According to a report published by Wharton School (of business) recently -“the global push for change” (http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/special-report/global-push-for-change/) India Stack is the largest project taken by any government in the world.
India Stack project has been quite successful in achieving what it is supposed to. Unfortunately, not many in public sphere know or talk about it. The term “Stack” is borrowed from the software industry and it refers to multiple, interdependent layers of software services that are built on top of one another. Similarly this project has various layers, first one is “Aadhar”, second is “paper-less criteria” that is e.g. e-KYC. And the final layer is “consent”.
The first layer has covered, already, 1.2 billion Indians till date. Remember, India’s population is 1.3 billion. Second layer has brought $7billion saving to the government from 17billion KYCs done in the country. Third layer is all about democratising the data driven markets through individual consent.
In 2018, 9% of national budget is allocated to food, fertiliser, and petroleum subsidies. After the India, stack implementation for petroleum subsidies, (PAHAL) there was an immediate drop of 11%-14% in fuel demand indicating that it was due to the black market. Now, government is bringing fertiliser subsidy also under this project and subsidy will be provided to the vendor and not to the farmer, farmer will not feel any pinch. The Digital Dividend Report prepared by the World Bank estimates that India can save $1000 billion every year by the use of Aadhaar.
Another success story of India Stack project is the use of UPI by various wallets for cashless transactions. PayTM is a good example and there are many more.
India has jumped 30 places in World Bank’s ease of doing business. Though there are lots of reforms done by the Modi government, but according to the World Bank, majority of the credit goes to the “India Stack” project.
According to a paper published in Harvard Business Review in November 2017 (https://hbr.org/2017/11/how-india-is-moving-toward-a-digital-first-economy) “Banks have far greater liquidity, SME lending is at an all-time high, and digital transactions have multiplied 760 times over in some cases” and of course, the credit goes to the India Stack.
Of course, in a larger scheme of things coupled with impatience, all this seems superficial. At the bottom of the ladder, impoverished millions are saying so what!! Farmers committing suicides are not even covered in this!!! Bottom line- moral decadence leading to exploitation of needy and poor is real. Moral decadence leading to corruption is very much real and no piece of technology can fix this. India needs many more projectts like India Stack that is programs with a vision to transform lives, programs beyond day-to-day politics of this country.
On the other hand, we all must realise that transformation does not happen overnight and for a successful transformation we need a solid value system foundation.
