The government provides applications that many cannot use
Poverty and illiteracy deprive millions of digital services in India
Kindergarten Network is a successful project in India.
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Tens of millions suffer from poverty and the absence of basic services.
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Obtaining a driver's license in New Delhi requires one 20-minute visit, during which the applicant passes a digital test, then a fast and efficient driving test, and the new driver receives a message upon leaving the examination center saying, “Congratulations!
The license will arrive in the mail within 24 hours.” At 8.30 the next morning, the postman hands the elegant new chip backed card.
Such superior government service can be found in other poor countries as well, but only by paying a bribe. The secret in the Indian capital is the national identification system called Aadhaar, introduced over the past decade and now covering all but India's population. A small part of a country of 1.4 billion people.
Everyone has their own 12-digit number, backed by fingerprints and retina scans, allowing instant proof of identity and residency, tainted birth certificates, bundled utility bills or rental contracts no longer needed.
Given the sheer scale in India, and thanks to the large number of highly skilled employees and workers, its governments in the various provinces have increasingly turned to high-tech solutions to deal with all sorts of problems, and in general have eased the burdens on the rulers and citizens, despite some foreseeable loopholes. Administrative infrastructure, such as Adahar, has improved public services such as digital payments, online shopping, and online education. Yet precisely because of India’s size and poverty, tens of millions are still not covered;
Because they are poor, illiterate, handicapped, lack electricity, do not have a smart phone, or do not have access to a mobile network or Wi-Fi.
Access to benefits
Take, for example, Rina Devi, a mother of two young children in Bihar, India's poorest state. After her husband died last year, she was supposed to get a widow's pension and a job offer, among other things, but when the researcher met Phiom Anil, Economist Jan Drees met Mrs. Davy by chance and found that she had lost her ID, so she also lost access to benefits, and with no phone, no registered mail address, and no record of her date of birth, Davey was unable to retrieve her number. Alfred, and for four months the two academics tried to re-enroll Davey, and finally a Latif official went the extra mile, found her file and issued a new card.
Devi has been fortunate to get help, and in some tragically cases people have starved to death, losing access to subsidized food, because they cannot link their old ration cards to the new Aadhaar cards, or because fingerprint readers in remote towns do not work properly. It is more common for the poor to dispense with government assistance.
Recent surveys by Luqunity, a polling center, show that four out of five Indian families use public food supply schemes, of which 28 percent say they have been denied food rations at some point due to issues with the Aadhaar identity system.
He states that biometric identification has helped reduce theft and corruption, but to a lesser extent than non-technical fixes to the food system.
big holes
There are also major loopholes in other government plans, and the vaccination campaign against “Covid-19” in India, which began in January, quickly declined, and not only because the government failed to obtain sufficient doses, as it is possible to book an appointment to take the vaccination only through Cowen online service.
This proves to be easy for people who can read, write, use modern devices, and have even some basic knowledge of the English language.
Most of those without such knowledge, the vast majority of Indians, had to wait until June, when the government quietly began to admit shortcomings, and India is now close to giving one billion doses of the coronavirus vaccine, a remarkable achievement, but Only a quarter of those over the age of 11 have been fully vaccinated.
Ranked among the most successful in India, a social program is a decades-old network of about 1.35 million kindergartens offering free meals, known as Angan Wadis. The network has suffered high-tech disruption. In March, all network workers, women earning less than $150 a month, were instructed to use a new government-provided smartphone app, and failure to upload classroom data could lead to wages and food supply suspensions, threatening a vital source of nutrition for the poorest children. India.
The workers say that the application is difficult to use, because it is only available in English, a language most people do not understand, and consumes so much phone memory that it disables their cheap smartphones, and many do not even have a phone, electricity, or a mobile phone network in their villages. Some say what is wrong with the written notebooks that kindergartens have kept carefully for years, the change seems to be that the government now wants more control and monitoring.
“In one scheme after another, we find that digital transformation has a clear goal,” says economist Jan Drees. Like many critics of the government's approach to using technology, Drees says he does not object to this principle, referring to a scheme in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, It was phased out after the inclusion of "Aadhar", which simply replaced the old ration cards with smart cards, and people loved it because it was simple and practical.
The problem comes when Bangalore's tech advocates forget that they live in a very poor part of India, and this disconnect is then exacerbated by politicians, who are looking for quick and exciting solutions, and rush to implement projects without proper study, while the simpler methods are ignored.
In a random experiment, carried out by researchers from the American Bureau of Economic Research, in order to try to improve the performance of kindergartens “Angan and Addis”, with the help of part-time workers, the result was impressive, as teachers devote more time to educating children, taking care of their health, and doing Administrative work.
Pupils’ performance has improved significantly, however, the government’s budget allocated to the kindergarten network has remained the same, while spending on technology has doubled, and in its quest to become a modern and digital economy, it is feared that India will neglect its poor citizens, who urgently need to benefit from such Services.
• Obtaining a driver's license in New Delhi requires a single visit of 20 minutes, during which the applicant passes a digital test, followed by a fast and efficient driving test.
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