Coronavirus Part 23, Improving Together, Transformation Through Information Technology

               These days it has been like playing with fire. I need to be extremely cautious and evade any danger. It is about being in the situation of disabling the public and I had to provide some fodder to enable them. It is about giving them something to make myself bearable. When I am mingling in a group, people can easily feel me as someone too much to handle. My problems are solved, I am writing weekly posts, working in a good job and all additional factors going my way have only contributed to the moments of rendering havoc on the public. It is like I am living and I am alone living at the expense of everyone else. The juggernaut has reached the huge proportion and the point where, if a person like me has to live a good life, it has to disable many others. If they have to be enabled then I need to get disabled but not all of us enabled at the same time. This is how the equation is working. 

              This year it has reached greater proportions and the lockdown has increased the severity. To put it in perspective, I had a great year so far at an individual level but the pandemic has wreaked havoc on everyone else. While I am doing good and progressing well, the country has collapsed and going through a contracting GDP. In a sense, I have enabled myself and disabled the nation. The output at the macro level has certainly fallen. The atmosphere of inducing an interest and passion for living and a drive to set ambitious goals and achieve them seems to be absent at large. There is no favourable climate to drive the people from within.  I am afraid how it goes into the future. But I would like to win and make the fellow countrymen win as well. I would like to progress, realize the purpose of my life and make everyone lead a purposeful life as well. In short, I would like to step ahead together and not alone.

               If there is anyone who is unaffected by this pandemic it is me and my brethren in IT field. We continued working from home uninterruptedly and did not take even a single day off. Neither we are down nor our applications are down when there is a black out in most other areas. This speaks of the reliability and the need to embrace IT more in the essential operations of the state or country. Not just that, the role of IT is to provide financial inclusion of the poorest in the growth story of the country by attacking two-fold on the poverty in any country - by serving financially challenged persons through leveraging the systems, applications and by providing employment to financially challenged persons. Simply, you need to employ the poor and serve the poor. This is the true value addition of IT to any country. This is how you stay relevant by addressing the modern day challenges.

              I would like to delve briefly upon some huge programs which have transformed the trajectory of India by banking on IT. Few of those path breaking programmes initiated in India by virtue of the technology in the last ten years are –

 1. Aadhar: This provides a unique 12 digit number to every citizen of India to establish identity. It is the world's largest biometric ID system and a central database of the citizens. Many of the welfare schemes use this to establish identity and ensure the intended recipient is benefitted. 

2. Streamlining of MGNREGS: While the Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme is rolled in 2006, the streamlining of the programme occurred in 2015 when the government harnessed the benefits of technology. This included the implementation of Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) and linking it to Aadhar linked payments. It leveraged the Jan Dhan, Aadhar and mobile (JAM) trinity to credit wages directly into MGNREGS workers’ bank accounts, thereby reducing scope for delays in payment. This is among biggest of the schemes in the world benefitting unemployed rural work force. 

3. Jan Dhan Yojana: This is the program intended to open bank accounts for the bottom 50%. Till 2015, only 50% of the population has an account in bank. After 6 years of launch, 40 crore people opened accounts under this scheme meant for financial inclusion. Over 63% are from rural and 55% of this are women. Needless to say, IT has enabled the implementation of this most successful programme. 

4. Ayushman Bharat – Health Care Program:  A technology-enabled nationwide program led by the government of India, has brought to life the vision of a healthy and robust India where medical care is available and accessible for free to society’s least privileged. The Ayushman Bharat scheme empowers the poorest 40% in India’s population with quality secondary and tertiary healthcare by a funding of Rs 5 lakh offered to every such underprivileged family per year. The digital healthcare solution brings together central and state medical facilities to enrol citizens, empanel hospitals, process medical claims, generate auto approvals and detect fraud. The program connects 500 million to health care services and over 10 million are treated so far since the launch in 2018. This is by no means an easy task and greatly enabled by a transparent and seamless technology. 

5. Goods and Service Tax(GST):  The digitalization of tax regime in the country is a mammoth exercise. It is a largest tax application of its kind in the world. The system handled lakh of crores of rupees through its platform every month since its launch in 2017. Tax regime has become convenient by increasing compliance, reducing duplication and multiplicity of tax filings. 

6. Banking: All the public and private banks in the country have started to completely digitalize the back-end and front office operations of banks in the last decade, significantly improving the ease of offering its services and helping to penetrate every nook and corner of the country. The manual reams of documentation and slew of processes which limited the services to a limited few has exploded by going online. They are able to scale up tremendously and the timely introduction of government schemes have helped reach the most needy through its medium. 

7. India Posts: A connected network of 150,000 Post Offices makes it the largest ePostal Network in the World. This involved deploying an integrated ERP solution that caters to mail operations, finance and accounting, and HR functions, and connects its vast network of post offices which makes it a largest of its kind. An important objective of the transformation is to use the Department’s nation-wide reach to drive financial inclusion and accessibility of citizen services in remote areas.

8. Passport Services: I still remember how cumbersome it is to get the passport in the legacy mode of operations.  The entire system which was revamped at the turn of this decade made it easy to get the required service quickly. A scalable technology platform for 150 million citizens was developed, 88 facilitation centers in 63 cities are established and the platform serves office networking, core passport applications, and the citizen portal. The entire process has been simplified by the IT implementation.

                 The above are a few examples of how IT has enabled the surge of new India in just a decade. Working in this field provides an opportunity to serve the poor through our systems and salaries. The ultimate mission to realize the financial-equality and financial-inclusion across the world can be achieved by using IT as an instrument and tool. The above examples and much more need to be taken up in each and every country all over the world to spread the goodness that comes along with IT. In a country like India where people belong to diverse socio-economic strata, this technology has been a big boon in empowering the vulnerable groups. No one can envisage these programs, leave alone implementation without this powerful tool in their possession. The above are all worlds largest in terms of sheer numbers and size. What the country couldn’t contemplate for centuries, has been achieved in a decade by sheer performance and pace. 

                However, there is still distance to travel. The pandemic has exposed the poor man-management in the country. Just for instance, the migrants are not in accounts of any government. They do not count in their own state nor in the residing state. When the economy closed down, it is these poor migrants who suffered the most. The government is clueless with the count of migrant deaths. They did not get any immediate assured help from the government which did not have any mechanism to help. These poor labourers travelled hundreds of miles on foot and used all means to reach the home states when a simple timely help could have prevented the exodus. Animals are tagged and tracked but humans are not. This is where technology should pitch in and provide a mechanism to help them in their hours of distress.

                Every poor person should be mandatorily accounted for and a window to address all their grievances should be setup. There will be times of unemployment, low wages, ill-health, bad yield of crops, piling debts etc. These are the times which need to be captured and attended by providing monetary benefits with the help of technology. It will reduce the risk, improve the livelihood, reduce anxiety, fear for living and provides a valuable cushion to absorb the unbearable problems. It will make the country safe and great for the importance given to human rights and suffering. These will be the challenges in next decade as we march in the pursuit of serving the living Gods worldwide.

                Coming to the pandemic statistics, there are a total of 312.31 lakh infected cases worldwide and 9.68 lakh people dead. In the past week, 20.5 lakh new cases came up and 40 thousand passed away. The week has seen more than 20 lakh cases which is the highest number of cases registered in a week.  The number of cases in a week is still reaching the peak. Once again, a third of cases have been contributed by India which is recording highest number of daily cases and deaths. U.S., India, Brazil continue to be the major hotspots worldwide. The countries which have controlled few weeks back are also experiencing a second wave in this connected world. What a wrath this is upon the humanity. The nations across the world should declare it as a natural calamity and work with one another to limit the damage. There should not be any blame games since the virus is unpredictable and not many experts can gauge its behaviour.