India First

Aadhaar, the backbone of big data for the Government of India The UPA’s highly ambitious initiative Aadhaar was launched in 2009. It is to assign a unique number to every Indian resident. As part of the unique identity, the initiative captures each resident’s biometric data, and other personally identifiable information such as name, sex and date of birth. We are a country of 125 crore people, and there is great inherent diversity in our society. Our society’s major attributes are caste, sub-caste, religion, culture and language. In addition, we have political demarcations of regions and states. Another important metric is literacy and level of education. Yet another is employment. We also have a very wide variety of levels of income. It is expected of a government to provide for society at multiple levels and in multiple directions. Any government needs to provide schools and colleges directly or indirectly as a necessary social and economic investment. We also expect the...

Can a Religious Leader Delivery as Chief Minister? On Sunday morning I was very surprised to hear of BJP’s choice for Chief Minister for UP. Honestly, I can’t recall any of Yogi Adityanath’s statements that contribute to his present negative image among urban Indians. At the same time, even for BJP supporters there is some negativity associated with our impression of him. One associates UP with social backwardness (to put it mildly), social divisions along religious lines (for those who love to hate BJP, let’s not forget the contribution of our “secular” parties in having achieved so), high crime rate, and I’m sure it’s pretty backward economically too. The govt of such a large and problem-ridden state would need to plan and perform along multiple dimensions for a decade before social and economic reforms begin to show. But parties are lucky to have more than five years! Why then, would a firebrand religious leader be chosen? He has no experience in administration. We can’t ...

Can't be an easy journey from Yogi to Chief Minister of India's largest, very complex state Politics divorced from sound economics is disastrous for society. At the same time, running a state or country like a corporate doesn't work in politics. Sound economic policies, along with appropriate (dynamic) social investment and even concessions, are inevitable in the journey of running a state or country. Little is known about Yogi Adityanath other than his trademark attire and provocative statements. Again, one could argue that this is known to urban India because this is what English media wants us to know about him! Still, the journey from one of 543 MPs even with five successful elections cannot be the same as Chief Minister of India's largest state, which comes with acute social problems, not to mention poor economic health. How will the Yogi perform? How will negative social factors be addressed? How will employment be addressed? Will he depend a lot on the Cen...

Very well-balanced argument in favour of the digital landscape the Union govt is constructing as an enabler for both social and economic reform. Digital platforms and tools on a nation-wide scale will bring corruption and inefficiency to very low levels, and will save govts HUGE amounts of money, making it available for a whole lot of avenues where India desperately needs to invest. Along with the investment in Digital India, Aadhaar, and other revolutionary digital enablers, the govt needs to strengthen laws to ensure information sharing happens for legitimate purposes only and it's illegal to sell personal information. http://www.asianage.com/opinion/oped/170317/data-privacy-needs-much-better-safeguards.html

Politics For a Purpose In a democracy the primary purpose of a political party is to come to power to serve the people of the country. Moving closer to the real world, raw power associated with top constitutional positions intoxicates like few other human experiences. Often we see that achievement of a constitutional position is viewed as a goal, when in reality, it’s just a means to achieve the noble goal of serving one’s country selflessly. Somewhere along the journey of securing freedom from the British, to running independant India for nearly 60 years, India’s oldest party Indian National Congress seems to have lost purpose. As is inevitable with human nature, politicians across parties and across democracies, seek powerful positions. But how well do all of them utilise those positions of power for which we have elected them? The negative aspects of human nature – like greed and ego – prevail more often than we voters would like! But the Congress seems to be a step wors...