Synopsis of 1st round table on Speeding Digital Inclusion

ICT is critical for inclusive development like educating and skilling the 500 million citizens.  Today government benchmarks literacy around base literacy but now the need is to benchmark digital literacy? Obviously, ICT also plays a critical role in financial inclusion, i.e., banking the un-banked and banking the un-banked is critically dependent on ICT to reduce the transaction cost and also giving access. Participants also pointed out that ICT plays a very critical role in programmes like NREGA, Public Distribution Systems in bringing about transparency in the delivery of these and all these programmes are aimed eventually at inclusion.  Mr Karan Bajwa, GM of Microsoft pointed out that “Digital inclusion will also help in delivering the citizens’ services right at the doorstep and that is where the common service centre programme is absolutely the programme which delivers that inclusion from a citizens’ service delivery standpoint.”

Seated in the photo are (from L to R) are Mr Karan Bajwa, Microsoft Corporation (India), Mr R Chandrashekhar, Secretary, Ministry of Information Technology and Mr Sameer Kochhar, Chief Editor & CEO, Skoch Consultancy Services.

Speakers equated the success of the telecom world policy environment where there are about 450 million people who have access to mobile telephones in the country and if this argument is brought to the IT world then the success in exporting IT services and IT-enabled services has really masked the fact that as a country we don't have a large user of IT services within. The low PC penetration and low broadband penetration requires urgent policy interventions as an enabler like in the areas of broadband penetration. For this they pointed out that the target should be in the next 5 years there should be 100 million broadband connections across the country, across universities, colleges, schools, panchayats and post offices.

Then speakers highlighted the problem of fear that enabling people to transact financially at least to a limited extent, may be small transactions below Rs. 5000 or small balances below Rs.20000 may lead to a lot of financial transactions which are not attributable to individuals and are a lot of illegitimate financial transactions. Here Mr Neil Gouff, of Vodafone responsible for China and South African markets shared his perspective of how mobile banking in Kenya has reduced corruption and brought in transparency in financial tranasctions. Therefore, it in addition to enabling small transactions and small balances to be handled through mobile without the need for opening a conventional bank account, it will also be able to link it to establishing the identity with absolute certainty. Once that is done, a mobile device then can become not only a device on which financial transactions can take place but also identity can be established and that is exactly the direction in fact in which the UID Authority is working. 

Speakers pointed out that a lot of these services will be available even on the mobile including a Yes or No type of answer. They stressed that a mobile device clearly becomes a tool of empowerment to the people in the villages for identity and for financial purposes. What really came out of the discussion is that for digital inclusion to successfully happen, it should enable the rural poor to enjoy the benefits of financial inclusion.

1. Where are we as a country on Universal Digital Access? E.g. e-readiness, telecom and broadband penetration, PC and kiosk penetration, e-services and Internet penetration etc.

2. Examine how the Universal Digital Access can be converted into Universal Digital Inclusion that would create a virtuous bi-directional cycle of it leading to grassroots economic enablement (e.g. rural BPO, rural business hubs, better delivery of offline services using online resources etc.) and vice-versa.

3. How Digital Inclusion can foster participatory democracy and better targeting and monitoring of social spending schemes?

4. Examine the content supply chain, identifies gaps in areas like felt needs, and business case etc.

5. Revisiting the role of Public Private Partnership and examines in what ways can this be structured/better harnessed to deliver outcomes.

6. Examines use of mobility and other emerging technologies for reducing transaction costs and increasing penetration.

The study entails multi-stakeholder dialogues spanning, field visits, research meetings, one-on-one interviews, e-discussions and a national consultation. The national consultation is scheduled during the 21st Skoch Summit – India @ Work scheduled on the 10-11 November 2009, New Delhi.

The first research meeting in the series structured as a round table of about 35 domain experts drawn from academia, industry, civil society and the cross-functional government departments was held on 16th September 2009, Jacaranda, India Habitat Center, New Delhi.