Digital India has been called a moonshot project that draws together the best human and private-public capital to achieve a goal that was previously thought to be impossible: Total transformation of society.

Digital India, based on Aadhaar, focuses on three fundamental areas -- access to digital infrastructure as a utility, services on demand, and digital empowerment of citizens through access to information. With more than a billion UIDs and growing, Aadhaar is the world’s largest database.

It has captured the imagination of the people of India. Besides the government, private enterprises, including some places of worship, have begun to use Aadhaar to prevent fraud and facilitate transactions. For example, a Hindu temple in Almora, Uttarakhand, makes Aadhaar cards mandatory for getting married. Temple priest Hari Vinod Pant told The Times of India, “There have been instances when couples who came to the temple were found to be underage and it turned out they had eloped to get married. There have also been cases of Nepalese underage girls coming here to get married. So the temple committee took the decision of checking Aadhaar cards before agreeing to conduct the wedding.”

In a major reshaping of the public health system, Aadhaar numbers will be used as unique patient identifiers in a new electronic health records system. National identification numbers will be generated and assigned to all health facilities, beginning with public health facilities.

To encourage the use of Aadhaar, the Reserve Bank of India has asked banks to ensure that all new transactional cards, effective from Jan. 1, 2017, are also enabled to process payment using Aadhaar-based biometric authentication. Under the financial inclusion scheme, Jan Dhan, any Indian above 10 years who does not have a bank account can now open one in their name with an opening deposit of zero in any registered bank. Demonetization has awakened the mostly dormant Jan Dhan. Bill Gates of Microsoft is not the only foreign observer who believes that India will “move away from a shadow economy to an even more transparent economy.” The whole world is watching.

There have been concerns about the misuse of biometric data. Aadhaar uses the highest available public key cryptography with built-in tools to prevent meddling. Just like the US Military, Aadhaar uses layers of firewalls for data protection. Besides, Aadhaar databases are segregated. Segregation adds to security.

Entrepreneurs regard India’s digital venture as an extremely bold initiative. Jack Hidary, a senior advisor at Google X Labs, speaking at EmTech 2016: The Digital Future, called India a moonshot nation that is “going through a radical transformation the like of that we have never seen.” A moonshot, he said, is an initiative that aims to achieve a goal that was previously thought to be impossible because it attracts the best human capital and finance from long-term investors.

Sharad Sharma, co-founder of iSpirit, said at the conference, “India is entering a phase of innovation that is substantially different from what we have seen until now.” Aadhaar, he stated, will create other digital possibilities such as “the presence-less layer, which means I can open a bank account and establish who I am without doing in-person verification.” Aadhaar will enable millions of people to use their e-signs for paperless transactions. It has made possible the Unified Payments Interface, a debit card system that is a less expensive alternative to MasterCard and Visa.

With 650 million smartphone users, it is expected that within a year, mobile cash will become all-pervasive in India, especially when the “digital consent” becomes an operational and integral part of the cashless payment system. As reported in LiveMint, Sharma said, “We are data poor right now, but we are putting in place a new system to manage digital consent, so nobody can aggregate data about you without a digital permission token from you. This is going to be the largest country-scale system in the world -- a techno-legal solution… a very modern approach, which is a techno-legal sort of solution to manage privacy.”

While the government uses Aadhaar to ensure the delivery of benefits and services to residents, albeit with a special focus on the underprivileged, business enterprises are developing Aadhaar-based apps for the nation’s burgeoning e-commerce. That is drawing Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and others to collaborate and compete with Indian enterprises to reach rural India. Consider this: In 2014 Jeff Bezos of Amazon invested $2 billion, and in June 2016 he pledged another $3 billion, to build a logistics network to cover the entire country to have a major stake in the online market expected to grow to $110 billion in the coming decade, according a Wall Street Journal report.

Women in India lag far behind men on social media, e-commerce and mobile connectivity. Parents discourage girls from having smartphones. They fear that young girls might go astray or do something that might shame the family. For their own self-interest, it is important for IT companies, therefore, to educate people and remove their fear of smartphones, especially by women so that they can fully participate in opportunities created by Digital India. Once men see that women are using smartphones for socially useful purposes, their hostility will diminish. That is the hope for Digital India: Give every woman a smartphone and see India transform.

By Narain D Batra

Narain D Batra is professor of communications at Norwich University. –Ed.

(Asia News Network/The Statesman)