Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In 2023, Nandan Nilekani, the man behind Infosys, Aadhar and India Stack, made a presentation on India’s digital transformation that has grown viral in recent times.   In 2008, we had the world’s most “unbanked” population, i.e., folks without bank accounts. History shows that the fraction of the population with bank accounts is a function of how it rich it is. By 2017, 80% of the population had bank accounts despite the per capita GDP still being low. (For comparison, 80% coverage is usually achieved when a country’s per capita GDP is around 10 times ours.)   How did that happen? Two critical factors were the dropping prices of smartphones and the even sharper drop in the price of Internet data costs. In turn, those two factors caused India’s digital payments to take off. The convenience of digital payments further drove the rise of bank accounts. Which then set off another virtuous cycle – subsidies and cash benefits could be transferred directly to recipients wit...

The popularity of the Internet and social media has triggered a reaction from many, albeit still a very small minority, who have made “digital detox”, “disconnection”, and “unplugging” buzzwords in their criticism of the virtual world we live in. Nathan Jurgenson took a look at this reaction and wrote this is what the naysayers feel: “Once upon a pre-digital era, there existed a golden age of personal authenticity, a time before social-media profiles when we were more true to ourselves, when the sense of who we are was held firmly together by geographic space, physical reality, the visceral actuality of flesh.” But he calls this view of how the world was pre-Internet as “fairytale”: “ According to this popular fairytale, the Internet arrived and real conversation, interaction, identity slowly came to be displaced by the allure of the virtual — the simulated second life that uproots and disembodies the authentic self in favor of digital status-posturing, empty...