Digitization Should be a Litmus Test of Intent

A few years back, I’d written about the talk that Nandan Nilekani, the man behind Aadhar, gave on the reasons for yet another ID at my office. In his book Imagining India, he has one section on digitization/electronification initiatives in India over the decades.

The first attempt to computerize the passport department in 1986 “got stuck in a quagmire of resistance from department officials”. That being the general attitude, most attempts in those days were “covert, backdoor operations”. The needle was moving, albeit very slowly…
-         Liberalization in 1991 brought out the need for easy ways to monitor our institutions. The Harshad Mehta scam brought matters to a head. The BSE and its brokers fought any digitization measures tooth and nail. Ok then, said SEBI, we’ll just create a new stock exchange, the NSE, which will be digitized from the get go. The NDSL was next and “demat” became the norm. All this increased investor confidence; which meant smaller investors started signing up; and more money was thus available for companies and the economy to tap into.
-         As the IT sector started blooming, the expertise to design and implement IT systems expanded. In 1993, the RBI made it easy for private banks to come up, and they were eager adopters of IT. It forced the public sector banks to follow.
-         In 2001, the electronic voting machine (EVM) was tried after a long gap. It wouldn’t allow successive votes to happen within 12 seconds. This made it impossible to stuff the ballots at one shot. Logging of timestamps also made it easy to spot when fraud might have happened:
“If we spot a series where votes were cast every twelve seconds, we simply cancel the result.”
-         The electronification of the Indian Railways had obvious benefits. And that was even before the Internet!
-         The Internet next allowed for online railways bookings, e-choupals allowed farmers to see crop prices and sell crops online.
-         Digitization of land records in places like Karnataka made fraud harder, and kickbacks smaller.

In recent times (this isn’t part of Nilekani’s book), we have gas subsidies being credited electronically. Which forces people to have a bank account. More people with accounts would be a step towards a cashless (or less cash) society, which also becomes a move against black money. Digital payment systems are taking root.

And yet, despite all the benefits of digitization, even today, we have the Mayawati’s and the Kejriwal’s who want to go back to the era of paper ballots! I sincerely hope that we fast become a nation that considers such steps to be so retrograde and corrupt that we reject outright any politician who advocates un-digitization or less digitization.

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarMarch 18, 2017 at 10:42 AM

    All election losers resort to fixing the poll by the other. Yes, what Mayavati and Kejriwal speak is, to quote from your earlier blog, "despicable".

    I understand that a BJP fellow had written a whole book with a foreword by LK Advani about the voting machines, portraying them as highly susceptible to fixing, in great many detail. That book came out before the Modi wave swept through. When asked, what about the points of the BJP's propaganda book, the spokespersons promptly and pompously announced, "All the defects of the electronic machine has been addressed and rectified!" Great :-)

    I wish you had mentioned in your blog also about BJP stand expressed in the book on the machines before they won the election. That would have make your argument appear totally impartial. If I mention it, I can't be sure at all how it will be taken.

    Many feared the machines around the time they were introduced. That is natural and proper. But not today. I would respect only those politicians who declare, "Let's ensure by every means that the voting machines will tamper free and their response totally error free too". It is also important more people from general public should believe in the same way about the machines, so that political-muck speak will reduce, knowing there are no takers. Machines can be made pretty trustworthy, even if by chance still some problems are there. It is in our hands.

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  2. Ramiah KumarMarch 18, 2017 at 11:36 AM

    By the way, apart from what I said by way of responding to the blog earlier, I would like to share some "yesteryear politics" about the voting machines. Any number of parties and politicians spoke against it, always pointing out the same thing: it may fix against me/us. I distinctly remember Jayalalitha demanding the paper version, long after such a possibility cannot be asked for. The machines had found a place already. She was one among many politicians who did politicking with voting machines.

    The truth is this: though the politicians keep dilly dallying, and they are going to continue doing so too, we all know (and strangely all the politicians too know) that the probability of fraudulent poll fixing is much higher in the paper version! Only thing is that, if it is done on the ballot paper box, there are higher chances of exposure too. For such exposures, others like scam exposures etc. media (which has its evil side too, no doubt) helps in bring them to people's notice. Unfortunately, if electronic machines get tampered, then it can be done a lot more stealthily. One needs higher intelligence systems to expose them.

    Fortunately, the Election Commission acts without political outmaneuvers in India to a very, very large extent. By repeatedly attacking such organizations, our politicians lower the caliber of our democracy. Instead, we should make the Election Commission work out near foolproof methods of vote count, fully utilizing high technologies. We trust our banks with electronic technologies, we trust our IT department better with digital system in place. We can completely trust our Election Commission too.

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