If I were the CIO of the Republic of India: Harmeen Mehta, Global CIO, Bharti Airtel

By Harmeen Mehta, Global CIO and Head Digitization, Bharti Airtel

Having recently celebrated our 68th Republic Day, if you just reflect back on what our country has achieved in these years, it humbles you.

Yet if you think about what all is yet to be done, it overwhelms you.

A Republic of India powered by technology
The republic of India is in fact the largest “corporate” in the country and if you approach it like that, as a CIO, my job would be to be the best technology advisor and help the country’s leaders use the power of technology to truly innovate and bring the best possible experience, products and services to the citizens of our country.Or at least that’s how I would approach it.

Aware citizens lead to a crime free India
One of the first things I would like to do is digitize and interlink the police and all other law enforcement agencies and use the power of technology to make India a safe and secure place for women.

Last year, over 3.27 lakh cases of crimes against women were reported across the country. Of these over 1.3 lakh were sexual offences including rape, attempt to commit rape, assault on women with intent to outrage her modesty and insult to modesty of women.

Technology can allow the government to pool resources and trace both crimes as well as criminals across state borders more easily and create transparency of information for its citizens by having public portals for citizens to find out if any predators or sex offenders live in their neighbourhood.

In most western countries, this information is public and everyone is well aware of their surroundings and who lives there (like the National Sex Offender Public Website in the U.S. www.nsopw.gov). Studies have shown that this open availability of information leads to reduction in crime, heightened awareness in the public and also encourages parents to openly discuss such issues with their kids and make them more aware of their surroundings and people to watch out for.

Expose corruption
Best way to end corruption is to fully expose it. I would create a crowdsourced whistle blowing system that allows people to report corruption they see around them and then also use the intelligence from data mining to see which of these are more frequent or higher in relevance to help the law enforcement agencies deal with the most pertinent cases first.

This is actually possible if we digitize all public services, build suitable audit trails and automate all tax / levy collections.

I heard in my last visit to Nigeria that they actually have a similar initiative called TRIMS to crowdsource trade route bottlenecks that was done together with the Ogun state government.

One ID is enough
India created history by running the largest national identification number project by creating a centralised database of biometric and demographic data of residents, storing them in a centralised database, and issuing a 12-digit unique Aadhaar number to each resident. Despite 99% of the Indians having an Aadhaar number in India, we still have several other IDs, each of which were created at a different point in time for a different purpose.

You have a PAN Card issued by the Income Tax Department, a driving license issued by the RTO, the Voter identity card, a passport number, a ration card etc. The biggest issue is that none of these is a comprehensive ID and that you would have used one of the other IDs to get the other one! Unlike Aadhaar which is based on a biometric ID, the rest of them are also easy to fake.

Unlike us, in the US as an example, the Social Security number has become a de facto national identification number for taxation and other purposes. Everywhere you go, they just ask you your social security number.

It’s about time we adopted a similar approach in India and moved everything to be Aadhaar centric. Your passport, your driving license, your income tax, all your properties, your cars, basically everything should be linked to your Aadhaar number.

This would help the government immensely as all spends, purchases, assets, credits and liabilities, taxes everything would be linked to a single ID making it easy to follow the money preventing fraud, tax evasion, embezzlement, etc. Aadhaar penetration makes a ripe case for this to happen now in our country.

Win the war on cyber crime
When it comes to cyber crime, prevention is by far the best policy. And the only way to do that is through use of advanced cyber security technologies. Last year, the Centre of Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), estimated that cybercrime costs businesses $400 billion worldwide!

Today’s technology is preventing corporates and intelligence agencies as well as governments from all aspects of cyber crime – from data leak prevention to protection against DDOS attacks, to data privacy.
And with us as a nation moving towards digital payments and frequent use of social media platforms which share information, this becomes even more pertinent.

Most people don’t realize that most digital companies that offer services for free, make money by actually monetizing data of their customers. Personal data is the currency of the Internet economy. And with the mobile now being the gateway to the internet, it becomes critical we ensure everyone has security on their phones – whether they are digitally savvy or just a common man trying to search the internet.

Intelligent traffic management
According to a recent survey done, Indian commuters spend more time behind in traffic as compared to their counterparts in China, Thailand, the Philippines and Australia. Today, a person travelling a distance of 40 km by a private vehicle during peak hours spends an average of 3.43 hours on the road, as opposed to 1.36 hours in 2011.

And the average speed of a vehicle being driven during the evening peak hours — between 5 pm and 7 pm — has come down from 42 kmph to 20 kmph. At this rate, by next decade our walking speed will be greater than that of vehicles, unless something changes.

Dramatic infrastructure improvements are needed in India and while these will take time, using the power of smart traffic management, intelligent traffic light controls, autonomous intersection movements and smart routing we can reduce this stress considerably and in fact completely eliminate traffic jams. Real time mining of this data with automated controls are making this a reality in many smart cities around the world.

City planners can also simulate traffic and congestion patterns to see what designs and road flows work best.

Innovate with technology
India has the largest population of software engineers and is the largest software services and business process outsourcing industry in the world.

When India joined WTO in 1995, we agreed to bring our intellectual property legislation into conformity with standards in developed countries.

This led to a lot more foreign investments by competitors in the Indian market and in fact setting up their R&D centres here. Over the last several years, India’s participation in the best technical innovations in the world can’t be underestimated.

High time that India invests in R&D for itself to solve the numerous challenges that can propel our country as a nation at the cutting edge of technology. Whether it is in the field of agriculture, manufacturing, energy, medicine, forest conservation, wildlife protection, environment protection and many other fields, innovations in technology can truly propel our country as a major superpower in the world