Developing nations are both really lucky and unlucky with the internet. While they are able to take advantage of international assistance in leapfrogging previous technologies, they have to struggle with basic issues like electrification and education.
India acts as a wonderful case study. 96% of villages in India are electrified (although only 67% of households actually have access to power) as of October, 2015. This number has, of course, grown in the past year, and has led to a 34.8% penetration of the internet in India, a 30% increase YTD. Millions of middle class Indians have access to the internet.
On July 1st, 2015, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled Digital India – an initiative backed by major tech firms, both domestic and international, to bring India into the digital age, leapfrogging the analog technologies that Western nations were still transitioning out of straight into the internet age. This allowed PM Modi to tackle corruption and galvanize transparency. Good governance via good technologies.
One of the biggest and most innovative initiatives under the umbrella of Digital India was mygov.in. PM Modi uses this platform religiously to publicize government initiatives, post his bi-monthly radio addresses to the nation via SoundCloud, and request feedback and suggestions from every day citizens. The website hosts nationally recognized and valued referendums, though none with legal value, and has led to major reforms, including the recent banning of the ₹500 and ₹1000 notes, which was a suggestion from an average citizen. To increase transparency, the government also implemented attendance.gov.in, forcing 4.8 million public servants to biometrically identify when they arrived at work and when they left. This has had the effect of, at the very least, instilling fear in public servants, getting them to reduce absences.
Further digitization has been in pushing all government transactions online in an “Amazon-ification” of government purchases, including moving tenders and RFPs online. The entire system is moving towards transparency and clarity, with the PM advocating for a cashless society to tackle corruption even further.
The PM’s Office has also pushed the Aadhaar system, a giant online, biometric identification system for almost all Indians, that was first pushed by the previous government. This then leads to the big question of the century: is all of this digitization safe? With hundreds of millions of citizens’ information and biometric data online, a huge honey pot is just ripe for breaking into. So far, no large scale hack has been reported, but, with actors such as Pakistan and China in play, anything can happen. Ultimately, as always with software, the battle will be between efficiency and security.
Fascinating. Thank you for posting this information, Dhruv. It was a delight to have you in class this year. I hope you enjoyed it as much as Jim and I enjoyed teaching it.
By the way, you might pop over and read Beatriz’s last blog entry. She wonders how developing nations might move into technology and the Internet even when struggling to fund this move. I suggested that it had to be done in their own unique way, and not the way the U.S. did it. You have given some very powerful examples of exactly this. I bet she would benefit from reading your blog post this week.
Keep in touch!
Thank you, Dean Smith! I had a great time in the seminar and learned a lot!
Two terms that no one in the technology field likes to hear are “technical debt” and “legacy”. “Legacy” refers to all of the systems (both hardware and software) that already exist, and that can’t be changed without huge cost and disruption. Because of that, most new systems are required to interoperate with the legacy systems, which means that really new ideas and approaches are nearly impossible to introduce.
“Technical debt” is all of those things that you knew needed to be fixed before you ship a system, but decided to live with “for now”. It is like taking out a loan– you save time now, knowing that you will have to pay that time back in the future (with interest). “For now” often turns into “until I absolutely have to” which leads to work-arounds and strange processes that allow you to avoid the paid technical debt. But all of these work-arounds are themselves more technical debt.
What you describe in your blog is the ability of India (and other emerging nations) to avoid a lot of the legacy and technical debt that have piled up in places like the U.S. where we adopted the Internet early on. It can be a huge advantage, if you avoid the problems that earlier systems encountered. I have lots of concerns about the privacy implications of Aadhaar, for instance, but having a general identity and authentication system that everyone can trust would be a huge advantage (just think if we didn’t have to mess with Harvard Key because there was a national identity system we could just use).
There will be new problems in these systems, but hopefully they can be different than the old problems.
Thanks so much for all you added to the seminar– your point of view was distinct and amazingly valuable. I look forward to seeing you around…stay in touch.
Thank you so much for your analysis, Prof. Waldo 🙂 The seminar was a lot of fun!