Mumbai, INDIA — In a recent MSNBC interview I described President Trump as a “brain-eating disease.”
I
did so because his indecent behavior, and nonstop outrageous tweets and
actions, force you as a commentator into a terrible choice: either
ignore it all and risk normalizing Trump’s excesses or write about him
constantly and risk not having the time to learn and report about the
big trends now reshaping the world — trends that one day will surprise
your readers and leave them asking, “Why didn’t I know this?”
To
inoculate myself against Trump eating my brain, I occasionally get as
far away as I can. This time it was to India, where I learned a ton that
I didn’t know: I found India trying to leapfrog out of poverty and
catch up to China by engaging in a rapid digitization of its entire
economy and power grid.
Yes,
while our president has been busy playing golf, tweeting about LaVar
Ball and pushing an anything-that-will-pass tax plan, China has been
busy creating a cashless society, where people can pay for so many
things now with just a swipe of their cellphones — including donations
to beggars — or even buy stuff at vending machines with just facial
recognition, and India is trying to follow suit.
These
are big trends, and in a world where data is the new oil, China and
India are each creating giant pools of digitized data that their
innovators are using to write all kinds of interoperable applications —
for cheap new forms of education, medical insurance, entertainment,
banking and finance.
Continue reading the main story
I
was blown away by one big change in India in particular. In 2009, my
friend Nandan Nilekani, the tech entrepreneur, led a team of experts
that helped the then-Congress Party-led government launch a national
digital identity system, known as Aadhaar (Hindi for “base”).
Every
Indian, rich or poor, goes into a field office, has fingerprints and
irises scanned into a biometric database and then linked to the
individual’s 12-digit ID number with basic identifiers: name, address,
date of birth and sex. When the Congress Party left office in 2014, and
Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party took over, Modi continued and
impressively energized the Aadhaar project, bringing it today to 1.18
billion users, out of a population of about 1.3 billion.
In
a country where many poor people lacked any form of ID, like a birth
certificate or a driver’s license, this has been a revolution, because
they can now open a bank account and get government aid sent directly to
them — rather than having bureaucrats, bankers or postal workers skim
off 30 percent each year through the mail — and then link their bank
account to their mobile phones, from which they can buy, sell, transfer
money and receive payments digitally anytime anywhere.
The
digital network platforms that have broken the one-billion-plus user
mark — like Facebook, Google and WhatsApp — all came out of the private
sector. Aadhaar, noted the Harvard Business Review, is the only non-U.S.
platform “to have broken the one-billion-user threshold and the only
such system to have been developed by the public sector.” It also has
the distinction of “having reached one billion users the fastest.”
When
the British laid railroads in India it led to the more efficient
extraction of natural resources. Now the Indian government, through the
combination of a trusted unique ID platform — tied to cellphones and
mobile bank accounts — is creating a kind of digital railroad enabling
the more efficient empowerment of human resources.
“It’s
transforming the lives of ordinary people,” explained Alok Kshirsagar, a
McKinsey partner based in Mumbai. “Millions are already benefiting from
digital payments and credit. There are already more than 30 percent
productivity gains when digital capabilities are used in agriculture,
transportation and manufacturing. We are in the early stages of a
transformation that could generate as much as $1 trillion in economic
value over the next seven to 10 years.”
Now
any Indian farmer can just go to one of 250,000 government community
centers — each with a computer, Wi-Fi and a local entrepreneur who
manages it — log into a government digital services website with the
farmer’s unique ID and instantly print out a birth certificate or land
records needed for transactions.
An
Indian friend told me: “My driver has two bank accounts, and he has
given one debit card to his wife and another to his son. And now he
tells me he puts X amount of his salary into one account and Y into
another, using his cellphone, so his wife is empowered and not asking
her mother-in-law for money, because she has her own debit card, and the
son, who is off in school training to be a doctor, can be independent.”
Nilekani
and his wife, Rohini, have built a foundation, EkStep, to create mobile
education apps to help parents, teachers and students — armed only with
cellphones — to learn faster, using these new digital networks. As
Shankar Maruwada, an EkStep co-founder and its C.E.O., explained:
Unlike, say Facebook, whose business model is to “retain your
attention,” EkStep, Aadhaar and other such “societal platforms” are
designed to “restore your agency,” particularly to the poor.
The
West got economically rich “before it got data rich,” added Pramod
Varma, EKStep’s chief technology officer. “So when data came along, it
just became a better way to sell you things. They could target you
better; you became a better customer for them. But in a country like
India, where per-capita income is $2,000, today you can get data rich
before you get economically rich. And if you empower people with their
data, they can use their data to get better loans, get better skills,
and build a digital repository that captures their skills to get better
salaries.”
Similar
innovations are going on in energy, explained Mahesh Kolli, president
of Greenko, India’s largest renewable power provider. Theft of
electricity from state-owned distribution companies amounted to some 20
percent of their output, as people strung wires to siphon from the grid,
or the companies couldn’t identify users.
Now
the government “can link my unique ID to my electricity bill” and then
directly and digitally connect my government subsidy, if I am poor, to
that electric bill, said Kolli. Greenko just built the largest solar
project in the world — a 3,000-acre field of Chinese-made solar panels
generating 800 megawatts powering over 600,000 homes in Andhra Pradesh.
Two more such fields are on the way up, all connecting to the national
grid.
Oh,
and by the way, for those of you who want to preserve coal jobs, this
800-megawatt solar farm “was built with over 5,000 skilled and
semiskilled workers,” said Kolli. “We believe the renewable energy
sector will create over one million new generation jobs to meet the
175-gigawatt target set by Prime Minister Modi.”
Greenko
builds these plants, he added, “in five months using Chinese panels and
European inverter-grid integration technologies made in India.” (Notice
the absence of U.S. technology in that loop.) Greenko is also making
huge strides in battery technology to store solar energy, so it can be
used when the sun is not shining, and the company is now in the midst of
building the first grid-connected battery storage system integrated
with its solar farms.
“No
new coal or gas power plants are being built in India today,” he added,
“not because of regulations, but because solar, wind, hydro are all now
able to compete with coal plants without subsides.”
Bottom
line, the Indian energy economy is rapidly transitioning to a
“decarbonized, digitized and decentralized” system, said Kolli, enabling
better quality of life while meeting big energy needs — without the
government having to deal with all the protests that come with building
coal- or gas-fired plants.
So
while we’ve been following Trump’s tweets about bringing back
“beautiful coal,” India built a billion-user ID network bigger than
Twitter and giant solar power plants that are cheaper than coal.
That’s what you missed — and that’s just one country. Are you tired of winning yet?
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