Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Its time for IT IN India...

For long this country has earned its name for the high quality IT Services delivered FROM its shores. Its time some of these are delivered IN its shores now.

The global recession has expectedly had its impact on the Indian IT Services industry as well. With the IT Budgets being slashed across the US and Europe, the industry is looking to reinvent itself.

The huge IT Talent pool in the country needs to continue to be productive. What better time than now to deploy this talent pool to develop a NATIONAL IT INFRASTRUCTURE.

Its time we think about Centralized Identities to track citizens. i.e linking licenses, PAN Cards, Bank Accounts, Property documents, Insurance etc to a single identity.

The absence of this ability to track has been the root cause for most of the problems our country faces today. The basic premise that one can get away easily, even if one does not follow a rule, even if it is the smallest or most insignificant like parking in a No Parking Zone, has given us a Freedom thats more akin to what animals experience in the wild.

It is not that we lack discipline. Its just that when we defined "Freedom" for ourselves in this country, we seemed to have forgotten the duties to our fellow citizens that this freedom demands. For 60 years now we have experienced "Freedom" in the truest and wildest sense of the word.

This can change if every action has a consequence, even if it is minimal. And this is not rocket science, it has been done elsewhere. Yes, we do have challenges in terms of scale of implementation and we have to keep this in mind when try to solve this problem.

National Identity Cards with chips in it that store everything from one's DNA are probably not the best solutions for us. Is it feasible to deploy such a solution to a billion people?

What we need is a simple, clean solution. For example, Assign a number to every citizen and make sure that number is mandated on every legal document like a license, property, bank account, PAN Number or insurance.

This solution, in whatever form, if scalable, will be an investment whose ROI can be boundless.

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