It seems outlandish that Sony’s iconic gaming console PlayStation 3
1, Hallmark greeting cards
2 and smartphones should have anything to do with India’s social welfare programmes. But they do. Technology has an amazing ability to overturn stereotypes and open up new possibilities by meshing together disparate things. A standard birthday card that plays the familiar tune when you open it has a chip that has more computing power than all of the Allied and Axis powers had in 1945. Theoretical physicist and a strong advocate of the string theory Michio Kaku
3 in his book Physics of the Future: How Science
Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 21004 says Hitler, Roosevelt and Stalin would have killed for that chip. But we just discard it. An average smartphone has more computing muscle in it than the NASA mission that put men on the moon in 1969. The power inside a Rs15,000 Play Station is more than the 10 million dollar American supercomputer Cray X-MP 24
5 of the 1990s that was used by the military establishment to design nuclear weapons. All these incredible advancements have been made possible because chips are getting faster, cheaper and smaller all the time. It also means that chips are getting embedded in the unlikeliest of inanimate and animate objects, from plastic cards, furniture, cars to birds, apes and human beings. Amidst all this lies an Indian story of what could be, and just as easily, also a story of what could have been.
India spends over Rs 400,000 crores every year on schemes, projects and programmes broadly falling within the category of social welfare. Every Union Budget since 2004 has marked a steady increase in the allocation to primary healthcare, education, maternal and child nutrition, rural employment and agriculture. Out of the total budgeted expenditure of Rs 14,90,925 crore for 2012-13, social sector spending constitutes 36.4% of the allocation, an increase of 17% over the previous year. Yet the combined total expenditure of the central and state governments on social services is just over 7% of the GDP at current prices. For all their rhetoric about keeping the State out of their lives, some of the Western countries spend substantially more on their people. Data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), for instance, indicates that Germany spends a significant 25% of its GDP on social services like education, sports, arts and culture, medical and public health, family welfare, social security and nutrition. France spends 23%, United Kingdom 12% and even the cradle of aggressive capitalism the United States of America spends 12% of its GDP on social services
6. The question here is not as much about the proportion of social sector spending in India, as it is about how much of it reaches the needy.
Germany and France lose less than one percent of their budgeted outlay to what in India is euphemistically referred to as a leakage. A leakage can range from corrupt officials and contractors siphoning off money to sheer accounting bullheadedness that prevents the allocation of a sanctioned amount. In the US and UK the leakage is about 3 percent. For a long time, there was nothing more than a ring of truth to what Rajiv Gandhi had once said: "Only 15 paisa out of a rupee reaches the poor." But there are several studies that reveal that India loses -- or leaks if one goes by officialise -- at least 50 percent of its budgeted outlay for the social sector. For instance, a planning commission study on Targeted Public Distribution System spread across four years and covering 3600 households found that out of every rupee spent by the government on TPDS, only 27 paisa actually reached the poor
7. That’s a leakage of 73 percent. Similarly, a Comptroller and Auditor General’s (CAG)
8 audit of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) reveals that despite using 86 percent of the allocated funds, the scheme is nowhere near achieving its target, with 1.36 crore children in age group of 6-14 years still out of the school system.
India’s social welfare system, even at its best behaviour, gulps down half the money meant for the poor, disadvantaged and disempowered. So the actual social sector spending of the state and central governments is closer to 3.5 percent of the GDP. Usual explanations of a weak logistical network, inadequate cold storage facilities and godowns and lack of governance structures cannot explain the yawning gap between India and the other countries with a higher spending on the social sector. There is something that the Western countries have got right that India hasn’t. In unravelling that answer is a great opportunity for India to repair long-standing structural faults.
Germany, France, the US and UK are as different as chalk is from cheese. Yet they have two things in common. First, all their social welfare schemes are routed through the single window of a social security card. It’s a plastic card with a memory chip that’s strong enough to have powered a first generation iPod. This card not only carries all necessary personal information, but is used to document transactions and activities as varied as electronic commerce to parking tickets. In fact Sweden, which is at the cutting edge of embedding technology in daily social life, has a beautifully functioning system where bar-coded cars are scanned automatically along with the highway and any misdemeanour is recorded, the ticket mailed across to the person concerned and a fine deducted after a certain period of no contestation by the culprit. Second, all systems dealing with transactions of governance and economy are digitised and seamlessly integrated with each other. It’s this close coupling with each other that allows the governments of these countries to choose the social security card as their primary entry point for identification of beneficiaries, monitoring the impact of their programmes, getting valuable feedback for improvement and quickly plugging any loopholes. It’s a combination of these two factors that explains why these countries have been able to keep their ’leakages’ to a minimum.
The Indian bureaucracy needs to embrace technology, not just in bits and pieces, but in its entirety. Three are three fundamental directions that the Indian policy establishment needs to take. The first is to convert the
Aadhaar card into a self-sustaining intelligent system by embedding it with a memory chip that can not only store all relevant personal information, but also interact with other digital devices like computers and mobile phones. This step will not succeed unless
Aadhaar is given the same singular status that European government give the social security card. The identity card issued by the NPR, the PAN card, the ration card and even the driving license have to be either merged with
Aadhaar or at least linked to it. The second is to digitise all customer-facing interfaces of governance from the local to the national level. Each of these levels has to seamlessly integrate with the other and interact with the
Aadhaar card as a single-point entry for any transaction or a service with an institution of the State. This is particularly necessary if direct cash transfers have to become a ’no leakage’ reality. The third is to make mobile phones the primary transaction system for delivery of social services, especially payments for beneficiaries of social welfare schemes. Mobile wallet is coming of age and our policy makers need to wake up to it. India has a mobile subscriber base of 930 million
9 and it’s only a matter of time before every single Indian acquires a mobile device.
Meshed together these three steps will not only substantially increase the efficiency of social sector spending by plugging leakages, but will also help the government realistically apply the concept of targeted subsidies at the ground-level. This will have a long-term impact of reducing fiscal deficit, improving government finances and empowering those who are really in need. This isn’t a technological pipe-dream. The cost of a computer chip with the processing power of today’s high-end quad-core chip will be 50 paisa in 2020. It will be so small that it can be embedded on to practically anything. Today’s Internet of Devices will become tomorrow’s Internet of Things. Between how and how soon we embrace this technological reality, lies two stories of what India could be and what India could have been. How the story ends is in our hands.
(The writer is a Visiting Fellow at Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. He is also a National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) Fellow)
1 The PlayStation 3 is the third home video game console produced by Sony Computer Entertainment and the successor to the PlayStation 2 as part of the PlayStation series. The PlayStation 3 competes with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles. It was first released on November 11, 2006, in Japan, with international markets following shortly thereafter. Major features of the console include its unified online gaming service, the PlayStation Network, its multimedia capabilities, connectivity with the PlayStation Portable, and its use of the Blu-ray Disc as its primary storage medium.
2 Hallmark Cards is a privately owned American company based in Kansas City, Missouri. Founded in 1910 by Joyce C Hall, Hallmark is the largest manufacturer of greeting cards in the United States.
3 Dr Michio Kaku is an American theoretical physicist, futurist, and a communicator and populariser of science. He has written several books about physics and related topics. He has written two New York Times Best Sellers, Physics of the Impossible (2008) and Physics of the Future (2011). Kaku has had over 70 articles published in physics journals such as Physical Review, covering topics such as superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and hadronic physics. In 1974, along with Prof. Keiji Kikkawa of Osaka University, he authored the first papers describing string theory in a field form. Kaku is the author of several textbooks on string theory and quantum field theory.
4 The book speculates on the possibilities of future technological development over the next 100 years. Interviewing notable scientists of their field of research Kaku lays out a vision of coming developments in medicine, computing, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and energy production. Kaku writes how he hopes his predictions for 2100 will be as successful as science fiction writer Jules Verne’s 1863 novel Paris in the Twentieth Century. Kaku contrasts Verne’s foresight against US Postmaster General John Wanamaker, who in 1893 predicted that mail would still be delivered by stagecoach and horseback in 100 years time. Kaku points to a long history of failed predictions against progress to underscore his notion "that it is very dangerous to bet against the future".
5 The Cray X-MP was a supercomputer designed, built and sold by Cray Research. It was announced in 1982 as the ’cleaned up’ successor to the 1975 Cray-1, and was the world’s fastest computer from 1983 to 1985. The principal designer was Steve Chen.
6 Apart from the International Monetary Fund, independent analysis also arrives at similar figures of social spending. Please refer to
http://www.polity.co.uk/shortintroductions/samples/dean-sample.pdf.
7 Please refer to the report titled Performance Evaluation of Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS) released by the Programme Evaluation Division of the Planning Commission on March 2005. The report can be accessed at
http://planningcommission.nic.in/reports/peoreport/peo/peo_tpds.pdf.
8 The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) is an authority, established by the Constitution of India under Chapter V, who audits all receipts and expenditure of the Government of India and the state governments, including those of bodies and authorities substantially financed by the government. The CAG is also the external auditor of government-owned companies. The reports of the CAG are taken into consideration by the Public Accounts Committees, which are special committees in the Parliament of India and the state legislatures. The CAG is also the head of the Audit and Accounts Department, which has over 58,000 employees across the country.
9 TRAI figures for September, 2012.
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