Nandan Nilekani is India’s smartest technology entrepreneur who, due to a temporary lapse of judgement, decided to enter electoral politics, something which many, including this writer, advised him against. He lost, but his ideas continue to win with Aadhar, which, despite unfortunate legal and administrative setbacks, promises to be a genuine game-changer. Nandan himself swears never ever to enter the electoral arena, something hopefully time will prove him wrong on, for with his ideas and ability to get things done, he can write a part of India’s digital destiny.
His new tome, with Viral Shah, is an outstanding roadmap for a digital India and delineates a kind of ‘governpreneurship’ for unleashing entrepreneurship inside government. The book provides an interesting blueprint on how to combine the strengths of government, such as scale, stability and staffing with the speed and agility of start-ups. The overarching theme of simplicity and scale runs throughout the book. It is estimated that by 2020, Bangalore alone will overtake Silicon Valley to become the single largest IT+knowledge geographical cluster on the planet, with two million direct jobs, six million indirect jobs and Rs 4 lakh crore-worth of exports (or about 40 per cent of India’s total IT exports). That’s a tipping point for India; this book is a salute to that India.
Nandan talks of the ‘WhatsApp moment’ in finance, whereby around 2020, India will be the only country to have one billion Jan Dhan bank accounts, Aadhar identities and mobile connections which, he argues, will transform credit, lending, peer-to-peer money transfer—all a two-factor authentication activated by one click on the phone. The book argues that irrespective of the colour of the government of the day, programmes like Aadhar and PaHal are a testimony to Indian democracy and bureaucracy’s strengths to provide continuity to critical endeavours. The book also has eye- catching illustrations.
The key questions, as always, are never about technology but about leadership. When it comes to technology, there are many who can do it as well, if not better than Nandan, but there are hardly a handful who can provide the leadership inside government to make Digital India happen. Nandan’s political cooling-off is currently going on, but who knows what 2019 holds!
In stark contrast to Nandan’s book, Dreaming Big: My journey to Connect India (Penguin; 304 pages, Rs 699), by Sam Pitroda and David Chanoff, is a lost opportunity and is more of a biography of Pitroda rather than a blueprint for India to go digital. It is more about I, me, myself and India’s telecom revolution and peppered with anecdotes about how his journey brought him to become one of the many fathers of India’s telecom revolution. In fact, Pitroda opposed the early introduction of cellular phones in India!
Indeed, Pitroda’s impact in the real world was far less than what is enunciated in the book, and he needs to explain why from 2004 to 2014, despite his self-proclaimed proximity to powers that be, neither Digital India nor connecting India advanced much, and why he could not overrule risk-averse babus who he despises so much. Unless he himself counted for nothing much to write home about. He was largely consigned to the Planning Commission, which his own boss called the ‘dustbin of the bureaucracy’, had an ornamental advisory status in the PMO, and did nothing much. If he was such a hotshot as the book argues, why didn’t the UPA government make him the Union minister for IT?
Pitroda also doesn’t reveal anything about why he couldn’t practise what he preached and why his company, World Tel, could do nothing much in India. There was also a lingering suspicion inside government about their intentions and multiple perceived and real conflicts of interest. Thus his journey to connect India stopped after his much talked about initial success with CDOT and STD PCO booths, which, of course, were impressive! Much like Narendra Hirwani, who is still remembered for that one hugely successful Test match, so is Pitroda for this!
Nandan looks at the future, Pitroda at the past. Nandan’s book is an infinitely superior read and let’s hope Nandan’s own ‘WhatsApp moment’ in Indian politics will help him realise his own and a billion other aspirations.
(The author is an IAS officer.)
The Word
Nandan Nilekani is a good quizzer. He was part of the IIT Bombay quiz team that came third in the 1979 Mood Indigo final. A competitor says he was laidback and generous.
