Animal Farm

One of India's more watched news channels and its leading English daily recently ran an exposé on the pitiful state of our food distribution system. Given the sheer emotive value of rotting grain in a nation home to the world's largest concentration of the hungry, yet with superpower ambitions, public interest was bound to get fired up. Again, the backdrop of runaway food inflation (that has under its spell more than a trifling percentage of our Great Unwashed) provided the outrage with a tinge of rare immediacy. A call to action, so to speak, seemed immanent in the wave of national indignation.

Yet, it remains a moot question whether this will lead to tangible change. While a grandstanding media may have chanced upon its newsworthiness now, the issue has been hanging fire for ages. My personal recall is of (copious, if not compelling) lamentations on 'distribution losses' two decades ago, in the pursuit of an Economics degree — and the problem was not of recent vintage even then. Indeed, pithy 'mouths fed if gaps plugged' protestations brought academic glory to many (not me!) over the years — clearly, to little avail, as the sordid TV visuals testify. The agricultural supply chain was held hostage to political ambivalence for far too long. Such was the potency of notoriously enmeshed vested interests in every leg that one had to be content with a status-quoist survival play, with cynicism and not challenge being the dominant trope.

A quick dekko illustrates the extent of the rot in the entire ecosystem. Starting at the farm gate, the so-called farmer lobby (read: large agriculturists) cannot think beyond input subsidy retention and diesel price control. Interest in output is limited to pushing periodic MSP increases, with populist governments only too willing to oblige. Their small and marginal brethren are too fractured to wield any real political influence, clear from the typically lackadaisical, stopgap response to farmer suicides. A lack of organised credit confines their choices in any case — a fledgling microfinance revolution is still some time away. (This is not to undermine the fact that better contextual appreciation and economic timing help sustain local moneylender-cum-intermediary strangleholds.) In this extant reality of stagnant productivity, the otherwise laudable NREGA and mostly reprehensible Maoist violence add fresh undercurrents. It remains to be seen how these play out, but (at least for now) they have bred more questions than solutions.

Moving ahead in the chain, the picture alters only slightly. Higher investment continues to be a crying need in the storage and distribution of agricultural produce. Public sector agencies hold the key, but gunny sacks full of foodgrain don’t have a vote, and tackling post-harvest waste remains low on their list of priorities. Other logistics players, only occasionally different from middlemen, have little motivation to drive efficiency, given the infrastructure (and corruption) squeeze on margins, unless to profit from (artificially induced) supply imbalances. Lastly, wholesale through last-mile retail suffers from a lack of scale, subject to high rents, rising operating expenses, and limited organised investment, disadvantaging honest trade.

Fact remains that our nation also drove a Green Revolution. The erstwhile stage was one of stronger political will, with public memory fresh from ignominious PL 480 capitulations. In consequently sympathetic ears, AIR propagated research science prescriptions, and rural India took to HYV seeds, fertilizers, and irrigation in little time. (Incidentally, the most common critique of the Revolution centres around land degradation, showing little appreciation of R&D’s evolutionary nature — science is a process of constant churn, not a one-time infusion. Critics likewise gloss over the lopsided nature of fertilizer subsidies and the like.)

In short, we must lean on science again. Be it input optimisation, cultivation and processing practices, storage, or transit efficiency — each can benefit from the strides the scientific-industrial world has taken over the years. (Robust risk modelling too can help drive deeper microcredit penetration, but that science, alas, draws much derision in a post-Lehman world!) And our IT prowess can be brought to bear on information gaps that mess up cycle time, cost, and pricing across the value chain.

Of course, it would be naive to think one can solve it without social science. And no, this is not a call to the political class to miraculously conjure the will to lead the charge. Shorn of direct electoral gain, political commitment levels seldom multiply manifold — if it has not happened in years, a blog post or television theatrics won’t. (Our beloved Agriculture Minister is anyway planning to focus on his new ICC chair when not engaged in periodic one-upmanship exercises with his professed allies.) This is merely a plea not to wilfully muddy the waters. We cannot afford to continue ludicrous supply-pricing games, with ill-advised and badly executed (if not dubiously intended) market interventions lacking economic sense.

Hypercritical of politics after a fashion? No. We must recognise the math by which 58 million tonnes of stock accumulates, double the actual need. Or how over a million tonnes are lost to storage and transit in just four years while at least as many parts of the country reported starvation deaths. (Yes, we did give folks with BPL cards TV sets in some state elections. Good — they can watch the tragicomedy live now.) So, if our political masters can just about manage to keep their gaming instincts under control, this can get off the ground well enough. And if we are really, truly lucky, perhaps they can think visionarily — and allow full mobility and free markets in the sector. Food Security would then move from policy shibboleth to proud reality.

Numb and Number: UID

Well into the 21st century, the first impression for anyone walking into a government office in India is likely an image of a deluge of paper, embodying its creaky infrastructure. A proliferation of overflowing cupboards, dusty files stacked wall to wall, cobweb-tangled piles kissing the roof, and reigning over every spit-stained corner; it is an ugly and telling sight. The obvious — a grim tale of bureaucratic sloth suggestive of callow indifference, busy adding to the karguzari paper mountain day by day. Equally, a sense of wonder how, in its midst and despite it, the business of governance carries on in our vast, parched lands.

Times are a-changing, though. Via some central initiative but mostly local effort, the Government is waking up to technology and convergence. While paperless is still a far cry, Indian officialdom is taking gradual, diffident steps to improve information management and productivity. This is only natural. Services, and specifically IT, offered a way out in a country beset by inadequate physical infrastructure. In tandem with corruption and lopsided left-leaning policy, these bottlenecks had leashed us to a stubbornly sluggish growth and economic has-been status. New Age technology enabled the emergence of a confident, vibrant India that is generously glimpsed today. Thus, it is only fitting that it provides the vehicle for our governance transformation, light in a pen-pushing, paper-gorging Black Hole where citizenry feared to tread.

Obviously, this goes much beyond paper. Of vital significance are technology's game-changing capabilities in delivery of governance benefits. Indeed, the Government has put no less than 27 mission-critical projects to this task. UID, or Aadhaar as it is now named, is arguably the most important of these: the core of our national e-enablement effort. The idea is simple - a unique identifier to serve as primary key driving the massive information repository that governance for a billion-plus populace entails. Naturally, the superstructure can only be as good as its edifice. And the UID ask is humongous — plan and execute a 12-digit numerical tag for a mindboggling 600 million records, including associated biometric and personal data. All this over the next 4 years, while staying true to the goals of building a robust and efficient system. If successful, this identifier and pathbreaking database of biometric permanent numbers and personal statistics would enable policy analytics and monitoring at an unprecedented scale. Frankly, it is nearly impossible to envision the full governance impact of the result. Yet, broadly speaking, its incisive segmentation and targeting ability would be a dream in terms of faster rollout, easier tracking, and better audit.

Of course, the picture is not all hunky-dory. The enormity of the exercise is perhaps equalled only by its complexity. For instance, potential private use is a double-edged sword. While it does wonders for, say, a financial services company for verification, marketing analytics, and the like, the risk in unfettered online access to personal information can be immense, especially for a terrorism-frontline state. To this extent, UID is much more than a technological challenge or design complexity. Imagine concurrent needs across multilevel security and ease of accessibility in a citizenry with varying levels of computer proficiency (safely assumed low on average). Then there are connectivity concerns (Mukeshbhai's opportunity can be Nilekani's bugbear). Revert to traditional paper census methods or a paper-hub-digital-spoke model and you open up data compromise risks in L1 implementation itself. Power can play spoilsport too — solar panels had to be used to fill gaps during proof-of-concept — and bear in mind that a Karnataka does not an India make. We cannot be blind to the bureaucracy's internal change resistance either — some of the flock do love a good drought, as we unfortunately know only too well! And so on.

Yet, the RTI experience shows that political will at the top goes a long way in overcoming what seems prima facie insurmountable. Similar commitment must be mobilised to tackle the issue of data privacy protection for citizens in post-UID India. Not only is this a checks-and-balances need, it is high time the GoI realised that potential for misuse in a nation with lax, ill-defined laws is not restricted to its Internal Security agencies alone. Take this train of thought forward, and one would love to see proactive public debate around Aadhaar's design and other postulates or concerns — beyond the self-congratulatory, world-hunger-solution posturing that has come by till date. Short of this, it will be another gamechanger that flattered to deceive!