Spearheading a decade of innovation

How can information technology help transform India?

India has set ambitious targets for growth and investment across many sectors over the next decade. Urban and rural planning, power and energy updates, transportation infrastructures, and a more connected telecommunications system are some of the many areas that need to be improved if India is to become the modern state it aspires to be.

As the country continues on its ambitious path toward growth and prosperity, how can technology play a role? And how will public-private partnerships make a difference? We discussed these and other questions with Neena Gill, former Member of the European Parliament and now the Vice President of Corporate Affairs for Europe and Asia Pacific at SAS.

Recently, the President of India, Pratibha Devisingh Patil, pledged billions of dollars to update and modernize the country's infrastructure, including its information technology systems. What is the country hoping to accomplish with these changes?
Neena Gill: The Indian government, which was reelected last year, has made some bold commitments, recognizing that the knowledge within society that exists today offers the key to people and nations realizing their potential. Harnessing the creativity, innovation and enterprise of a billion people is its goal. The government would like its legacy to be that it spearheaded a decade of innovation.

India has an impressive economic growth record, averaging 8.5 percent growth per year, and has the fourth-largest economy in purchasing power. Moreover, India has fared reasonably well during the global economic downturn, and at the end of 2009, GDP growth had reached 8.6 percent. Although, there has been a worrying trend of rising inflation due to increases in energy and food prices.

However, India strongly believes that it is through innovation that it can identify solutions to many of its problems. Namely, India suffers from acute levels of poverty, which affects 37.2 percent of the population – 410 million people. And, low levels of long-term agricultural growth continue to affect poverty levels. Furthermore, absence of rural infrastructure, from roads to electrification, hinders growth of non-agricultural activities in the rural areas and the expansion of urban growth centers too. For example, roads and highways have not kept pace with the growth, and shortages in energy have hampered the kind of expansion that could have been expected. Therefore, expanding social and economic infrastructure is a top priority.

The vision of the government is to achieve faster and more inclusive growth. It is designed to reduce poverty and focus on bridging the economic divide that exists in the society. This will be achieved by creating productive employment, reducing disparities across regions and communities, and ensuring access to basic infrastructure as well as health and education services to all.

In order to achieve the goals laid out in the Planning Commission's 11th five-year plan, the government is putting a lot of emphasis on IT as an enabler for this transformation. Therefore, a national e-Governance Plan that takes a holistic view of IT initiatives across the country has been put in place. Around this idea, a massive countrywide infrastructure, leading down to the remotest of villages, and a large-scale digitization of records are also taking place.

The government also aspires to be more citizen-friendly and therefore is establishing citizen service centers that will complement state-level data centers, which in turn will have connectivity across the states.

What are the ultimate goals for modernizing India, and how might analytic technologies help?
Gill: Clearly, the goal is to reduce the disparities between people, communities and regions within India. Therefore, there is a need to increase the effectiveness of service delivery by the public sector. Many public programs suffer from ineffectiveness due to poor targeting and wastage of resources. There is an urgent need to dramatically improve the impact of government funding.

Technology can help India fast-track the development of its public sector. Furthermore, analytics can help meet the government's goal of making all services accessible to the common man by ensuring that the information "of the people, by the people" is accessed, analyzed and leveraged for optimal utilization of scarce resources.

It can also play a key role in ensuring that the Indian government achieves its objectives of transparency and governance. The Indian government has already agreed to a public data policy that places all information in non-strategic areas into public domain. This is to help the citizens challenge the data, and to engage directly in government reforms. They have also established mechanisms for performance monitoring and evaluation across some government departments. Some of the many initiatives are outlined below: State Wide Area Networks (SWANs) to ensure connectivity of all states, cities, tehsils and villages (above a certain population) to ensure that citizens can access the Citizen Service applications online.

• New proposals on online technologies cover provisions of scholarships and social security schemes.
• Use of smart cards for beneficiaries of various government programs, such as below-poverty-line and food programs.
• Banks and post offices are being revamped to become outreach units for financial inclusion through technology.
• Electronic governance through Bharat Nirman Common Service Centres (CSCs) in all Panchayats (village councils) over the next three years.
• Commitment to rural knowledge centers.
• A move for nongovernmental organizations to submit online applications and monitor the progress of these applications.

These initiatives are generating huge amounts of data, which will multiply in the years to come as they continue to gather momentum. Therefore, the data can be leveraged for more effective and efficient utilization of resources, and should give a near-real-time view of where the bottlenecks are, and what are the means to address the bottlenecks.

How might partnerships between the public and private sectors help in this endeavor? What can corporations do to help modernize India?
Gill: In order to achieve the ambitious growth, India requires funds and execution skills. Public-private partnership is seen as an effective approach to delivering the government's above stated goals, as the private sector can bring in the expertise and skills required for major new infrastructure projects.

The private sector involvement, of course, means greater investment and can also mitigate the associated risks on cost and delivery. But the established public-private partnership models in the West need to be tailored to specific needs in India.

Corporations could assist in training the government departments to optimize the use of new technologies and business intelligence to help realize the government's agenda.

Many of the government's initiatives are designed and funded at the center and implemented at the state level. This often leads to the need to improve delivery in the public sector and fine-tune strategies, so that they were state-specific but designed to help large numbers of citizens.

Regular workshops for decision makers on advanced analytics would be a large help. Likewise, corporate social responsibility projects that can demonstrate corporations' commitments to delivering on the government's social agenda will be beneficial. Businesses can also assist the government's ambitions to address these concerns through employment generation projects.

How will these changes affect other countries around the world? What can other states learn from the changes India is making now?
Gill: India is trying to leapfrog developed countries in its levels of transparency, deployment of new technology and hopes to find a sustainable model of economic growth. If it achieves its ambitions, it will indeed be at the forefront of innovative change, which many other countries will try to replicate.

For many other underdeveloped countries, India would provide a blueprint of sustainable growth that they could replicate.

Of course, as the toll of demographic imbalance besets the West, India will likely become the main provider of human resources to service "the service-demandled" societies of Europe and the Americas. This alone ties the world together.

What else should readers know about this topic?
Gill: India is highly vulnerable to the impact of climate change, especially in relation to access to water. Nearly half of the country's population does not have access to safe drinking water.Water access also has an impact on agricultural yields.

Sustainability of growth is another major concern, as economic growth has taken a toll on the country's natural resources, especially in forests, marine and coastal biodiversity. Rapid growth is also leaving a massive pollution footprint. Therefore, analytics could play a role in better management to reduce the burden of environmental degradation.

Ultimately, India hopes to become a leading economic and political global power and to be an inclusive and equitable society. To do this, it has to become more productive as a nation. Fundamentally, India would like to have significantly improved livelihoods of its population, having addressed the shortage of skills and promoted the use of innovation in industry and agricultural sectors.

Since more than 50 percent of its population is under the age of 25, it desperately needs to address the shortage of skills and the gaps in its higher education sector.

Analytics provides a real prospect for assisting the country's development efforts, by first focusing on the technologically advanced states and using information technology as much as possible in public-private partnerships. These efforts will help ensure that the technologies put in place today will reap benefits in the long term and will assist with the right type of decision making and the targeting of ever-scarce resource.

Neena Gill, Vice President of Corporate Affairs for Europe and Asia Pacific, SAS