Forget Trump and discover the world
IN A recent MSNBC interview, I described President Donald Trump as a “brain-eating disease”. did so because his indecent behaviour, and nonstop outrageous tweets and actions, force you as a commentator into a terrible choice: either ignore it all and risk normalising 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 digitisation 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 digitised data.
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 Par- ty-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 energised 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 licence, this has been a revolution, because they can now open a bank account and get government aid sent directly to them.
The digital network platforms that have broken the 1-billion-plus user mark – like Facebook, Google and What- sApp – all came out of the private sector. Aadhaar, noted the Harvard Business Review, is the only non-US platform “to have broken the 1-billion-user threshold and the only such system to have been developed by the public sector”. It also has the distinction of “having reached 1 billion users the fastest”.
Now, any Indian farmer can just go to one of 250,000 government community centres – each with a computer, WiFi 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.
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.
Similar innovations are going on in energy, explained Mahesh Kolli, president of Greenko, India’s largest renewable power provider.
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 1,200-hectare field of Chinesemade solar panels generating 800 megawatts powering more than 600,000 homes in the state of Andhra Pradesh.
“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.”
So while we’ve been following Trump’s tweets about bringing back “beautiful coal”, India built a 1-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?