My Personal ‘Manthan’ From Being An #Aadhaar Opponent To Becoming An Advocate For The #IndiaStack  

Much has been spoken and written about on both sides of the #Aadhaar #NirAadhaar debate. The decibels seem to have only gone up, especially so in recent months. And a lot of it has been coupled with fire, fury and smoke! Soon, we also expect the Supreme Court to adjudicate on the constitutional validity of Aadhaar as well as the related issue of “privacy” as a fundamental right of citizens of India. Even that, I suspect, may not settle the issue once and for all! I expect our wise justices to leave many significant parts of the debate in grey. My hunch is that the honourable judges will allow this churning to continue and allow society to find its own “end”.

However, this post is not yet another argument for or against Aadhaar. It is a narration of my own personal manthan — the churning and transformation from starting as a cynic, and a fierce opponent of Aadhaar, to becoming an advocate of Aadhaar and India Stack with a very high degree of conviction.

Cut To Circa 2009. “First They Ignore You”; “Then They Laugh At You”

I — and most, if not all of us I would assume — have suffered through a zillion types of know your customers (KYCs) before in various forms. Does anyone remember the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) initiated common KYC? Till now, I have not understood what was “common” about it! Having done the Central KYC or CKYC (possibly a few times over!), i would still have banks and brokers asking for KYC documents again and again — even if I might have given the very same banks and brokers, the very same set of ID and address proofs just a few months back! Even till date, I receive a monthly “consolidated” account statement from NSDL whose tagline is “technology, trust and reach”. The consolidated statement is far from being consolidated and has very partial data. More importantly and relevant to this particular story of mine, my address as per this statement is one (a rented place) which I had quit nine (yes, nine) years ago. Subsequently, I have updated my newer address (es) in a zillion KYCs, including this so-called SEBI mandated CKYC. However, most of these institutions do not seem to have any memory of that! Hence this statement is of absolutely no use to me. Neither did it seem technologically savvy, nor could I trust it in any way. But I am digressing here. This story is not about the technology or trust aspects of NSDL.

Hence, given all this KYC mess, we seemed to have forever mired ourselves in, when I started hearing murmurs about Aadhaar and Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) in 2009, I just ignored them. I assumed it would turn out to be just another failed KYC project — albeit at a much larger scale. A monumental waste of taxpayer money as I saw it. Especially so, coming from a government that I was not particularly impressed with then, and with the backing of the so-called NAC (National Advisory Council) with a deeply “socialist mindset” that I abhorred and feared would take us back to the mediaeval dark ages of the 70s and the 80s, and which to me was an extra constitutional authority, only made me deeply cynical. And when I heard that techno-savvy Nandan Nilekani was the technocrat who would be leading this project, it just seemed to me that it was somewhat akin to putting lipstick on a pig as they say!

I just decided to plain ignore and laugh at Aadhaar and UIDAI and forgive me, Nandan, but I decided to ignore and laugh at you as well!

Mid 2011– Mid 2014 : “Then They Fight You.”

This was the phase when I had turned into a “political animal”. All sorts of scams with multiple zeroes attached to them were in the news, day in day out. Skeletons were tumbling out of the government’s cupboard almost on a daily basis. In my mind then, the UIDAI/Aadhaar project was just one more scam running into thousands of crores. Given the huge level of mistrust that by then had accumulated within me about the United Progressive Alliance (UPA)-2 government, I further felt that this was going to be one more potent tool for harassment and extortion of honest citizens. I saw it as a project that was deeply flawed and deeply corrupt. Far from explaining the rationale of why this project needed to be executed to citizens like me, the UPA government seemed to be at loggerheads within themselves, even within the Cabinet. The Finance Minister was saying one thing, the Home Minister was saying something else altogether. It was then that I discovered that it was not just one Aadhaar project, but there was also a NPR (National Population register) underway. As with most things in government, the entire exercise to me, seemed to be soaked in the 3Cs that one has got used to by now — corruption, confusion and contradictions.

I had become associated with some quasi-political outfits then, and on real streets as well as on cyber streets, joined the fight against many of the misdeeds of the UPA-2 government, including on Aadhaar. I tweeted quite often and quite vociferously, often using the #Niradhaar hashtag. A couple of my tweets are placed before you on record.

Mid 2014 : “And Then You Win”

Then sometime in June 2014, I came across some news reports about Nandan Nilekani meeting with the new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi and senior members of his National Democratic Alliance (NDA) cabinet. And soon after, surprise, surprise, there were announcements from the new NDA government about strong support for continuing the Aadhaar programme! This astonished and, in fact, angered me no end. Here was a leader and a party who had been vociferously arguing against Aadhaar till then, and within a few weeks of coming into power, had taken a complete U-Turn! While one part of me suggested that this was just one more opportunistic politicking, another suggested that maybe it was time for me to step back and study this more deeply. A few of the points that I came across then, and which I had not either heard of, or been blind to before, seemed to offer a vision of a new kind of reality for India, for Bharat.

Thus began my journey into really trying to understand what Aadhaar was all about with a new lens. During this period of discovery, I came across this excellent exposition of the basic premise of Aadhaar, by Nilekani at IIM-Bangalore, including with a very interesting Q and A. When you “look”, thou shall “find”! How true! Better late than never, I told myself. I would urge you to take a look at it as well.

I stopped my war on #Niraadhaar and continued to keep myself updated off and on about developments related to this, as a “passive spectator” of sorts.

It was during the latter half of 2015, that suddenly several things started falling in place for me, at the same time. By then, at my startup, we had already begun to make some progress on a new kind of a “Program Lending” platform. And I could start to at least connecting some of the dots. Another fantastic exposition by Nilekani got me really excited — this one on his by now famous phrase about the “WhatsApp moment for Indian Financial Services”. If you haven’t done so yet, I would again urge you to watch this one.

During the period from 1992–1997, I had had several encounters with “Bharat” — cutting across diverse fields of agriculture, forestry and tribal welfare, micro and small enterprise, healthcare, education and alternative tourism. And cutting across several states. Especially across the states of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Odisha and Maharashtra. For almost all of those five years, I had the opportunity to study the challenges and opportunities in these areas in depth, and at first hand. I had visited and even stayed over in several remote parts of these states, and in many different seasons. We came up with many different solutions, most of which were quite radical. Almost all of them were accepted “in principle” and “on paper”. But sadly, most of them remained as such and did not see the light of day!

I am now convinced that we are on the cusp of the opportunity of our lifetime to leapfrog a nation of a billion plus people. In fact, this has already begun. Just as we have leapfrogged ourselves from a pathetic teledensity into a nation of close to a billion mobile phone users, with approximately half of them, users of the mobile internet, in less than a decade, we now have the opportunity to leapfrog India, Bharat into a developed economy.

Aadhaar and the IndiaStack and the entire ecosystem around this will be foundational to this journey. This is a foundation that many different players, startups and large institutions, both public and private, can build upon to drive radical innovation to produce sustainable solutions for seriously complex problems at scale. An experiment at such scale has probably never been done anywhere else and anytime before. We are far from the foundation being perfect. This is an experiment which is still very much work in progress. But as my favourite monk St Francis of Assisi said centuries ago, “The impossible perfect should not become the enemy of the possible good.”

We desperately need more light, and less smoke and fury in this manthan. Every stakeholder, and that is each one of us, has a moral obligation to contribute to this light and remove the smoke in this momentous manthan.

Recent reports indicate a large scale of acceptance of Aadhaar and its basic premise by a large section of society who are seeing some direct benefits.

I, along with our startup team, am hugely excited at the opportunity to solve the financing needs of the next 500 million Indians we see it, consisting of 100 million plus households and 50 million plus small businesses.

Let the manthan continue for our nation of 1.3 billion people. Amrit (nectar) awaits.

This article first appeared in the Medium and has been republished here with permission.