Archives: Blog

This blog is part of a series on blockchain technology, governance and its implications for e-Governance in India. 

Since my blog of last week, two events that relate to digital privacy have further muddied the waters. The Supreme Court’s decision that one’s Aadhar number need not be linked to every service imaginable, from your bank account to your taxi app, came as a relief to those who worried about protecting their privacy. I, for one, vented my irritation by sending rude replies to all those threatening messages that asked me to reveal my Aadhar number to them or else. Sadly, all the messages came back, undelivered. There must be a law against those who send automated messages that block replies – some of my responses were literary masterpieces!

But then came the Cambridge Analytica expose. Cambridge Analytica, a big data mining firm that was instrumental in strategising electoral campaigns in widely differing democratic contexts, was found out playing dirty, by using data from social media to target delivery of persuasive messages, many based on falsehood and the maligning of opponents. Clearly, it does not matter that we are given a respite by the Supreme Court from enforced transparency of our personal lives. If we are on social media, ruthless big data giants like Cambridge Analytica have us caught naked, in their searchlights and are making money selling our pictures to politicians. It did not come as a surprise that the India branch of Cambridge Analytica, which claims to have influenced elections through their strategies for large, mainstream parties that can afford to pay their costs, is headed by a politically well-connected individual.

The paradox is that even as our personal data out there is vulnerable to cross-linkage to build a complete profile of our lives that can be sold for good money without our knowledge, governments continue to drag their feet on building integrated architecture for the divulging of data relating to its doings.

Let me give you an example.

In nearly all States, a slew of departments that are termed the Revenue system – which, by the way has nothing to do with revenue, but which looks after land administration – has computerised its databases. This is a commendable task and must be appreciated. For example, Karnataka state was one of the first to digitise its data on agricultural land, through the widely acclaimed ‘Bhoomi’ project. This was followed by the Registration department – a unit within the larger revenue set up ‘Cauvery’ project, which computerised the registration process, when immovable property is sold and bought. Yet, for a considerable number of years, Bhoomi and Cauvery did not speak to each other. This meant that if one sold a piece of land, one still had to obtain physical copies of the land cultivation particulars from the Bhoomi system and physically present them to the registration department, which would scan the sale deed and record the registration of property in Cauvery. But then, since Cauvery did not speak to Bhoomi, the buyer of the land would again have to obtain physical copies of the sale document from the registration department and make a fresh application to the Bhoomi wallahs to replace in their land records the name of the seller with the buyer. This took another 45 days.

However, buying and selling of land is not the only transaction that happens with land. The owner of land may like to partition it, sell a few portions and retain the rest. That introduces another complication; the fresh boundaries of the smaller plots of land have to be marked on the drawings of the land. This is done by the survey and settlement department; another member of the Revenue family.

However the survey and settlement department has a backlog of digitisation of records to follow. That is understandable, given that measurement of land and marking their boundaries on the ground is a manual process that still have to be done, even in the age of digitisation. What is not understandable is that more than twenty years have passed since the first steps were taken towards Bhoomi, but there has been little headway in the digitisation of survey drawings on the ground.

When the nature of the land is changed, for example, if its classification changes from agricultural to non-agricultural use, there are further complications in store. Non-agricultural land is taxed by the local governments, namely, the Gram Panchayats and the Municipalities. They do not come under the Revenue system and so, their accounting and database systems have taken a different path.

And you guessed it – the local government software does not speak to Bhoomi or Cauvery, in spite of the government’s claims that they do. So one has to again obtain physical copies of documents from one system and present it to the local government to have the records changed there.

All this could be easily solvable, if they focused their Aadhar style linkages on land, rather than on people. If every piece of land were given a unique number that enabled its ownership records to seamlessly transfer from one digital system to another, life would be much easier for people.

But when was governance ever meant to make peoples’ lives simpler?

This blog is part of a series on the rollout and progress of e-Governance in India. 

My four year stint in the Tobacco Board as Director (Auctions) was where I finally saw e-Governance making a big difference to the lives of people who dealt with the government.

A few disclaimers, before I begin my story.

The Tobacco Board is a government of India body that assists tobacco farmers to grow and sell tobacco. Before one throws up one’s hands in horror at this, lets dwell on the fact that the government is concerned with all interests of people; so while on the one hand, it actively campaigns against smoking, it also cannot be blind to the fact that considerable numbers of farmers depend upon cultivation of tobacco for their livelihoods. If and when tobacco use diminishes, the farmers will look for other alternatives. However, as long as people do smoke, in the face of health warnings given by the government, one cannot overlook the fact that tobacco will be grown. And if it is so grown, the government takes on the responsibility that farmers don’t get short-changed for their produce.

Indian policy has been that government regulates the cultivation of tobacco, by licencing farmers to produce a limited quantity every year. The government does not take on the responsibility of buying all the tobacco produced; on the other hand, all it does is to run auctions where registered farmers sell to registered buyers. Tobacco is a high priced product and the proper grading and weighing of produce is the key to ensuring that farmers receive a fair price. Auction halls during the season are a hubbub of activity. At least a thousand farmers come to each auction hall daily. The halls open as early as three in the morning, so as to ensure that all the tobacco bales put out for auction are ready for inspection and auction starting from eight in the morning. An early start is necessary to ensure that the auction is finished in the morning light; experienced buyers say that afternoon light is not right for assessing the colour of the tobacco, a key parameter of quality. Usually, by 12 PM, the auctions are over and the sellers wait to receive their payments.

In the early 1990s, the Tobacco Board was one of the first institutions in the government to embrace e-Governance. All bales were physically inspected jointly by the buyer, the seller and the quality assessor provided by the Board. An agreed upon description of the bale; its weight, colour, moisture content and quality, were recorded in a ‘bale ticket’ placed on each bale. The auction proceeded after all bales were marked. After each bale was auctioned, the details of the winning bidder and the price quoted was also entered into the bale ticket. Once the auction was finished, all details on the bale tickets were entered into the auction software, which then proceeded to print out debit notes for buyers, indicating the debiting of their bank accounts by the appropriate amounts and payment cheques that were handed over to each seller. The software also churned out reports that kept tab on all essential statistics on the buying and selling; the quality, the quantities sold, the financial values, all on a daily and cumulative basis.

By today’s standards, the state of the art computing technology of those days was laughable. Simple PCs with no hard discs and minimal RAM were used to churn the numbers. As the auctions progressed, computing times took longer, particularly to prepare cumulative reports. By the end of the four or five month auction season, processing time would be more than three hours. We kept our fingers crossed, because a tiny blip in the power supply could corrupt the calculations and one would have to start all over again. When we upgraded to the latest PC-ATs in 1995, we exulted, because the computing time at the end of the season was reduced from several hours, to a few minutes.

Yet, in spite of the obvious benefits of e-Governance, one could not help but noticing how power equations were changing, due to technology. The computer operator was the key to the integrity of the system and like any other lesser mortal, he could be compromised. Since the system set quotas and imposed upper limits on what a farmer could sell, the software automatically rejected sales where farmers exceeded their set quotas. It took very little time for computer operators to hack the software. Then, for a price, farmers who exceeded quotas would be able to sell their extra tobacco.

The hacking was so elementary, that an equally elementary safeguard sufficed to snuff it out. I got a software written that would automatically scour through the sales and list out all sales where quotas were exceeded. I carried that software on a floppy disc; it was given only to a few senior people. A few random checks discovered the main transgressors. Once caught red-handed, the erring data entry operators were punished. The software soon became an effective instrument of deterrence; merely letting data entry operators know that their bypassing of the quota rule could be instantly detected, was enough to make them cautious.

Like all robust e-Governance solutions, the Tobacco Board’s system continues to do well even today. Regular upgrades have made matters even simpler; data entry operators have very little to do after the introduction of bar coded bale tickets. Cheques are no longer printed; the amounts paid by buyers are transferred to the bank accounts of sellers. The linkage to bank accounts also provides assurance to the Tobacco Board to raise loans on behalf of sellers, to obtain fertiliser and other inputs in bulk and resell them to the buyers.

The Tobacco Board’s system has features that are typical of many good e-Governance solutions. It has kept things simple; it constantly has upgraded itself and it has worked to reduce discretion and effort. Most important, it has kept farmers and buyers at the centre of its focus, not the Board or its data entry operators

The views expressed are of the author. Accountability Initiative does not encourage tobacco use in any way.

This blog is part of a series on the rollout and progress of e-Governance in India. 

If one individual has to be fervently thanked for initiating a national movement towards e-Governance, it must be Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. During his tenure, he ensured that the National Informatics Centre established an office in each district in the country. As Karnataka had established a strong rural decentralisation framework with the Zilla Parishads as the district level rural local government, the NIC office of the districts were not located in the offices of the Deputy Commissioners as done elsewhere, but were attached to the Zilla Parishad offices.

By the time I moved to the position of the Chief Secretary of the Zilla Parishad of Hassan District, Karnataka, Rajiv Gandhi was no longer Prime Minister. But his good work continued; all NIC offices in the districts were connected through satellite with the national office and the capability of data passing upward seamlessly was established – not that data passed that way, but in any case, one could not grudge that the infrastructure was not in place. The world-wide-web was in the future, for laypersons such as us, so the movement of data was still in the domain of the programmer, who all behaved as if they were apostles of God.

But that was not the case with Parasher.

Parasher was a young gentleman just out of college, and had the bounding enthusiasm of an individual who genuinely thought that all of the rest of his life would be like his college days. He was unsullied by government hierarchy and spoke out of turn in meetings – a trait I welcomed, even as I saw the acute discomfiture of those who thought that I must only receive filtered information. Since I was staying alone and the evenings were long and lonely, I spent plenty of time in the NIC centre with Parasher, learning the ropes of the latest in computerisation.

The NIC office was a quiet haven in the hubbub of my office complex. Like a temple, one left one’s shoes outside reverentially, and went into the sanctum sanctorum where a bunch of earnest programmers, under Parasher’s watchful eye, sent data and received instructions from their mysterious masters in Delhi.

In those days when the principle of separation of the budgets of the state and local governments were more strictly followed than today, the government issued an order every month, releasing the Zilla Parishad a one-twelfth installment of its annual budget. This single consolidated order released funds department wise, for each of the 20-odd departments that worked under the Zilla Parishad. My office sent the order manually to the local office of the treasury after the necessary authentication, following which the treasury operated the order and released funds to the departmental heads concerned at the district level.

However, there was a chronic problem that I had to face. The government system of budget taxonomy is a two stage one, with funds being allocated to ‘Major Heads’ of Account, which are then further sliced into ‘Minor Heads’. Thus, the Public Health Engineering Department receives funds for provisioning of drinking water supply under a Major Head, which is then sub-divided into Minor Head allocations, for piped water programmes, drilling of borewells, maintenance works, payment of electricity bills and suchlike. The government, in its release order, only allocated funds to the level of the Major Head. However, if in turn the Zilla Parishad released the funds on that basis alone to the departments, it faced the risk of the money being diverted within the Major head to some Minor heads alone, starving other Minor heads of sufficient money. This occurred usually due to bad planning, but corruption, which drove officers to spend more money on purchases while neglecting maintenance was not ruled out. I therefore needed to put in place a system that would automatically divide the Major Head-wise allocations made by the government to the Zilla Parishad, proportionately to the Minor Head level. Communicating this order to the Treasury would ensure that the Departmental heads could not divert money from one Minor Head to another, thus sabotaging the Zilla Parishad’s implementation plans and leaving it with piles of useless inventories.

It was kids play for Parasher to design and implement a system that would do this. As soon as we received the monthly release order from the government, in a few hours the data was digitised and an automatic release order subdividing the allocations to the level of the Minor Heads was issued to the treasury. Parasher did not stop there; he designed a system by which expenditure vouchers lodged in the treasury by the implementing departments concerned could be tracked, so that we had an idea of who was spending how much, when and for what.

We called our system GRASP – Grant Release and Accounting Software Programme. Over two years, GRASP was able to introduce a level of budget discipline in the departments that executed the plans and projects of the Zilla Parishad. There was resistance as departmental officers lost the flexibility to play around with the money released under a Major Head in the past, as they could not divert money from one Minor to another Minor head now. But in the long term, they saw the sense in budget discipline, as their programmes did not stop and stutter for a surfeit of money locked into useless inventories, while they starved for it elsewhere.

Parasher did not stay long in the NIC. Within a few years, he joined a major software firm; one that would make waves over the next few decades. He is probably driving a Ferrari in sunny California, as we speak. That was another lesson I learnt with e-Governance. The champions of e-Governance have already moved on, even before the systems they develop are entrenched in government processes.

This blog is part of a series on the rollout and progress of e-Governance in India. 

Finally, on the eve of the nineties, I escaped from my dungeon in the Medical Education Department and took charge as Deputy Commissioner of a district. Known as the District Collector in most other states, the posting as the Deputy Commissioner is the single most important aspiration for most people who go through the arduous task of appearing for the civil service entrance exams. The fifty acre forests surrounding the huge colonial era bungalows in which these worthies live, their cars with red beacons on top of them, the appearance of the Deputy Commissioner at most district-level functions, the automatic reference to her as the problem solver in each district, all this drives the popular lore and mystique that surrounds the IAS.

Yet, in Karnataka, the DC of the early nineties was a piffling scaled down version of the real thing. In 1987, the state had gone through a ‘big bang’ effort to deconcentrate power to elected rural local governments, by setting up Zilla Parishads in each district. These bodies were elected and most development departments were transferred from the control of the DC and placed under the Zilla Parishads. What was worse – as seen from the perspective of an IAS officer who dreamt of the day when he would ride into the Collectorate on a white charger (or at least pull up in a white Ambassador) – was that the administration of each ZP was headed by a ‘Chief Secretary’, a far more senior officer to the DC.

Luckily, I was not particularly worried about being dislodged from the numero uno position in the administrative hierarchy of the district. The fact that plenty of open ended development responsibilities had moved to the Zilla Parishad meant that DCs could focus on their core responsibilities, the main of which was land administration.

It was then that I discovered Altaf and Raghavan, two kindred souls.

Altaf was a Shirastedar, a delightful term used to describe someone higher than a head clerk, but not yet an officer. He was one of those rare souls who still retained wit and wisdom even after two decades in government service. His ready smile hid a fanatical commitment to being systematic and a phenomenal memory for the intricacies of the laws relating to land administration.

Raghavan was another restless soul, who, finding the regular land administration work to be too boring, wandered into the National Informatics Centre of the District and discovered that his calling lay in software. He taught himself programming – of course, this was back in the days when Office suites were virtually unknown – and his aptitude got him a job close to the DC’s office, where he could be relied upon to churn out the multitude of reports that are sent every day, which is often the only tangible evidence of any governance happening.

Like all taxation systems, the land revenue laws of most states are precise and logical. Land Administration by the British, which was copied to a large extent by the old Princely State of Mysore, lived by precise data on land assets on which land revenue was assessed, charged and collected. This was maintained by an army of village accountants, displacing an earlier generation of hereditary ‘Shanbhogs’ – village officers who wielded considerable power and influence because of their knowledge over land matters. However, over time, as the attention of DCs began to encompass several welfare programmes, the reporting protocols of land administration had begun to fail. Less attention paid to the daily tasks of land record maintenance, coupled with staff shortages and the expansion of welfare responsibilities, was beginning to weaken the land records system. The resultant confusion and uncertainties about land ownership had the potential to derail the entire economic base for the rural economy.

With my new found enthusiasm for spreadsheets, Raghavan’s far better programming skills and Altaf’s depth of knowledge of the law and rules, we set about systematising land revenue and land records maintenance and creating a computer aided system that would replace the entirely manual one followed so far.

In line with the newly fashionable trend – something that shows no signs of abating three decades later – we used an acronym to describe our efforts. We called our system ‘MISRA’, meaning, a management information system for revenue administration. 

More about MISRA in my next blog.

This blog is part of a series on the rollout and progress of e-Governance in India. 

I fell in love with spreadsheets, even as the rest of government, in the 1980s, looked upon computers as nothing more than modern typewriters. The idea of bunging in formulae into columns and rows and watching them do addition and subtraction and more, was fascinating. Yet, my extolling the virtues of spreadsheets with colleagues and team members – all novices in computers anyway – only drew blank stares. Why would an IAS officer be fooling around with these machines, when they had stenographers to type on them, they seemed to ask.

The stenographers were no good either, when it came to understanding the potential of desktop computers in the office space. They liked them only because they could make corrections with the text without using white fluid, and because they did not have to wait for the tinkle of the typewriter’s bell to ratchet down to the next line. Even when it came to documentation, they did not have any clue about storage of written records and their retrieval on the computer. I could explain all day about how easy it is to prepare tables using spreadsheets – and government lives on tables; usually full of misleading data, but undersecretaries and others preferred the clunky calculator to attempting to enter formulae in spreadsheets. To them, that was programming, and beyond their sarkari remit. We must hire programmers to do that, they said.

The loneliness of being enlightened has its compensations, though.

I worked those days in the Department of Health and Family Welfare, looking after the murky goings on in the Medical Education Department. I operated out of a dank, dark room, beyond which an equally dank and dark corridor was being constructed; with all its attendant delights of wet gunny sacks hanging over my windows for curing the concrete. Sure as anything, I developed a rich, throaty cough, which drove me to gulp down plenty of antibiotics, which in turn, made my tongue the colour and consistency of the concrete being laid just beyond my window. The files I dealt with were not inspiring, either; they were mostly about the shenadigans of private medical colleges, which were charging astronomical fees for ‘management quota’ seats, and which used their leeway to provide subsidised seats to the children of politicians and bureaucrats, to wangle more concessions for themselves.

Suddenly, things began to change; various courts began to issue orders that private medical colleges should not be allowed to operate in this way, and that they must provide a percentage of seats for those clearing the government managed entrance exam, at subsidised rates. The private colleges howled in protest and complained that they were living a hand to mouth existence and that their earnest efforts to improve the lot of humanity by charging plenty of lakhs of rupees for medical seats, were being thwarted by an interfering government.

And so they came to our office in their posh cars, to negotiate the fee structure that would enable them, in their opinion, to break even after they were done with cross subsidising the seats that needed to be filled by students who passed the government conducted examination.

They came well prepared, with data that showed the cost of medical education and how various permutations and combinations of fee structures for different categories of students would affect their bottom line.

My boss came from a trading background; he often proudly told me that he was the first in his family to join the civil services. Whilst medical evidence does not reveal any genetic predilection to driving a hard bargain in those who belong to trading castes and communities, my boss could drive many researchers scuttling to seek conclusions in that direction. He would stare impassively at the bejewelled boss of a private medical college, resplendent in his white safari suit and crocodile skin shoes, reeling off statistics to show that that the government’s proposal for a fee structure was totally unworkable. Then he would tighten the screws by asking for a lower fee for the government student than what the man opposite had used for his worst case scenario projection.

He was able to do that, because I was Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote.

No sooner that I was handed over the calculation sheet presented by the private medical college management, than I would run down the corridor to the Karnataka Government Computer Centre, and breathlessly enter the data myself in those beloved spreadsheets. Bingo! I ran the calculations and created my own analysis of these and prepared alternative scenarios that I would slip into my boss’ hands.

Yeah, spreadsheets were very useful. One could have moved mountains of red tape with them. Yet, nearly three decades later, I am not surprised when I ask data from a government office, and it is often sent as a picture of a table, sent through social media, rather than data in spreadsheets. The large majority of people in the government did not use spreadsheets then, sadly, they don’t do so now either.

And the same chaps who send me pictures of tables of data, also send Whatsapp forwards of how Blockchain Technology is going to revolutionise governance.