Editorial 1: India’s DPIs, catching the next wave
Introduction:
- India’s digital public infrastructure (DPI), loosely the India Stack and more, is a marvel of our times, shaped in a unique partnership between governments (Union and States), regulators, the private sector, selfless volunteers, startups, and academia/think tanks.
About DPI:
- It refers to an open-source identity platform that can be used to access a wide variety of government and private services by building applications and products. These public digital platforms are customisable, localizable, interoperable and leverage public data for open innovation models.
- It includes digital forms of ID and verification, civil registration, payment (digital transactions and money transfers), data exchange, and information systems. For example, Unified Payment Interface (UPI), JAM trinity, digilocker, CoWIN etc
- The platforms in DPI are based on core principles of consent-based data sharing protocols, openness, equity, inclusivity, fairness, transparency and trust hence reducing the digital divide.
India Stack:
- India Stack is a set of APIs that allows governments, businesses, startups and developers to utilise an unique digital Infrastructure to solve India’s hard problems towards presence-less, paperless, and cashless service delivery.
- The following APIs are considered to be a core part of the India Stack: Aadhaar Authentication and e-KYC, eSign; DigiLocker, Unified Payment Interface (UPI)
Web 3.0:
- Web 3.0 is a decentralized internet to be run on blockchain technology, which would be different from the versions in use, Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. In Web 3.0, users will have ownership stakes in platforms and applications unlike now where tech giants control the platforms.
- Engendering sustained collective action at scale between so many disparate entities itself is magical and the outcomes are India’s answer to Web 3.0, perhaps even superior in many ways.
Aadhaar and the private sector
- Aadhar is a 12-digit unique identity number that can be obtained voluntarily by the citizens of India and resident foreign nationals who have spent over 182 days in twelve months immediately preceding the date of application for enrolment, based on their biometric and demographic data.
- The data is collected by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), a statutory authority established in January 2009 by the Government of India, under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITy), following the provisions of the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and other Subsidies, benefits and services) Act, 2016.
- Aadhaar is the world's largest biometric ID system. Considered a proof of residence and not a proof of citizenship, Aadhaar does not itself grant any rights to domicile in India.
Aadhar and good governance:
- The judgement of the Supreme Court of India had affirmed privacy to be sacrosanct, and led to an unintended slowdown of the opening of Aadhaar to the private sector to unlock its value even further.
- The rapid adoption and attendant visible ease of doing business in day-to-day transactions for citizens, has now led to a gradual opening of Aadhaar, beginning with voluntary usage, for various private sector applications.
- Aadhaar holders can voluntarily use their Aadhaar for private sector purposes, and private sector entities need not seek special permission for such usage. Also, between government departments (intra- and inter-State) Aadhaar data can be shared, but with the prior informed consent of the citizen.
- Banks and other regulated entities can store Aadhaar numbers as long as they protect it using vault and other similar means, as in UIDAI security regulations. A new private sector-friendly UIDAI is racing ahead to incentivise Aadhaar usage, to become richer and more meaningful.
- These three changes will lead to the next leap frogging of the India Stack as a whole, under a rare alignment of a dynamic political executive and inspired volunteers. Proof that this is work in progress is that Aadhaar authentications have shot up to 2.2 billion per month, and the cumulative number over the past 12 years has crossed 100 billion.
- An example of the benefit of Aadhar is that the Goods and Service Tax Network (GSTN) and then account aggregator could not have happened without an Aadhaar number and Permanent Account Number (PAN) database existing.
DigiYatra and DigiLocker
- DigiYatra is a Biometric Enabled Seamless Travel (BEST) experience based on a facial recognition system (FRS), again through a partnership between industry and government, which ensures seamless identification of passengers at key check points such as airport entry, security check and boarding gate clearance. The pilots have shown that about two lakh passengers have utilised this successfully.
- Take DigiLocker, one of the least known DPIs, which today has 150 million users, six billion stored documents, and done with a tiny budget of ₹50 crore over seven years. Plans are afoot to expand it to many countries around the world, and with this microscopic budget.
- Zerodha, Upstox, RazorPay, Equal and many other insurance and fintechs would not exist today but for the DigiLocker APIs, for their KYC verification happens through it, almost instantly.
- Here is another example. When DigiLocker was used in a Karnataka Police recruitment drive to verify the academic credentials of candidates, it led to the process being cut down by about six months.
UPI’s impact
- Created by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) in 2016, it is an advanced version of Immediate Payment Service (IMPS)- round–the-clock funds transfer service to make cashless payments faster, easier and smoother.
- UPI is a system that powers multiple bank accounts into a single mobile application (of any participating bank), merging several banking features, seamless fund routing & merchant payments into one hood.
- It has now crossed eight billion transactions per month and transacts a value of around 65% of India’s GDP per annum.
Conclusion:
- India’s DPI marks our second war for independence — economic freedom from the day-to-day drudgery of life and transactions, which has made it become our new business backbone that is powering India towards a $5 trillion economy.
Editorial 2: India needs public policy education
Introduction:
- Government policies are pivotal in deciding the future of a country. Good public policies spur economic growth and public welfare and improve ease of living for citizens. However, there is little interest in public policy education in India. Only a small percentage of policymakers — civil service officers — are exposed to the formal study of public policy and public administration.
Public policy in India:
- In this context, this article carries a few suggestions which could boost public policy education in India. The phrase ‘public management’ is used to refer to both public policy and public administration.
- Public policy generally consists of the set of actions—plans, laws, and behaviours—adopted by a government.
- The Indian bureaucracy has many talented people working at various levels. However, governance is still perceived to be lagging behind private sector management, in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. This is largely due to lack of training in public management.
Paucity of programmes
- Most executive jobs in the organised sector are in government or government-owned agencies and require an understanding of public management. However, the supply of formal education in public management is inadequate as compared to business management education.
- As per data from the All-India Council for Technical Education, there are 3,182 institutions with an approved intake of 4.22 lakh in business management programmes, but only about 130 public, private and not-for-profit universities that offer public administration programmes and only 29 institutes that offer public policy programmes. Of these 29 institutions, 17 are private, four are semi-private, and eight are state-funded institutions.
- The reason why universities don’t have many programmes of public management is because there are few jobs available for people pursuing such courses. The private sector offers limited opportunities in government advisory roles, consulting and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).
- For public sector opportunities, students have to go through competitive exams. Therefore, neither educational institutes nor students find any incentive to prefer public management courses in place of technical or management courses that offer lucrative private sector opportunities.
- Further, there are very few civil servants who have got exposure to public management before joining service. Most of them undergo the departmental induction training programme which is focused on the role that they play in their department. They do not learn much about how to make good public policies.
- There are a few opportunities for in-service officers to study public management in India and abroad. As per the data available of the capacity-building commissions in the 10 years between 2012 and 2021, 194 civil service officers (including 86 from the IAS) went abroad to study public management at the Master’s level.
- Within the country, there are five institutions in which 194 civil service officers have been sponsored by the government for full-time public policy courses in the last three years. Contrast this with 1.3 lakh Group A officers in the Government of India today.
Way forward: Three suggestions
1.Public management to be made one of the compulsory subjects for the UPSC CSE:
- The introduction of a public management paper in UPSC civil service examination can either be a substitute for one optional subject or an additional paper. This will ensure that civil servants who join government would have formal education in public management before they enter service.
- Since about 5 lakh candidates appear for UPSC civil service every year and each one of them will need to prepare for the public policy paper, this creates an opportunity or incentive for universities and private institutions to offer the subject at the graduate or post-graduate level.
- On average, 50% of the UPSC aspirants preferred an optional subject in CSE other than their graduation subject for the UPSC main exam. This indicates their willingness to learn whatever it takes to succeed in the exam. Public policy education can be one such subject.
Training and capacity building:
- Current training institutions of the government should have a larger component of public policy as part of induction training. Also, they should build up a case study bank for training.
Lateral entry:
- Union and state governments can create certain specialised positions of public policy analysts, to be picked up from the market directly, so that new job avenues for the graduates of public policy programmes can be created.
Conclusion:
- Those UPSC aspirants who make it to various government jobs, including at the State level, studying this subject for CSE, would develop better understanding and sensitivity towards complexities involved in public management, making them better citizens as well as effective private sector managers.