case of this ID and also I think I think the ID uh I think the ID antipathy is slightly irrational because argument is privacy in this country we have five to seven million CCTV cameras it's about one for every 11 people which is taking photographs of you and doing face recognition without even knowing it so then what are you talking about or you are 23 million people on tick tock so I think this is the idea is form of benign and then most other things but if it's voluntary if you can attach some compelling value maybe fast track on the train or whatever it is then people will will embrace it still worry around in the middle what if you were to seriously decentralize and kind of take an architecture a solid architecture redecentralized back to the individual is that is that a deeply Federated model would that be yeah I think we can build a decentralized Federated ID system in the UK which built on to get that idea you go with an existing ID so you don't don't any Biometrics you go with the passport or a budget I I think it's entirely difficult and certainly the uh the data architecture we have is agnostic to the sector it's not just for banks Health Care records education skills the works I have a an online question from one of our alumni blessing ajimoti who is working on the Nigeria digital capabilities program and she asks um other than access to loans what are the other use cases which are emerging from digital ID perhaps that you didn't start out with so it's just picking up on this you need a strong use case what are the other use cases do you think well I think one thing we should remember here that there's a lot of Market Innovation happening in top of all this so people are building all kinds of applications people are building Personal Finance Management applications on top of this infrastructure people are building for example the best Innovation one of the best Innovations I've seen is something called a sound box which speaks up the money received and what happens is that it improves the productivity of a small shop because a small shop or in Bangalore where these things called darshinis where you get idlis and dosas so uh it's you know you can if earlier the guy had to he or she had to give the Dosa and take the cash and became complicated now he hands over the Dosa and say pay 100 rupees and the person walks to a box with the QR code he puts 100 rupees and that speaks up saying 100 rupees received so the guy is listening oh he said the money has come in so he's able to double his productivity who is not handling money now who would have thought of this Innovation so I think the idea being in all this is to create infrastructure at scale open it up with apis and then allow Market innovators to build on top of that let me finish with um a question not about global IDs but about the global reach of the India example because you're not turning your gaze to the rest of the world and to countries who you think could really benefit from a more inclusive economy if they had this public digital infrastructure and I guess the question that that will keep arising is is there something particularly Indian about the success of adhar and if there is what's that and what do other countries need to pay heed to well I think obviously there are certain set of circumstances that came together which made this happen and uh you know so at that time they were all unknown unknowns in some sense so that's but that start that's solved so I think today the technological risk of doing this is has diminished dramatically because we know it can be done if we've done for a billion people you can do it for 100 million people right so I think that's done so I think there's an opportunity here for people to take this and many of these things are also open source software Solutions so the tech risk has been Tech risk or Tech access is out but ultimately it's about countries their leadership like in India whether it's Prime Minister Modi or foreign they all get it they're all tech savvy and they're all digital first so you need that kind of uh Focus From the leadership uh you need enough people in the system who are capable of implementation so there are some of those capacity issues that have to be tackled but yeah it's not a big deal so and you've been incredibly successful helping make that happen helping explain to politicians as you said state level City level National level across India so what's the pitch if you know we we as a the blavatnik school we enter into July teaching short courses of leaders from the public sector from around the world what's the pitch I mean it's a win-win right because here's something which doesn't cost that much money it improves governance it allows you to deliver Dynamic benefit for people for which you can take credit so why would you do that brilliant um will you all join me in thanking Nandan nilikani for a wonderful Frank uh conversation that takes us from the kind of personal to the National and the global thank you Nandan thank you [Applause]

Channel: Blavatnik School of Government

Views: 233,249

Keywords: Oxford, Public Policy, University of Oxford

Id: YpZkL1LkLFQ

Length: 71min 49sec (4309 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 15 2023