The endless wait

Published On: September 1, 2016 01:00 AM NPT By: Hitesh Karki


Over the years we have been part of the system where big initiatives are announced with uncanny regularity

I was recently reading the book Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations, which provides good insights into how a country can become prosperous. Obviously, as the name suggests, the book is coauthored by two IT people, Nandan Nilekani and Viral Shah. Nilekani is the co-founder of Infosys while Shah is a PhD in Computer Science from University of California, both ‘geeks’ in some sense. Apparently, Nilekani had hired Shah while Nilekani was heading the Unique Identification Authority of India, which was tasked with distributing unique identification cards, with bio-metric data, to billion-plus Indians.

The project named ‘Aadhar’, which, in the words of Vijay Sathe, a Harvard Business School professor, is “the world’s most ambitious Id Project”. Nilekani, who has been listed among 100 most influential people in the world by TIME, calls it, “possibly the mother of all IT projects the world has ever seen”.

The most interesting part of this book: it’s easy-to-understand infographics. Each chapter picks up one issue, analyses the problem and proposes a solution. The reason I fell for this book is also simple: one, it proposes simple IT-based solutions to problems and second, the problems are so identifiable.

In one of the infographics, a pictorial shows a certain Ram Lal Singh from Madhya Pradesh, ‘travelling to the nearest bank’ using different modes of transportation. He starts from his home, from where he goes to the nearest bus station, which is a five-kilometer walk. This is followed by some 14 kilometers of bus ride to arrive at a bank branch. To make matters interesting, his journey does not end at the gate of the bank. He has to wait for two more hours in a queue before he finally reaches the teller and receives his salary of Rs 546, a month’s wage from ‘rural guaranteed employment project’ in India.

This little ordeal has already cost him 20 percent of his income, even before he could collect it, mostly in transportation and opportunity costs. But with the new unique identification card, Ram Lal now receives almost 100 percent of the money.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a seminar where one of our celebrated economists, Swarnim Wagle, was a keynote speaker. India’s unique ID card featured in his speech. He too echoed that Nepal somehow needs to figure out a way to implement a similar project, as our record at delivering money to target population is dismal. He mentioned that for every rupee spent by Nepal government barely 35 paisa reaches the intended beneficiary.

A couple of days ago I came across a somewhat similar situation while trying to get a police clearance report. In order to get this clearance, which is mandatory for those applying to work abroad, people have to spend three full days of their lives. There are also many other associated costs, incurred while travelling to police headquarters, payment of Rs 15 for a Rs-10 stamp and standing for hours in a queue. For those out of the valley, the cost is higher still. In essence, even though the government claimed that one could get a clearance with just Rs 10, in less than three days, the reality was starkly different. Ram Lal from MP now gets almost total sum that his government gives him, while we pay a couple of thousand rupees for a simple task that should have cost us no more than Rs 10.

The problem unfortunately does not end there. No one even acknowledges that there is a problem. One small online system could have solved the problem but nothing is done. I am sure by now you have a whole range of similar issues. So is it that everything is broken here? Is it really that nothing gets done? Not really.

Over the years we have been part of the system where different initiatives were announced with uncanny regularity. But they almost always come to a naught. A certain K P Oli best epitomized this practice. Every new prime minister talks of taking relationships with our neighbors to newer heights. But who would publicly declare that he would tilt towards one neighbor? 

When a new police chief was appointed, he told us citizens that he will have zero tolerance for hooligans and dons. The obvious inference was that police had turned a blind eye to crime till then. Similarly, the traffic police chief, as soon as he was appointed, announced that he would not spare anyone indiscriminately crossing lanes or disobeying zebra crossings. The obvious inference was that till his arrival you could give two hoots to those markings on the roads. 

The newly appointed minister of energy announced that electricity supply of all defaulters who had not paid their electricity bills would be summarily cut. This made those of us who dutifully paid our dues feel utterly stupid. The supplies minister announced that petroleum import disturbances are now thing of past and the NOC would not let black marketers off the hook. This, again, was a general acceptance that there is a thriving black market. 

More importantly, new Prime Minister Prachanda is heard talking about bringing back all Nepalis stranded abroad in various jails. He does not stop there. He says he will create a ‘situation’ whereby no one has to leave Nepal in search of work. He says he is working towards that goal, but he doesn’t tell us what he is doing or how. 

It’s been a while we have seen a mega-project take shape, something like Aadhar. The distribution of Aadhar ID cards is all set to change the course of India in coming decades because of its ability to include the financially marginalized. The project has been heralded as panacea for poverty eradication, by bringing into national mainstream the ‘excluded’ people who are, as the noted corporate strategist CK Prahalad would put it, at the bottom of the pyramid.

What have we got to look forward to? There is no big project in the pipeline. All we have are these idiosyncratic, attention-diverting, populist announcements. We all know these statements are hogwash and will not take us anywhere. Yet we continue to hope against the hope and somehow believe them. In other words, we are hoping for a miracle. 

hiteshkarki@gmail.com


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