Month: January 2014

My visit with (perhaps) the next Prime Minister of India

Sara Shipley Hiles

Earlier during our tour of India, we visited the massive campus and training center of Infosys, the IT giant.

Yesterday, we met the man behind the company. Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys and the inspiration behind “The World is Flat,” now runs a massive government effort to create online identity cards for all 1.2 billion people in India, allowing the disenfranchised poor in cities and remote villages to have an official identity for the first time.

When completed, the Aadhaar system will be the largest biometric database in the world. Forbes India has called it “the most transformative project modern India has seen.”

We met Nilekani in the New Delhi offices of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), of which he is chairman. Nilekani was relaxed and gracious with our group as we chatted over coffee and cookies.

The tech titan clearly relished the challenge of using innovative technology to address a pressing social need. Half of births in India are unrecorded, and more than 700 million Indians lack bank accounts, living on subsistence income and having no way to save or transfer money. Without an official ID, such as a driver’s license or passport, many poor Indians cannot get a mobile phone, reserve a train ticket, or sign up for government benefits such as food assistance or scholarships. This can lead to corruption and unnecessary costs – a “poverty premium” – as people sometimes resort to paying bribes to create needed IDs, said Shrikant Karwa, UIDAI manager of process and operations.

“Here we are solving a societal problem: How to get millions of people into the formal economy,” Nilekani said.“There is no other system in the world like this.”

The system works this way: Aadhaar enrollment agents set up shop in a city or village. Individuals register by giving a name,address, gender and date of birth, plus biometric scans of all 10 fingerprints and both irises. Exceptions have to be made for people such as lepers who don’t have all their digits, or for laborers who have worn off their fingerprints. The registrant receives a print-out with his or her new Aadhaar number, which is verifiable online.

Enrollment costs have been $2 per person, and in just three and a half years, the program has issued 550 million IDs.

Nilekani explained that Aadhaar was designed using open source technology so it could be used as a platform for innovation. Not only can banks use the system, but many other public and private agencies can take advantage of the authenticated ID.

“Just like with the Internet, we can’t foresee all the future applications, but we foresee benefits,” Nilekani said. “Like Facebook Connect or Google Connect, it’s a platform.”

News reports say that Nilekani, who recently announced his intent to run for office in the Congress party, may be a candidate for Prime Minister. He told our group that “politics is more difficult than technology,” but he sounded ready to use Aadhaar as a platform of his own.

“My belief is that India needs to fix a lot of things quickly if it wants to realize the aspirations of its people,” he said. “This is a way to do that.”

Doing a lot with a little

Sara Shipley Hiles

India’s unofficial motto could be “Doing a lot with a little.”

A coconut isn’t harvested just for its sweet flesh. The fibrous husk is woven into rope. The shells are made into cups.

Even cow dung patties – ubiquitous on the narrow, dusty streets – are collected, dried, stacked and used for fuel.

The School of Film and Mass Communication runs Radio Adan 90.4, a community radio station.
The School of Film and Mass Communication runs Radio Adan 90.4, a community radio station.

We noticed a similar resourcefulness at SHIATS, a university we visited in Allahabad, a city in the populous and poor northern state of Uttar Pradesh. The university’s School of Film and Mass Communication squeezes an impressive amount of work from a small amount of resources.

My journalism colleague, Randy Smith, and I visited with three faculty members in the department. Its offices reside on the fourth floor of a large, concrete building with a central open-air atrium. The rooms are unheated, despite cool winter nights averaging just over 50 degrees. During our visit, people simply went about in wool hats, jackets and scarves. Even the dining hall was not heated.

The Film and Mass Comm department, just 7 years old, exemplifies a trend in India. Print and electronic media are rapidly expanding as the society becomes more urban and literate. Many universities are opening schools of journalism and communication. The SHIATS faculty asked what they could learn from us, the oldest journalism school in the world.

Randy explained the Missouri School of Journalism’s famous “Missouri Method,” in which our students learn through working at the school’s newspaper, magazine, TV and radio stations and other outlets.

SHIATS assistant professor Nishant Singh responded, “We must be using the Missouri Method then.” The department publishes a daily newspaper and runs a 24-hour community radio station, in addition to producing programming for cable TV. He gave me a copy of the newspaper, an eight-page broadsheet that had color photos inside.

Randy and I were amazed. We know how much work it takes to put out these publications. The Missouri School of Journalism has about 90 full-time faculty and more than 2,000 students.

The SHIATS mass comm department has just 200 students and eight regular faculty members. In addition to journalism, the department teaches film, animation and business communication.

We toured the department’s film shooting floor, recording studio, radio station, library and computer labs equipped with FinalCut Pro, the same editing software we use at home. The facilities were modest but adequate.

We felt the school could use help with online and social media training (none of the publications has a website) as well as courses in journalism law and ethics and specialties such as business and environmental journalism.

Randy and I told our new friends we’d be happy to help in any way we can, and we promised to Skype. I have a feeling we would learn as much as we would teach.

India’s environmental consciousness

Sara Shipley Hiles

India is a complex place. With more than 1.2 billion people here, it’s impossible to say that Indians have a single way of doing anything.

The same applies to environmental issues. We’ve witnessed many contrasts and contradictions in the past week. The developed world could learn from India’s smart use of resources in some areas. Yet in other ways, India has far to go.

A traditional Indian standing toilet - hold the toilet paper.
A traditional Indian standing toilet – hold the toilet paper.

Let’s take trash as an example. As any foreign visitor knows, Indians traditionally don’t use toilet paper. (A trip to the ladies’ room means bringing your own TP. If you forget, let’s just say you’ll understand why Indians use only the right hand for eating food, as the left hand is reserved for dirty work.)

While most Westerners would consider toilet paper a necessity, it’s an absolute waste from an environmental perspective. Paper flushed into the sewer system must be strained out and processed at the sewage treatment plant. Yes, paper is biodegradable, but why throw something in the sewer just to remove it a few miles downstream?

Indians have learned to live without toilet paper, or paper hand towels, or paper cups. Public restrooms are equipped with water sprays to clean the needful area. Want to dry your hands? The air will take care of that. Filtered water stations contain communal metal cups. The user lifts the cup in the air and pours a bit into his mouth, so as not to contaminate it with his germs.

By necessity, India is efficient in this way. However, the country has a severe problem with street trash.

Streets are piled high with plastic bottles, food wrappers, and so on. Stray dogs and sacred cows wander city lanes nibbling on the discards. When visitors question the mess, Indians might answer that trash cans get stolen, or city services are inefficient.

Our Indian tour guide, Sundhya, said said Indians lack a “civic sense,” and so they feel free to throw trash on common ground. She cited another reason as well: the growth in plastic packaging.

In the past, biodegradable materials were used to pack everything. Restaurants packed food in banana leaves. Picnic plates were made of leaves stitched into sturdy discs.

Today, of course, all these materials commonly are made from plastic. And so goes the cycle of economic development and resource consumption.

Sundhya predicts that children will lead the way to a new environmental consciousness. I saw a picture in a local magazine of a child holding a homemade sign. It read, “cleanliness is next to godliness.”

Amen to that.

Things remembered and things learned

Sara Shipley Hiles
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A boy bathes in the Kaveri River. Photo by Sara Shipley Hiles.

When we stumbled out of the Bangalore airport Sunday morning, bleary-eyed and eager to start our adventure, the stench of sewage swept over us. Ah, the smell of India! Or one of many smells in this sensory-overload place.

Many things reminded me of my first trip to India almost exactly four years ago, when I visited Hyderabad with a group of Western Kentucky University journalism students and professors. I was overwhelmed by the madcap traffic, the bleating car horns, the piles of trash on the streets and the free-roaming cows and dogs eating it. I took my first autorickshaw ride and drank cup after cup of sweet, milky chai.

 

 

 

 

 

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A market stall in Mysore. Photo by Sara Shipley Hiles

Two days into my second trip, I appreciate the now-familiar sights, sounds and smells. This venture will show me much more of the continent, as we will travel to Mysore, Pondicherry, Goa, Chennai, Delhi, Varanasi and Allahabad.

Here are three new things I’ve  learned already:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  1. Not all of India drinks tea. Here in the south, coffee is the preferred drink. They call it “filter coffee,” and like chai, it’s typically served with large doses of milk and sugar.
  2. Although many south Indian women still wear saris, young women here are increasingly adopting the salwar kameez, a tunic with pants. Young people consider it more modern.
  3. Sandalwood trees are protected, due to over-harvest. You cannot cut down even a sandalwood tree on your own property.

I can’t wait to see what else I learn in the next week and a half.