Season 2 Episode 1

Transcript

Hi, I am Samiran! Hi, I am Nilesh Hi, I am Sheetal and you are listening to 3TB Banter. 3 Techies Banter.

Hi, I am Nilesh Patankar. Welcome to the second season of 3TB, a podcast where 3 techies’ banter. It is a podcast where you explore tech the non-tech way. It is about tech, economics behind the tech, impact today and in the future. In Season 2 we have tweaked the format a little bit based on the feedback we received. So what we are going to do in season 2 is, we are going to take up a topic and treat it as a theme of the month. As a theme of the month we will have about 3-4 episodes dedicated to a particular theme. The aim was that in a way we will do justice to a topic in a structured manner and hopefully we are planning to get in the 4th episode in every theme a relevant guest. So the whole idea is to make it contextual, to make it structured and make it more relevant for all you to grasp the information so that was the idea. The feedback was to make it a bit more racy pacy and as usually peppered with humor. So you will see the duration of the podcast will also be tweaked a little bit. So without further ado, the theme for the month is going to be India stack and before I let Sheetal describe what we are going to cover within India stack, I would suggest all our listeners to checkout India Stack.org. A lot of rich information is available about the whole stack and we will kind of introduce the whole topic to you in an inceptual kind of manner. Over to you Sheetal.

Thanks Nilesh and welcome everyone, it's a pleasure to be back and we are hoping this season is going to be even more fun. Like Nilesh mentioned, this month’s theme is a theme that honestly should excite everyone, not just Indians but even people overseas. We are going to talk about the India stack and while the name bears India as a part of it, I think the vision for the India stack is not only limited to any one country. As we speak the UIDAI is already working with the World Bank and UN to replicate the aadhar infrastructure and the aadhar architecture in other countries. So honestly, when it comes to democratization of finance in that sense, we seem to have taken a really big leap through the India stack and yes we have talked about the India stack. So what is really the India stack and if i am to really quote Mr. Nilekani, he speaks of the India stack as something which will enable digital transformation in this country at population scale and remember that we have a population of 1.39 billion people today. So here’s a stack which is going to help us make sure that we’re able to digitally create inclusion and democratize a lot of the financial issues of this country through technology. The India stack really has 3 parts to it right, it has the first layer which is called the identity layer and in the identity layer it's really about giving every resident a unique ID. I am sure all of us are aware that aadhaar, which is an identity layer of the India stack, is the world's largest biometric database right now with over a billion people or a billion records if I may call it. So the first layer therefore is the identity layer. The second layer of the India stack is the payment layer. Which means it allows anyone to may anyone else? It is interoperable, it is fast, it is cheap and it's not necessarily mobile phones driven. It has a lot to do with mobile phones but it is not necessarily mobile phone driven and the last layer of the stack is really data empowerment and enabling secure sharing of data. Now today what we are going to cover is really just the identity layer and then in the next episode we are going to cover the payments layer and third episode we are going to talk about data empowerment. Let me tell you that you must hear the 3rd episode, of course you should hear all but the 3rd episode because the plans that the government has with the entire data empowerment layer is extremely exciting and could really be game changing in its own way. So aadhar has been game changing as far as identity is concerned. Digital payments all of us know today we are doing UPI, BHIM, Gpay, it has become so easy, none of us really have to run around to banks etc. and then comes the data empowerment which i think i am super super excited about but i am going to reign in my excitement and give it to Nilesh and Nilesh you know there is this interesting thing right that it's all about stacks and i keep recalling our conversations on block chain which you keep talking about as stacks. Is there any commonality between the India stack and maybe blockchain?

Well, it was a mathematical decision I promise you. So I don't know about randomness but math was involved. So yes, absolutely let's take a quick pause and come back with Samiran telling us why we need digital identities.

Hi everyone, welcome to the next segment in our India stack digital identity podcast. Identity is just so fundamental to what we do and it is of course so misunderstood. In fact so much so that when my mother told me that i could be anyone i wanted to be, i did not realize that i amounted to identity theft because if i wanted to be anyone i would essentially would have had to steal someone else’s identity. But having said that people have known the importance of identity from time immoral and that's why you have seals on wax, people carry their own family insignia on their rings and putting it on wax seals just to prove who they are to the other person. In fact that is also the historical genesis of the military salute which is kind of that vertical one that US forces use. That used to be used by knights to kind of identify themselves to each other where they used to actually live there wiser to kind of tell the other person who they are. With all surprisingly, the whole world of identity is also full of paradoxes. In fact i came across some really crazy and complicated ones in this stanford site, it’s that plato.stanford.edu and one of the ones i kind of remember this whole thing around the holy trinity where it’s the father, son and the holy ghost but at the same time there is just one God. So how the hell do you resolve this whole identity, is there one God, are there 3, are there 12cr like they are in India. So all are very complicated.

Or is it the father of Gods and then the rest of the Gods.

There is a father and there are probably children.

You are trading in dangerous zones Samiran.

The national interest security lies there.

We will quickly apologize if we have hurt anybody’s sensibility.

But this is all to prove how important and great aadhar is actually because it solves all of these things. It tells you exactly who you are so I am still waiting to discover how they have given it to all the Gods.

So Samiran when you said who you are and aadhar kind of solves it, it brought me to a very simple thing many of our listeners might be aware, for me when i first heard it, it felt it was the best way to describe identity and authentication which is one factor authentication, two factor authentication, three factor authentication and at first time i heard it blew my mind, i really loved it. So one factor authentication is essentially what you know, so all cross your Gmail and everything, password is what you know and that's how you are identified. And then came 2 factor authentication which is everywhere in India and it is great, it gives a lot of comfort and 2 factor authentication is what you have other than what you know. And what you have essentially 10 years back was the credit card so that was the card present, not credit but credit, debit any kind of card. A card present transaction, what you have and it is OTP. so 2 factor authentication is you get OTP and that is what you have. So done very well in India and probably in payment stack will touch upon it, it gives as that security of mind. The ultimate level of security is 3 factor authentication and 3 fa is actually who you are and when you are talking to who you are and aadhar it just came to my mind that with aadhar honestly and that is why i said this whole layered architecture, we are ready for 3 fa. I am pretty sure we are probably one of the countries who will see it earlier than later, than many other developed countries. So Samiran, you were mentioning something about the global landscape of identity and then maybe we will jump into the design part which is quite interesting.

Absolutely and in fact good that you mentioned 2 fa and many of the listeners would realize how unnerving it is when you are on international sites, you just put in your credit card it goes through. We have so psychologically got used to this 2 factor authentication where you get an OTP and put it in, it is so unnerving when you are on international sites and payment goes through just like that, that's 2 factors for you. All the issues of identity, the world has been struggling with identity for a very long time. In fact if you kind of look at the whole landscape of national identity globally, it pretty much looks like the whole world has identity but when you kind of slice it and look at countries with digital identity, shockingly enough the US drops off. They don't have a digital identity and then if you kind of bring that down further and look at countries with the digital identity with biometrics then you are pretty much looking at parts of Africa, parts of South America, India and few others. A large part of Europe doesn't have it, the US of course doesn't have it, and Canada doesn't have it. So it's something to be extremely proud about, it's something to feel good about. In terms of the overall landscape we are as a planet not doing too well because 1 in 7 people do not have an identity even today which is a very shocking number. In fact worse than that, half the children below the age of 5 dont have identity and there are about 600 million people below the age of 15 or something who don't have identity. These numbers by themselves are shocking, what it also leads to is this whole thing of human trafficking, slavery, these are unaccounted heads of population and nobody knows about them. In fact a McKinsey study had also said that just the introduction of digital identity will push national GDPs up by 3-5% by the year 2030. That's the amount of impetus it can give you because what it means for individuals is the ability to buy, sell, to do commerce. For companies it means less fraud, much more transparency and transactions so there is a huge thing going for digital identity and i think just quickly coming back to India before i pass it on to you that, on the aadhaar side, i was part of the aadhar, i would say the tiniest tiny cog in the wheel probably the briefest possible type but what i learnt there was the importance of having inclusion simplicity as design parameters. They made it very easy for you to be part of it and made it simple. Simple examples i will give you, there was this huge debate about the name feel, the world over you have first name, middle name, last name but in India that thing just completely changes. If you go from north to south it changes. So in aadhar there is only a name fill, you can fill in whatever you want. No exclusion can happen because your name is weird. Same thing with address, they didn’t create fields based on predetermined characteristics because in rural India it's different, in urban India it's different. Rural India is under the tree, behind the temple, next to the sarpanch’s house and all of that. They just made it a box. The whole principal was, include everyone, and keep it simple because there was this whole thing of componentizing micro services so it tested every component for scale and then whole part for scale so that any component which did not work, they could throw it off. Which i think has a lot of ramifications for the future and i think the important thing to remember about aadhar is that the founding designers knew this thing will need to be redone and changed and it is going to fail from time to time so as Sheetal, you mentioned it, it was built for improvement.

Great. You know Samiran it is very interesting and the fact that they made it simple for inclusion right because the entire philosophy behind the whole India stack and aadhar was inclusion. It was the fact that it was digital identity which was going to democratize access services. That is beautiful for them to have simplified because when you simplify that, it makes life much easier for everyone. Having said that, I also think that what is interesting is, Nilesh, we spoke about the layers but i think what is also interesting is that the India stacks is just a set of open protocols. Its open protocols, its identity platform and in its policies. So therefore it's really giving you a structure rather than making it so cumbersome that you cannot possibly build off or grow from the identity layer. So a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of startups have actually leveraged the entire architecture of aadhar to build products on it in order to solve problems. It's quite a fascinating piece because what we are doing now is not owning all of the innovation, they are saying you can own the innovation, we will provide the infrastructure for you and there are policies around it and there are protocols around it so much that you cannot abuse it which i think is another very interesting aspect of it.

Right. I think what was heartening and what Samiran mentioned, they had factored in the failures. Things can go wrong and we will look at it as and when it happens. So that part reminds me of the agile iterative development which fails fast and innovates at every step. So that is very heartening and the India stack and architecture India stack followed the modern development methodologies. Same thing holds true for your whole micro services aspect that what you mentioned Samiran. Like you create components, you create services, you test them for scale and put them all together and have all those what we call abstract interfaces and in object-oriented programming you will have abstract oriented phases which can be extended, which can be connected. So I think architecturally the whole design was extremely sound and the idea is that I think a lot of learnings of the past had gone into it. So I was just thinking the other day that there was a time when we just had the ration card, then the ration card was never unique, you name was in your father’s, parent’s ration card and when you are married. It was like a whole gamut of things you are to do to get another ration card and for a very long time it was also one identity document but not really unique in any shape of form so the design part was really interesting.

So Nilesh, just too intercheck speaking of Ration card, the Ration card is the true reflection of our patriarchal society, the Ration card is in the name of the Male of the House hold and everybody else is just a member in the family. Ration card is totally designed in India Male patriarchy system, which I think Aadhar is able to break and it has actually given women identity of their own and I will go on and on will take it up but not right now, because it has benefited women in ways, can it be better yes, but it has already started benefiting women in certain ways, so that is the interesting thing about Ration card vs Aadhar card. Now an individual has an identity and not a family.

Infact Sheetal, what might be interesting at this stage would be you could give a sense of the scale of operations of Aadhar and may be something to drop parallel because the number are so strangling and we cannot take this thing for Granted in India, anything we do is the billion but we don’t realize the population of country is fashion on this.

That’s true, just think about it when they started the project and they were thinking about it in 2008, only 17% of India was buying prior to whole aadhar, KYC and all, in 2016 you still had only 22 million people who were buying and there was who were in capital market, one of the key reason why it was tarping, the fact that cost of KYC is very high and it was all paper work, so I was listening to one of the chat and he said that Mutual Fund distributor get .5% and cost of KYC in those days was 1500rs, so in order just to recover the cost of KYC, the person have to give him a cheque of 3lakhs. How many people would have issue cheque of 3lakhs to get the Mutual Fund, if the cost is so high and that’s what is interesting and that is the break through Aadhar is able to bring. I mean our Neo banks now are fully funneled because of Aadhar, E-KYC, E-signature. What is also interesting is we have not done any leaner work and because of the simplicity we have did, we compressed the cycle which was expected to be four-decade long cycle, so we have gone traditional route of on-boarding people and giving them identities and all of that, it would have taken 46yrs, we have compressed that and bought it down in the time that we have, which I think is mind bugling, how much information we have collected. Just to give you strange parallel on this, FaceBook took about 11yrs to get 1.9billion users and we don’t know these are unique users because I am sure multiple people have multiple FaceBook profiles and some would be organization and some would be individual, but it took them about 11yrs. Google took 15yrs, actually Gmail started in 1999 and it was in 2019 they were able to get 1.5billion active users, so that was good 20yrs that have taken Gmail to get billion of users.

So in the terms of scale, I will just give you an example here, in terms of design of Aadhar. Aadhar was design with the expectation that million people would enroll every day, so think about it a million a day it is Finland in 5days, Ukraine in 40days, so it is just mind bulging so if we ran Aadhar in Finland we would have finish national identity in 5days, it is just crazy to think about it. On this fake account, I don’t know may be you guys have better idea but I came across this funny thing of Instagram and wherever it talks about identity in virtual world, so they have rinsta account and finsta account there are real insta account and there is fake Insta accounts, an individual has rinsta account and many finsta account, which kind of tells you that how many of this FaceBook and Insta accounts are duplicate.

Yes, it is going to get worse in Meta verse. All your finsta account would multiply and that makes more difficult for people to keep track of it. But having spoken about that Samiran, it’s interesting there has been concern around security around Aadhar, I think if you go to the website, they give you options in ways that you can actually protect your aadhar and you don’t have to issue xerox of your Aadhar, don’t have to give all the 12 digits of your aadhar, in order to safeguard your interest. If you think about it, how do you strengthen the privacy and confidentiality which is the big concern around aadhar, it has been one of the big debates while everybody acknowledges that this the largest Data base, so there is concern around it, so I know the architects have been working on it, so you have to throw some light on that.

So, I will tell you there is no go away that Aadhar is centralized identity system and may be that was the best way to do it, when it was started and over a period of time safeguard have been build, it is especially relevant because there was lot of noise in media about masking of Id, a press release coming out, there is general mudslinging on both sides but net of it there could be issue with privacy but Aadhar have safeguard which individual needs to take in their own hand. 1. You have availability to lock your own biometric which you can do in Aadhar site. 2. They have whole concept of Virtual id which you can use for Zudo for your actual Aadhar number which works for your KYC and for your regular uses. 3. They have started giving you mask id on their website, so those are 2-3 things which you can easily do to protect yourself. I come back to the fundamental question, if today we have to re-design Aadhar in new more decentralized world what we will do next: So we will touch upon that as we come in next segment, Nilesh will take you through what would be re-designing Aadhar look like with the new knowledge that we have.

Just to summarize this section 2, I think we talk of 2 of 5, so FaceBook we said 11yrs for 1.9, Google 20yrs for 1billion and Aadhar was 5.5yrs for 1billion. So I think hands down we are beating the big 5, I think in the next section we will do the 2 things, one is Sheetal mention about the women related matrix to Aadhar, which I am really interested to understand. We will also talk about the possibilities with the design of Aadhar, so we will be back soon with the section 3.

So, we are back with our final segment of 1st Episode of season 2. We ended on the note where in Samiran asked what could be done differently if we do Aadhar today. Not saying that what Aadhar does is anyway in correct, it is built for scale and doing perfectly, well it has API, Microsoft services incidentally it has seen the satisfaction, if I would have to call it a product and there would be a survey with Aadhar 92% of the respondent said they were satisfied and the sample size was close to 2000plus people, so as a product it has been successful product, undoubtful. But if we have to do something differently with the knowledge that we have today, I would kind of bang to my favourite topic which is decentralized identity, so if I have to re-think design it would be ideally a decentralized. Now as I said decentralized it is an umbrella term for distributor at architecture, within decentralized the ideal would be a distributor at architecture. There is another architecture which would suit India very well and that is a Federated architecture, whereby there would be cluster of notes connected to a node, it is called as Federated for a moment and it is connected to another server and it has its own cluster, so it is like a Hub and spoke and many hubs are connected to each other. Why I feel this architecture is suitable for next generation for identity solution in India, reason is our structure is Feder, we have center and state, atleast today there will be some improvements in rolled authority but today my license is essentially state. My car is registered in a state, so there are many things that happen at the state level. Honestly passport is central but I can’t suddenly go to different entity, to get these kinds of identities. So federated structure what essentially be the right kind of architecture to connect all this digital ids, truly now everything is becoming digital, you have license, passports, we will go an era where each and every documents which are identity related document they all will become digital, but the authority will be federated and with this Federated architecture what happens is you may replicate things which are at national level and on federated servers, I will say it is my compromise between the ideal decentralized digital world and a federated kind of id.

The other thing I would like to add this decentralized is the other criticism we have about Data Leakage and individual security and privacy, so in this centralized world you created and pass it on but in new world we have to build it today, I would create a mechanism to turn On and turn off access by a public private key, which will allow the person to control who have an access of their id and for what and probably to take the logic forward through web 3 world, if I choose to sell my data, name, money I would able to do it and if I choose not to so it should not, I think there is thinking in that direction but Aadhar is a good platform to build on, but I think this whole area of Data Privacy and individual liberty and civil liberty is going to become topic of discussion, so if I would have to redesign I would look at that aspect.

I think that was our bit possible on design of Aadhar if it was done today that what could be the new Aadhar. Sheetal, in the last section you touched upon women and how Aadhar has empowered women and that is very interesting, I never looked at that perspective, when we talk of Ration card you correctly mention that it was always the KARTA of the house, whose name was essentially listed. So would you give us some update that how Aadhar help women empowerment.

We talked about the fact that Government one of the big usages of Aadhar is direct subsidy for the Government. They are now been able to send direct subsidy into people bank account, and think about it a couple of decade ago there were very few women who had their own bank accounts both in urban and rural. Rural India practically had nothing, compounded with the fact that women was not educated that need opening bank account, going to bank or doing any work bank, was a challenge. Third issue was the fact that their husband was working in the city or town but the women were back in the villages and there was entire transfer of funds and money which was a big challenge. So what is interesting and I think it proof for both urban and rural to the large extend is the fact that for the first time, unlike family identity either ways women was known for the daughter of or wife of or mother of, Aadhar has enable the women to get her own identity, even it’s a number, while she will be still known as daughter of, wife of, mother of but now she has her know unique digital identity, so that I think to the large extend I think empowering women. Second thing that has happen is because of Aadhar there has been increase in the banking usage with Female heads of family opening account not the Male heads, because Male heads are living in other parts. So Female heads in Rural India are now opening up their bank account. For example, earlier my driver use to worry about Money order, how it will reach my house, today it is so easy he deposit the money and wife have an debit card and identity so she goes and pull money out so look at the facilitation that have happen because of identity. I think big thing is also dignity and respect, I remember when I was doing research in North East, I met couple of old women and they said that earlier the subsidy Govt was giving came through the post man, if the women is not at home so it would give to whoever is at the house, and no guarantee it would go to women. Today it directly go to the bank account, my maid who told me I can afford to get a cup of tea for my daughter because money is in my hand, fact that she is receiving to her bank account, means she has control and not her drunken husband not anybody else.

So, my personal favourite is this, whole thing allowing everyone to Vote, I think they are experimenting with this though it is underlying or block chain, so the number are staggering, there are 2.50 million people who don’t vote in India because they are not a register to Vote, so if you are thinking this as a true democracy where everybody opinion should be counted that is 200million people who should be counted and 250million is the population of US so that is just crazy.

Agree with you. That does bring an end to this episode which is the 1st episode of the second season for 3 Techies Banter and fantastic start for us, a moment where we all feel proud. In the next episode we are going to cover Digital payments and we will talk about payment parts of it, I think it will be equally fascinating because there are things which India is doing which is four fronts of what World’s need to be looking at even in the payment space, do stay tune with us. If you like it, please share this episode with friendly, family, if you put in your social media, we will be grateful. Do not forget to follow the show. Available on all major podcast platform, if you are on apple podcast, please leave us rating and review. Till the next time, see you.

Katappa ne Bahubali ko Kyon Mara - No Aadhaar?

Episode Description

Transcript

Transcript

Introduction

Nilesh

Sheetal

Nilesh

Sheetal

Samiran

Sheetal

Samiran

Nilesh

Samiran

Sheetal

Samiran

Nilesh

Samiran

Sheetal

Nilesh

Sheetal

Nilesh

Sheetal

Nilesh

Sheetal

Samiran

Nilesh

Nilesh

Samiran

Nilesh

Sheetal

Samiran

Sheetal