Other nations could benefit from Indias digital transformation

Governance systems developed ground-up in India can be replicated in other places in the world.

Over the last two centuries, India has adopted, or been forced to adopt, standards and systems imported from the West and imposed, except in some cases, from above. So, India's judicial system is a copy of the British legal system, its education system is a product of Lord Macaulay's disdain for all things Indian, its link language is also a gift from the former colonial masters and the Westminster model of democracy that India follows is a close replica of the British parliamentary system.

Some of these systems have served India well but many have not... but that is a topic for another forum another day. The bottom-line is that Independent India has failed to pay sufficient attention to developing indigenous systems that are more suited to its developing economy and cultural underpinnings. So, for Indians it is becoming a matter of great pride and a bit of a curiosity that the world is now sitting up, taking notice and even adopting tools of development that were conceived in India and rolled out with great success.

The World Bank is planning to launch a pilot scheme for the rollout of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's pet scheme, the Jan Dhan Yojana (a financial inclusion scheme to provide every Indian family with a bank account; about 260 million new accounts were opened), in Africa. Then, Modi's JAM (Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile) scheme, linking the more than quarter billion new bank accounts with Unique Identity Numbers known as “Aadhaar numbers” (that is being allotted to every Indian) and mobile phones of the beneficiaries and then directly transferring government subsidies, scholarships and other government support to millions of ordinary Indians showed the world a practical and low cost way in which technology could be harnessed to deliver services to those who needed them most.

This was all the more creditable because even the most patriotic Indian will admit that administrative standards in the country have thus far been abysmal. But that argument can just as easily be flipped around. The successful rollout of the Jan Dhan Yojana and the continuing success of the JAM scheme show that governance systems developed ground-up in India can not only be successful in this country but can be replicated in other places in the world as well.

These are systems that both bureaucrat and beneficiary can relate to; they address a genuine felt need of the people; and this creates a bottom-up pressure on the government machinery to succeed. The rollout of this scheme in Africa will undoubtedly be a feather in the cap of the Modi government but can also become a tool to sell India's soft power to the world. And this can have unexpected economic benefits as Indian service providers follow the rollout with a slew of low-cost, frugal products designed for the bottom of the pyramid - a market that Western counterparts either don't understand or are priced out of.

The logical progression from this point is: why can't India and Indians develop more such home grown solutions for the many problems that are plaguing India- in the education sector, the social sector, in innovation and, indeed, in every other sphere

That could, in fact, already be happening. India's start-up community, the world's second largest, is coming out with new innovations every day to resolve many small and big issues Indians face in our daily lives. For example, an Indian farmer can find out real time market prices for his or her products by just tapping an app or a texting a number from his mobile phone. As this community grows - and grow it will, thanks to the Prime Minister′s Digital India and Start-up India initiatives - many more such tech-based innovations will come to light. They will first roll out in India and then be taken abroad much like the Jan Dhan Yojana. Hopefully, the identification of shoddy governance standards with India will then become history. That journey has started.