As I See

  Plugged In / Leak Off/ Sealed Only 15 paise reaches the needy’: SC quotes one of the major politician remarks in its Aadhaar verdict in 2016. This quote came In 1985, on a visit to drought-affected Kalahandi district in Odisha as “ every rupee spent by the government, only 15 paise reached the intended beneficiary”. That was the scenario in those days. Has it changed now, my answer will be, yes, to a larger extent. Governments across the world run large cash/kind transfer programmes as an incentive to access essential commodities to its beneficiaries as a part of the government manifesto.  Even though the intention is good, due to the process, pilferage was high. Let’s take an example of scholarship, the flow of release is depicted below.   The issue with this flow is too many intermediaries, delay, lack of a mechanism to know whether the intended beneficiary received it or not. Due to the nonexistence of bank account to beneficiary cash disbursal happens at the l...

  Relief Biggest bottle neck for meaningful e-Governance is signature from public for application or proceedings or witness or acknowledgment or receipt etc., which is inked form, i.e., signed on paper. Final objective of government is to serve public at various capacity. To make it convenient and easy, government has organised itself in to various departments. And departments have developed software application to cater public seamlessly, with efficient way. Since large public don’t have DSC to sign electronically, it became a kind of hybrid system. Ink signed Application and documents/certificates were scanned either in image format or in non-searchable PDF format. Best of the best Optical Character Reader (OCR) has its own limitation. And hence large chunk of unusable data has been created, leading to multiple data entry at different level with error inputs and multi formats, leading to chaos. And also increasing the storage cost at data centres.  The only way to ...

Mesmerize   Digilocker. Yes, it is Digilocker, mesmerizer for me. The way it grew, adopted and being used is no ordinary wonder. Just imagine the relief from going around the offices, friendly middleman! never ending waiting, long lasting ques etc., to get your own documents. I always wondered, why applicant is made to run around, to get a document from “A” department and submit to “B” department and bears the burden of proving that the submitted document is genuine. Why not a department which requires particular document can get it from the issuing department (source of truth) directly, without intervention of the applicant in this software era. And it happened. Somewhere in Jan 2015, the concepts of Digilocker was introduced by NEGD. It took almost few weeks to realise how it works and its impacts. Luckily My bosses (many IAS are visionaries) realised and asked us to take it forward quickly. Any product much in advance has its own challenges. When we started talking about thi...