And for a Friday at renewal of Passport after 10 years, some thoughts….. some musings…..
India has come a long way from the past, when getting a passport was a Herculean task – full of drudgery, delays, Babudom, bribes and sleazy agents at Passport offices. All that thankfully is passé. Now it’s completely modernised, digitalised and super efficient. The operational parts, including data entry, validation etc. is apparently outsourced to TCS, whose staff, as to be expected, are doing an excellent job. There are only few senior officers from the Central Govt manning some crucial check points. Absolutely well managed and efficient. Apply on line, fix an appointment date and time, take documents as prescribed and presto it’s done.
Thanks to the genius of Nandan Nilekani, the public spirited Technologist volunteering Time and Effort for the Country, the creator of AADHAR, the 12 digit Unique Identification (UID) which now covers almost the entire population of 1300 million Indians. India is today the world leader in public digital infrastructure at scale. Imagine more than 700 million Bank accounts with annualised transactions on the payment platform – Unified Payment Interface (UPI) – a whooping $1 trillion (Rs. 75 lakh crores ). India per capita may still be a poor country, but it already is Data-Rich. No wonder Facebook, like other FANG companies, considers India one of its most important destinations.
The population scale digital infrastructure was not designed for the Pandemic. But it rose well to the challenge. Let’s support the economic revival, the digital way, the ethical way, the SEEGOS way.