Digital public infrastructure is a massive global revenue opportunity for India. And it should not be the preserve of the govt controlled sector. It is great to be govt supported but it may be completely non optimal if it were to be govt controlled. What is even more dangerous is if some parts are controlled not by the Indian govt but by a foreign government.
My journey on digital India started with a YouTube video of my batchmate Sanjay Jain. This was seven years ago.
I then met up with him in September 2019 in New York. Sanjay started his journey as a part of the core group at UIDAI with Nandan Nilekarni. He was then part of Bharat Inclusion Fund and was one of the key evangelists for the India stack which he has codenamed as JaM in the video.
India’s digital payment story has been crafted by a section 8 company called NPCI and overseen by the central bank. The techies have done a great job, both at UIDAI and at NPCI as well at the various iit alumni startups that made this happen. The list of startups is large – pine labs, Innoviti, mobipay, razorpay, Bharatpe, anytime transaction machines, Batua tech, mobikwik …. It is a very long list.
But the central bank has been negligent beyond description. Right below their very eyes CIBIL became a subsidiary of Trans Union – a 100% non indian company. Today I read that Preqin Singapore which has access to the entire benchmarking data of the indian aif industry has been taken over by Blackrock. A while ago, the largest pe trusteeship co which has access to the minutest details of the PE industry was taken over by the Vista group. Perfios who seems to have access to the entire sbi data base seems majority foreign controlled.
Any my friend and guide, Sanjay Jain now carries a visiting card which says Director – Digital Public Infrastructure of Gates Foundation. This is almost like Homi Babha joining Al Qaeda to share best practices.
India has a great opportunity to lead the world in digital public infrastructure. But letting foreign entities take over our institutions or key people is a disaster in the making. What is it that these foreign cos are required in India. India and Indians run all kind of massive databases. Why do we need Trans Union to own CIBIL.
Our central bank is run by a iit topper Sanjay Malhotra. He is anything but lacking in intellectual horsepower. We are already seeing some very decisive and beneficial moves under his leadership.
The digital rupee is one of them.
But when we go forward at speed, we need to keep our eye on the rear view mirror as well. The Aadhar card was conceptualised around 2005. Most of the hardware was done by our friend the late Mahendra Pratap during his HCL days.
However, this is all old stuff. A generation has gone by. In 20 years, we have been through two generations of cyber technologies. The Aadhar car is just a number, not a chip. It is no longer safe.
Aadhar needs an upgrade now.