getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
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Power shift India: Creating the 21st-century consumer
India turns to technology to extend a guaranteed identity to its poor
Here in the small village of Ambalavayal, in southern India, in a large dim room beside the local school, about 30 villagers sit patiently on benches.
Young mothers in bright saris with babies on their shoulders. Old men with the dust of the fields on their clothes and coarse work-worn hands.
At rough wooden tables, a jumble of cables connect laptops to fingerprinting machines and eye scanners, and one by one the villagers step forward to be fingerprinted, scanned and photographed.
By being catalogued this way — which would be fiercely resisted by people in the privacy-conscious West — each villager is becoming a part of what has been called the biggest social project on the planet.
One of the youngest societies on Earth, and one of the poorest, India is looking to a simple, if intrusive, technolgy to bridge to a brighter future. (Reuters)
The project itself is called Aadhaar, which means foundation, and it has the potential, its proponents believe, to transform India and shift economic power from the hands of the wealthy few to the (potentially) consuming many.
As most of us now know, India has become something of an economic juggernaut over the past decade. In fact, its growth rate this year is expected to be nearly triple that of Canada and other Western nations.
Yet even as the Indian economy produces its annual crop of new billionaires and races ahead statistically, many people are left behind.
One-third of the population, 400 million people, lives on less than $2 a day. Less than half of households have toilets. In even fewer can residents drink water from their own taps. One in four is illiterate.
An almost greater concern is that hundreds of millions of Indians are virtually invisible to the state.
They have no ID. They may have ration cards or election cards but no real identification.
Imagine trying to sign up for government help or open a bank account — less than half the population has one. What's more, only about three per cent of Indians pay income tax.
Microcredit
A central purpose of the Aadhaar identity cards is to extend microcredit and micropayments to India's poor who don't have the kind of ID that banks require by law to open accounts.
The unique identification number will satisfy that requirment and is expected to lead to more branch-less, ATM banking in rural areas, where residents will be able to use their card and a biometric identifier to prove who they are. It will also allow for more designated intermediaries, such as self-help groups and local convenience stories to provide banking services.
This is where Aadhaar comes in. It is a state-organized plan to give every resident — ultimately 1.2 billion of them — a unique 12-digit identity number in which an individual's identity can be verified online, backed up by fingerprints and eye scans.
Once completed, it will be the world's largest biometric database, unprecedented in size and ambition.
A tycoon's legacy
Aadhaar is the brainchild of one of the wealthiest men in the world, Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder of Infosys, one of the giant information technology companies that have driven India's economic success.
As he puts it, "Aadhaar's transformational potential is so immense that it's worth doing. If you're able to marry the power of modern technology to solving the problems of the most deprived of people then that's a big thing."
Nilekani and others argue that simply giving people an identity number brings them into the system, into the formal economy.
It may even encourage people to ask for more government services and demand change.
Also, because the system is online, it offers mobility. It will make it easier, for example, for someone in a village in northern India to move to Delhi to look for work.
As Nilekani sees it, this is a door that opens other doors — making it easier to open a bank account or get a ration card or a driver's license. Or even a welfare cheque without having to pay off some middleman in the process.
The Indian government spends an estimated $60 billion a year on programs for the poor, such as food rations of rice and lentils. And even the politicians here in India admit that as much as half that money never gets to who it is intended for.
Billionaire Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder of Infosys, is the driving force behind the Aadhaar project. He spoke with the CBC's Alison Smith earlier this month. (CBC)
It's either pilfered by sticky-fingered officials along the way, or people on the receiving end have figured out how to scam the system.
Aadhaar is designed to provide an electronic pipeline from government coffers to the bank accounts, or pockets of the poor.
It offers transactions that can be audited and verified online at both ends.
Not only would that make the whole delivery system more efficient, it takes it out of the hands of an archaic and often corrupt bureaucracy.
Big Brother?
Not surprisingly, for all the important ills that Aadhaar would cure, just the idea of this huge national database of identities has vociferous critics who worry about the hijacking of privacy, even national security.
"This is Big Brother," says Mathew Thomas, a civic activist in Bangalore who is launching a lawsuit to try and stop the project.
He thinks it is a waste of money that simply won't work. Government corruption, he argues, can't be eliminated with technology.
In fact, Aadhaar's development over the past two years has been marred at times by bureaucratic infighting, cost overruns (total projected cost is somewhere in excess of $3.5 billion) and finger-pointing.
But Nilekani, who was made a cabinet minister to oversee the project, seems to have sorted these out. Registration is voluntary and on track to sign up 600 million people by 2014 — about half the population.
Aadhaar, though, is more than just a project to empower India's poor, or simply get them their survival rations.
Many people believe India is on the cusp of an economic revolution — along with the other so-called BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) — that could change power relationships around the world.
While Canada, the U.S. and Europe worry about lack of young people and their abilities to support an aging population, India is youth personified: Half the population here is under 25.
In less than a decade the median age in India will be 29 while in Canada, it will be close to 40. What that means is there's a huge, largely untapped pool of Indian workers and consumers with the increasing technological savvy and potential to change India's economy and maybe even bring more of the world's goods to its shores.
Residents of Ambalavayal, in southern India, were lining up to get their biometric identifiers. (Alison Smith/CBC)
Back at that registration centre in Ambalavayal, even though people are willing, even eager to be registered, no one seems really certain what Aadhaar will mean for them.
"I'm not sure what the benefits are," one young mother says, "but it's important to have an identity, for me and my baby."
A young engineering student in Bangalore, can't be specific either but it's definitely good, he says. "You can do anything because you have identity, nobody can question who are you? We can answer, I am an Indian I am a citizen of India."
Harnessing the energy and potential of its young and its poor is, of course, India's big economic and social challenge. And Aadhaar may well be the tool to help do that, with applications that haven't been thought of yet.
Nilekani calls it an app store for development. If all of India is to succeed, a shift has to happen — and then a new and much more broadly based generation of achievers will drive its economic growth.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/04/20/f-power-shift-india.html
India turns to technology to extend a guaranteed identity to its poor
Here in the small village of Ambalavayal, in southern India, in a large dim room beside the local school, about 30 villagers sit patiently on benches.
Young mothers in bright saris with babies on their shoulders. Old men with the dust of the fields on their clothes and coarse work-worn hands.
At rough wooden tables, a jumble of cables connect laptops to fingerprinting machines and eye scanners, and one by one the villagers step forward to be fingerprinted, scanned and photographed.
By being catalogued this way — which would be fiercely resisted by people in the privacy-conscious West — each villager is becoming a part of what has been called the biggest social project on the planet.
One of the youngest societies on Earth, and one of the poorest, India is looking to a simple, if intrusive, technolgy to bridge to a brighter future. (Reuters)
The project itself is called Aadhaar, which means foundation, and it has the potential, its proponents believe, to transform India and shift economic power from the hands of the wealthy few to the (potentially) consuming many.
As most of us now know, India has become something of an economic juggernaut over the past decade. In fact, its growth rate this year is expected to be nearly triple that of Canada and other Western nations.
Yet even as the Indian economy produces its annual crop of new billionaires and races ahead statistically, many people are left behind.
One-third of the population, 400 million people, lives on less than $2 a day. Less than half of households have toilets. In even fewer can residents drink water from their own taps. One in four is illiterate.
An almost greater concern is that hundreds of millions of Indians are virtually invisible to the state.
They have no ID. They may have ration cards or election cards but no real identification.
Imagine trying to sign up for government help or open a bank account — less than half the population has one. What's more, only about three per cent of Indians pay income tax.
Microcredit
A central purpose of the Aadhaar identity cards is to extend microcredit and micropayments to India's poor who don't have the kind of ID that banks require by law to open accounts.
The unique identification number will satisfy that requirment and is expected to lead to more branch-less, ATM banking in rural areas, where residents will be able to use their card and a biometric identifier to prove who they are. It will also allow for more designated intermediaries, such as self-help groups and local convenience stories to provide banking services.
This is where Aadhaar comes in. It is a state-organized plan to give every resident — ultimately 1.2 billion of them — a unique 12-digit identity number in which an individual's identity can be verified online, backed up by fingerprints and eye scans.
Once completed, it will be the world's largest biometric database, unprecedented in size and ambition.
A tycoon's legacy
Aadhaar is the brainchild of one of the wealthiest men in the world, Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder of Infosys, one of the giant information technology companies that have driven India's economic success.
As he puts it, "Aadhaar's transformational potential is so immense that it's worth doing. If you're able to marry the power of modern technology to solving the problems of the most deprived of people then that's a big thing."
Nilekani and others argue that simply giving people an identity number brings them into the system, into the formal economy.
It may even encourage people to ask for more government services and demand change.
Also, because the system is online, it offers mobility. It will make it easier, for example, for someone in a village in northern India to move to Delhi to look for work.
As Nilekani sees it, this is a door that opens other doors — making it easier to open a bank account or get a ration card or a driver's license. Or even a welfare cheque without having to pay off some middleman in the process.
The Indian government spends an estimated $60 billion a year on programs for the poor, such as food rations of rice and lentils. And even the politicians here in India admit that as much as half that money never gets to who it is intended for.
Billionaire Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder of Infosys, is the driving force behind the Aadhaar project. He spoke with the CBC's Alison Smith earlier this month. (CBC)
It's either pilfered by sticky-fingered officials along the way, or people on the receiving end have figured out how to scam the system.
Aadhaar is designed to provide an electronic pipeline from government coffers to the bank accounts, or pockets of the poor.
It offers transactions that can be audited and verified online at both ends.
Not only would that make the whole delivery system more efficient, it takes it out of the hands of an archaic and often corrupt bureaucracy.
Big Brother?
Not surprisingly, for all the important ills that Aadhaar would cure, just the idea of this huge national database of identities has vociferous critics who worry about the hijacking of privacy, even national security.
"This is Big Brother," says Mathew Thomas, a civic activist in Bangalore who is launching a lawsuit to try and stop the project.
He thinks it is a waste of money that simply won't work. Government corruption, he argues, can't be eliminated with technology.
In fact, Aadhaar's development over the past two years has been marred at times by bureaucratic infighting, cost overruns (total projected cost is somewhere in excess of $3.5 billion) and finger-pointing.
But Nilekani, who was made a cabinet minister to oversee the project, seems to have sorted these out. Registration is voluntary and on track to sign up 600 million people by 2014 — about half the population.
Aadhaar, though, is more than just a project to empower India's poor, or simply get them their survival rations.
Many people believe India is on the cusp of an economic revolution — along with the other so-called BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) — that could change power relationships around the world.
While Canada, the U.S. and Europe worry about lack of young people and their abilities to support an aging population, India is youth personified: Half the population here is under 25.
In less than a decade the median age in India will be 29 while in Canada, it will be close to 40. What that means is there's a huge, largely untapped pool of Indian workers and consumers with the increasing technological savvy and potential to change India's economy and maybe even bring more of the world's goods to its shores.
Residents of Ambalavayal, in southern India, were lining up to get their biometric identifiers. (Alison Smith/CBC)
Back at that registration centre in Ambalavayal, even though people are willing, even eager to be registered, no one seems really certain what Aadhaar will mean for them.
"I'm not sure what the benefits are," one young mother says, "but it's important to have an identity, for me and my baby."
A young engineering student in Bangalore, can't be specific either but it's definitely good, he says. "You can do anything because you have identity, nobody can question who are you? We can answer, I am an Indian I am a citizen of India."
Harnessing the energy and potential of its young and its poor is, of course, India's big economic and social challenge. And Aadhaar may well be the tool to help do that, with applications that haven't been thought of yet.
Nilekani calls it an app store for development. If all of India is to succeed, a shift has to happen — and then a new and much more broadly based generation of achievers will drive its economic growth.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/04/20/f-power-shift-india.html
Ironicwarcriminal
Ironicwarcriminal
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I hope you don't expect us to feel guilty about this. India has had decades to choose to implement proper welfare and population control programs and has chosen squalor instead. It's hardly our fault if western capital wants to have a go at picking up the pieces
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aerdil
aerdil
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damn i read the title and expected it to be a friedman article
GoldenLionTamarin
GoldenLionTamarin
Goldgelbes Löwenäffchen
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im not reading this. please put it in TED talk format. thank you
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Myfanwy
Myfanwy
The Future is Here
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I want those ugly fucker indians to be my slaves and to be crushed in my evil factory's machines with no safety catches whatsoever
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cleanhands
cleanhands
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india, one of the youngest societies on earth
animedad
animedad
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What's more, only about three per cent of Indians pay income tax.
...
One-third of the population, 400 million people, lives on less than $2 a day
...
One-third of the population, 400 million people, lives on less than $2 a day
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getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
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CBC constantly changes their titles for bullshit reasons. Anyway they changed it to something even funnier: "India's Aadhaar ID project turns nation's poor into economic players"
also, bonus CBC comment: "India should make a point of passing on their expertise to 3rd world countries like china to help them enter the 21st century."
also, bonus CBC comment: "India should make a point of passing on their expertise to 3rd world countries like china to help them enter the 21st century."
GoldenLionTamarin
GoldenLionTamarin
Goldgelbes Löwenäffchen
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can we gamify and incentivize this shit and make like, a Zynga facebook game where you compete with your friends and use virtual coins to give microloans to third worlders
getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
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GoldenLionTamarin posted:
can we gamify and incentivize this shit and make like, a Zynga facebook game where you compete with your friends and use virtual coins to give microloans to third worlders
GoldenLionTamarin
GoldenLionTamarin
Goldgelbes Löwenäffchen
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can we do like, farmville, except my decisions on which crops to plant decide the agricultural policies of india for the next decade
Meursault
Meursault
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Whoever earns the most LoanPoints gets to travel to India and personally extort the village into honor-murdering those who fall behind on repayments
getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
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one article i liked about india was like oh man there are horrible water shortages in mumbai. and most of the article focused on upper class families that had to truck in water and like sometimes not take a shower until the afternoon or whatever. and then it included a little bit that was like oh yeah by the way not a lot of toilets among the genpop.
getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
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sometimes municipal socialism is called "sewer socialism" because they just focus on things like hey maybe a toilet or two would be cool and when you read a book like "planet of slums" you can't help but think like okay folks maybe let's try to reduce the number of people per toilet in lagos from 20,000 to 1 or something.
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getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
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CBC analyst:
"First, all of the above negatives are accurate, but every one of them is less prevalent than when I was in Mumbai less than two years ago. Running through the often smelly alleyways early every morning, or winding through jammed streets every evening, certain images stand out: Hardly anyone is begging, even among the poorest of the poor. There are far more begging in downtown Vancouver, it seems, than in downtown Mumbai."
"First, all of the above negatives are accurate, but every one of them is less prevalent than when I was in Mumbai less than two years ago. Running through the often smelly alleyways early every morning, or winding through jammed streets every evening, certain images stand out: Hardly anyone is begging, even among the poorest of the poor. There are far more begging in downtown Vancouver, it seems, than in downtown Mumbai."
animedad
animedad
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cbc analysts are MTW?
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getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
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discipline posted:
time for the british to colonize vancouver I guess
i've got a feeling they've already had some control over British Columbia....
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MadMedico
MadMedico
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Play Disney's new iPhone liquid physics game Where's My Water?, where you use your puzzle solving skills to deliver fresh water to a cute cartoon Indian peasant. Be quick, or he will drink pesticide to kill himself.
swampman
swampman
Dont Mess With Sucess
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getfiscal posted:
sometimes municipal socialism is called "sewer socialism" because they just focus on things like hey maybe a toilet or two would be cool and when you read a book like "planet of slums" you can't help but think like okay folks maybe let's try to reduce the number of people per toilet in lagos from 20,000 to 1 or something.
"It's a little - I don't know, but I would almost call it a colonial condition. It gives me the impression that they are thinking of the building of latrines as a fundamental thing. It would improve the social condition of the poor Negro, who lives under subhuman conditions: Let's make him a latrine, and after that, and also after education has taught him to keep it clean, then he will be able to enjoy the benefits of production. Because we must note, fellow delegates, that the theme of industrialization is not included in the experts' analysis.
For the experts, planning means the planning of latrines. The rest - who knows when it will be done!
If you permit it, Mr. President, I will voice my deep regret, in the name of the Cuban delegation, at the loss of the services of such an efficient expert as the one who directed this first group, Dr. Felipe Pazos. With his intelligence and capacity for work and our revolutionary activity, Cuba would be a latrine paradise in two years. even if we did no t have a single one of the 250 factories that we are beginning to build, even if we had not had the Agrarian Reform." Che Guevara at Punta del Este
getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
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swampman posted:getfiscal posted:
sometimes municipal socialism is called "sewer socialism" because they just focus on things like hey maybe a toilet or two would be cool and when you read a book like "planet of slums" you can't help but think like okay folks maybe let's try to reduce the number of people per toilet in lagos from 20,000 to 1 or something."It's a little - I don't know, but I would almost call it a colonial condition. It gives me the impression that they are thinking of the building of latrines as a fundamental thing. It would improve the social condition of the poor Negro, who lives under subhuman conditions: Let's make him a latrine, and after that, and also after education has taught him to keep it clean, then he will be able to enjoy the benefits of production. Because we must note, fellow delegates, that the theme of industrialization is not included in the experts' analysis.
For the experts, planning means the planning of latrines. The rest - who knows when it will be done!
If you permit it, Mr. President, I will voice my deep regret, in the name of the Cuban delegation, at the loss of the services of such an efficient expert as the one who directed this first group, Dr. Felipe Pazos. With his intelligence and capacity for work and our revolutionary activity, Cuba would be a latrine paradise in two years. even if we did no t have a single one of the 250 factories that we are beginning to build, even if we had not had the Agrarian Reform." Che Guevara at Punta del Este
yeah i agree with that but like also well cuba didn't do that. they became a soviet neocolony. they started with tourists and sugar and ended with tourists and sugar. they actually focused almost all their attention on things like "latrines" such as public health. and that's probably what makes cuban society liveable but it's also probably partly why they are a basket case outside a few sectors.
cleanhands
cleanhands
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theyre really good at ballet too i understand
littlegreenpills
littlegreenpills
Poronto
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cleanhands posted:
theyre really good at ballet too i understand
does anywhere have a ballet-based economy
Ironicwarcriminal
Ironicwarcriminal
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littlegreenpills posted:cleanhands posted:
theyre really good at ballet too i understanddoes anywhere have a ballet-based economy
getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
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apparently it's a whole series. here's a snippet from another one:
Niall Ferguson: a contrary view
There are some people who have a much more cheerful view of the euro crisis — experts who believe much of the crisis is being generated by a mass media hungry for a simple narrative and drama.
This group of euro-believers is a rather small club. Many of them are political leaders such as Germany's Angela Merkel or France's Nicolas Sarkozy, who are probably duty-bound to paint a rosy picture.
One notable, unaligned believer, however, is Niall Ferguson of Harvard University's Centre for European Studies.
A celebrated economic historian — his bestselling books include Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire and The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World – Ferguson tends to take the very long view of economic crises.
This one is serious, he allows, and there is no easy way out for Italy, which faces a future of crippling unemployment and wrenching changes. "There is no policy option that keeps the post-war welfare state functioning," Ferguson says, flatly.
Still, "personally I don't think that one needs to be too apocalyptic about this," he told me recently. "One of the fascinating things about this crisis has been the excessive pessimism of people in North America who previously never gave a thought to the euro. Mostly this pessimism is ill informed."
Niall Ferguson: a contrary view
There are some people who have a much more cheerful view of the euro crisis — experts who believe much of the crisis is being generated by a mass media hungry for a simple narrative and drama.
This group of euro-believers is a rather small club. Many of them are political leaders such as Germany's Angela Merkel or France's Nicolas Sarkozy, who are probably duty-bound to paint a rosy picture.
One notable, unaligned believer, however, is Niall Ferguson of Harvard University's Centre for European Studies.
A celebrated economic historian — his bestselling books include Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire and The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World – Ferguson tends to take the very long view of economic crises.
This one is serious, he allows, and there is no easy way out for Italy, which faces a future of crippling unemployment and wrenching changes. "There is no policy option that keeps the post-war welfare state functioning," Ferguson says, flatly.
Still, "personally I don't think that one needs to be too apocalyptic about this," he told me recently. "One of the fascinating things about this crisis has been the excessive pessimism of people in North America who previously never gave a thought to the euro. Mostly this pessimism is ill informed."
getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
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yeah most of this is just media hot air
*half of greek youth are unemployed*
*half of greek youth are unemployed*
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getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
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discipline posted:
Niall Ferguson
a celebrated economic historian, discipline. can't argue with that. a guy that says imperialism was of net benefit to the colonized.
TROT_CUMLOVER
TROT_CUMLOVER
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is niall ferguson still advising the uk government on rewriting the school history curriculum? lol
Tsargon
Tsargon
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discipline posted:
Niall Ferguson
Muse
Muse
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discipline posted:
Turd Ferguson