 All right, we're gonna start a little early, making the usual rules of meetings here. As you all know, we are talking about digital India, a topic on which there's lots of passion and interest and energy. We have a panel here which actually has a very interesting mix, so I'll quickly have them introduce themselves, but I'll tell you the surprising thing about it, which is we have someone who's from academia, we have someone who has experience working with farmers using digital technology, someone who has experience thinking about how software companies think about it and someone who has experience thinking of the public sector, and of course we have the minister who has the scope of all of it. So we shall, so it would be good, minister if we start with you and a quick introduction about yourself and what you think about digital India and what the future is. How much time I have to speak? You have a few minutes and then we will go, we'll do another round of questions around. Ladies and gentlemen, at 5.30 sharp I will leave. I have my cabinet meeting at 5.50, my agenda number is one, therefore you'll have to excuse me, I'll speak for a few minutes. I would have loved to remain here for a long time, but I'm sorry. My name is Ravi Shankar Prasad, I'm the minister for communication, IT and also law and justice, government of India. I was also the earlier minister in Mr. Bajpayee government for information broadcasting coal and mines. Speaking very briefly about digital India, India is a happening sector as far as IT is concerned, if I will very briefly give some statistics, all of you may be knowing it. The turnover is 1.08 billion, employment 3 million direct, 100 million indirect, outsourcing global industry share in India is 50%. We have got 9.33 million mobile phone connectivity in India, the urban density is 145%, rural is 44%. When Mr. Modi government came to power, we use certain, we use the power of technology to involve the people of India. We initiated my gov site, inviting suggestions from people of India on issues like Ganga cleaning, digital India, child rights, et cetera. Within a short span of 15 days, we got two lakh plus suggestions. A PMO dedicated team works that. We asked them to design for the Prime Minister e-Greetings on Independence Day. Within a week, we got 3,000 and the PM ended up sending four million e-Greetings on Independence Day. This whole inclusion program, Jandhan, was suggested by them. And you'll be happy to know on a single day on August 27th to be exact, we held 78,000 functions in India. We ended up opening 1.3 million, 10.3 million bank accounts on a single day and now it has gone to nearly almost 50 million. And this whole idea, the Prime Minister on 5th of August, September, the birthday of the former president, talked to 200,000 schools in India to the power of technology, involving 20 million school students. So India was the happening place and digital India was the first program conceived as a priority agenda within 100 days of inclusion, connecting India to the power of technology. The Prime Minister has said 3S, speed, scale and skill. 3D, democracy, demography and demand, 1.25 billion people. Another motto is IT plus IT is equal to IT. Namely, India today plus, or India's talent today plus information technology is India tomorrow. India was sitting at the cusp of a digital revolution and then came the digital India program. It is not for the elite, it is for the poor people, the marginalized. Basically it has three components, digital infrastructure for all the citizens for utility. That's point number one. Point number two, digital services on demand. Point number three, digital empowerment of Indians. And what we have done is, what we propose to do is, we want to link all the rural India through optical fiber network. 50,000 cluster of villages, gram panchayat we call this year, till the financial year, 100,000 next year, 100,000 next year. This will lead to three main up shots. E governance, E health, E education and above all E commerce. Then we are pushing electronic manufacturing in a very big way. India has a very gap area of electronic manufacturing. 100 billion dollar we use to, we use still important to India, it may become 400 billion dollars by the year 2020. We have given a lot of incentives and initiatives for establishment of electronic clusters. I went to Germany, I went to South Korea. Large number of big companies are willing to come in India and when we say make in India, we don't only say make for India. We say come make in India for Indians and also export outside and get all the incentives. Two quick points, digital literacy, we are going to encourage in a very big way. Special programs for peer people, marginalized, common service centers, which we are opening about 1.150,000, they are there, we propose to increase it further. Where women folk and others will operate it to computers, to broadband for all the services. This will also lead to backhand amalgamation of services in states after states for their certificates for land records, other entitlements should be E enabled. I can only tell you ladies and gentlemen, India is a huge country and the task is big. But if I can say India's innovative capacity is enormous. A poor, elderly, illiterate lady knows the significance of a missed call and how to respond to an SMS. Spectrum issue I know is troubling all of you. We are going to straighten it. A spectrum sharing, a spectrum trading, guideline are going to be in place by the year end. We are going to have a new auction also. We are in discussion with the Ministry of Defense for the release of extra spectrum. But we want to make the whole regime transparent with twin objective in mind, growth and India's consumers interest. Lastly, two very quick point and then I'll conclude. First is, I have instructed my officers and they are still having meeting today under Secretary's chairmanship, that sit with the stakeholders and whatever is required to ease the problems come with the solution. If the merger acquisition guideline needs to be revisited, revisit that. The first meeting with the stakeholder is happening today itself. The Prime Minister is personally monitoring this whole National Optical Fiber Network Program. I see a very huge role of retailers also in this process. Where the expansion of broadband as television expanded in India. For information you may be knowing we have got 600 channels in the sky of India. 245, 24 by news channels in India. Many talking sense, some talking nonsense too. But that happens. If India is a happening place and as television reached every part of India, similarly we want to push broadband. And innovation, there is a very famous word in India, all of you may be knowing, Juga technology, you know. When I get a presentation about the working of the department, I'm amazed to see that you can have recharge of your SIM card even at rupees 10. That's the model available in India. The tariff of mobile connectivity. All these are new areas which has given to the world an extraordinary example of India's commercial enterprise because of sheer size of the market available. I want to push it. I know it is a gigantic task. But I can only say, ladies and gentlemen, India after 26th of May is a different India. And we wish to complete that. Thank you. So since we have you for not too much. I've just spoken for 10 minutes. Yeah, no, no, true. And we have you for a little while. What we're gonna do is, we're gonna do a very quick introduction of everyone and what their view of digital India and come back to you before you leave for another follow up. 530 shop. Yeah, perfect. So, I'll start. Thank you so much. So very pleased to hear about the vision, sir. My name is Amit Mehra. I run a business called RML, formerly called Reuters Market Light. We provide information services and e-commerce services to farmers across the country. So I want to talk a little bit about the opportunity it presents, some of the solutions that are out there. But before you leave, press upon something that we have learned the hard way over the last seven years working with farmers across the length and breadth of the country, which is about behavioral change. And how important that would be to actually deliver the end goals that you have behind the digital India transformation program. So most of you may know that, but just to highlight a couple of statistics, India remains the only country which still has about 600 million people engaged directly or indirectly in agriculture. And as per the CII McKinsey study of last year, we still have only about 60% of our productivity potential reached. Yesterday, we heard that we produce about 270 million tons of grains from an area that is double the size that China has or more than China has and China produces 500 million tons. So clearly the potential of digital India and this whole program to empower the farming population directly and indirectly to improve their productivity, to improve their yields and to improve their price realization and income. And therefore achieve the bigger goal of inclusive growth is phenomenal. But what we have seen while proliferation of such services has happened over the last five, six years, I was sitting with a bunch of female farmers in a village close to Hadrabad a few weeks ago. And they've been using these services which provide them information on advisory, market prices, et cetera, et cetera. And I asked them, do you find these services beneficial? I said, yeah, all of us do. How many of you are able to read the benefit of these services? Only a handful, just about 30% or so. And we've seen this repeatedly in study after study done by the World Bank, done by the USA, done by the GIZ, et cetera, saying that while 90 to 95% of the people find these things beneficial, the actual benefit that they're able to derive from it is very limited. And a large part of that has to do with, it requires changing the behaviors. It is not about education and awareness about these services. It is about embedding them in their daily routines which takes a long time. So I'll come back to that, but I just wanted to start with leaving that point for you to consider that it will require consistent effort from the private sector, working with the public sector to actually engineer that behavioral change at scale for it to be really, really meaningful and transformational. So Bhaskar Pramadek, chairman for Microsoft. And I and my company, I've been around in the technology industry in India for the last 42 years and just for now three and a half years with Microsoft. So I've had the opportunity to see how technology has actually evolved in India and shaped. When I graduated from college, the microprocessor hadn't been invented. So it's good to see where we are today. The point I really wanted to make was that, what I see different today is the fact that everything which you're doing from a digital India perspective is focused on the citizen. It wasn't the same before, because previously it was about a state government wanting to do a particular mission mode project or it was a central government trying to do a particular department. But this time it's all about the citizen. And that I think is a tremendous opportunity which we have. The second I think is about the fact that at least with all the interactions we've had, I don't think the government says that we have all the answers. We want everybody to participate. We want the students, we want the citizens, we want the private industry, we want industry associations, we want everybody to participate. And I think that that is completely welcome. It's not about looking down. It says here's the vision, but let's get everybody together. And I think that that is really, very, very profound. And I want to compliment the government from doing it. The third is a sense of urgency. And I still remember the first meeting which I had with you, with Chandrujeet Banerjee of CIA, myself and another colleague from CIA. And you said that, look, I apologize. I have only 10 minutes. I want you guys to tell me, I'll tell you my two biggest problems. And I want you guys to tell me in 30 seconds what you can do and the solution shouldn't take 10 years to fix. And I still remember we told you two things. One is we talked about last mile connectivity and we talked about manufacturing in India. And so you told us that these are your two biggest problems. What can you do? I remember I talked to you about last mile connectivity and I'm gonna talk a little bit more about that just now. But when we talked to you about manufacturing in India, electronic products, the suggestion we gave was the duty structure. And I remember three weeks later, the duty structure got changed. So the speed at which you envision, but the speed at which you're also executing, I think I want to commend you also for that. The empowerment piece for citizens is also something which I think is very, very powerful. The fact that you want to involve the citizen, not just in terms of giving him a service, but about empowering him to actually take part in governance. And I wanted to also talk about that in terms of technology. You mentioned three things in terms of technology. I'm sorry, in terms of the programs which you have, one is on infrastructure, one is about empowering the citizen. And then the third one was about providing citizen services on demand. On the infrastructure side, I have two suggestions. One is about last mile access. And one of the technologies which Microsoft has actually deployed in other parts of the world, including in our campus at Redmond, is something which we call white fight technology. It's dynamic spectrum. It uses the TV white spaces in between TV channels and it can actually reach distances of over 10 kilometers. Which means that where your national optical fiber, link ends, you could actually set up routers which can cover up to 10 kilometers. And you can use standard off the shelf devices to connect to that. So you could have a self-help group, woman's group, you could have a Kirana store, you could have a coffee day, you could have a bank or a post office, actually setting up a router and providing free access. So there are solutions like this which I think would make it a lot better. This is emerging technology so we could build an ecosystem around that. We could manufacture products built on this. We could therefore create the internet of things in rural areas based on this. So the advantage which we get as a country is that we could become the leaders on a technology which is just about evolving. And it does require some policy and regulatory requirements but those are things which are easily handled. The second I think is again part of your program where you talked about digital identity. And we felt that again there is something where India's one of our biggest assets is really the Aadhar. The opportunity to take Aadhar which is a physical identity and convert it into a digital identity is huge where it can be used not just for accessing services but to really show the person who he is. The problem with the internet is that everybody you can be anonymous. It's like the US Marines be what you want to be and sometimes it's not what everybody else expects. But if you have a digital identity linked to your Aadhar then you could actually give people the digital locker. They could keep all their certificates from birth to death and then they could actually then share it depending upon the application, the service or whoever else they wanted it. The second is in the... Can I interrupt you a little bit? Just given the time. I'm gonna have them talk as well and have give the minister a chance to... I'll come back on the other two areas for some other suggestions. Thank you. Good evening everybody. I will be exceptionally brief. My name's Adair Fox Martin and I have the pleasure of running SAP for Asia Pacific Japan and have been a frequent visitor and active in India for 15, 16 years now. So I have seen a lot of change over the time. When I think of the concept of digital India, what I think of or what comes forward most to mind is a quotation from Leonardo da Vinci where he said, simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication. And when we're really talking about including and empowering people, it's making the services, the applications, the access so easy and so simple to consume that it almost addresses the problem that my colleague raised over here. So when you talked about your three Ss, I'd love to add the word simplify and create a fourth S there because really for me simplification and the battle against complexity is probably one of the most pervasive battles of our time. I'm Deb Roy. I'm chief media scientist at Twitter and on the faculty at MIT, at the MIT Media Lab. And recently Twitter and MIT came together and formed a new laboratory for social machines which I direct. Taking the perspective that we see through Twitter as an example of the power of digital networks and decentralized groups of people who can now express their opinions and lead to real social change, to lead to behavior changes referred to which is a hard thing to do. What we see is decentralized networks leveraging the internet tend today to lead to more ad hoc and disruptive kinds of social change when you have protests for example which can happen in a moment that is the current trend and we see a real potential to leverage this new social energy that's being released through decentralized networks and learn how to create design systems that channel that energy for rather than ad hoc and disruption, disruptive energy instead move towards systematic constructive social change. And just to give you one example of how we see some of these ideas coming together in a context of digital India in a rural setting, the idea that you have networks of children who have access to smartphones and the services, the content for learning but combine that with the social network that surrounds that child, the teacher, the parents, the coaches, all of whom have digital touch points, the opportunity to create deep transformation is that we can not only deliver the services but also map the communication and social interaction between all of that ecosystem around the child and map first of all the kind of structure and dynamics that are actually at play in a way that we just can't see, there's sort of a new microscope being built as we speak to see those dynamics and then with appropriate theories of change actually go and design shifts in these coupled systems and diagnose where the theory of change is failing and go and intervene with a kind of efficiency and scale that has just never been possible before. So there's a huge opportunities and I think that really India can be the place that shows the way for how to make that happen at a scale that will have global implications. So I'm very excited about that idea. So we have been running our own Twitter experiment before this meeting and so I'm gonna put one question which I think is in a way a summary of many of the things that were said that I think many people here in the room were interested in. You have come to power with a very different view of the role of the government and one of the things that is especially true for the sector we are talking about, there's a huge role of the government, there's regulation, there are other issues. So from your point of view, do you think of that if you had to divide the world up in three buckets as in what are the things that you visualize only the government doing? What are the things that would be in the bucket of PPP kind of models and what is really open field for private? And this has been one of those squishy areas and this applies to everything, right? Which services do you see largely being provided by the government and so on? Very quickly, I think I have seven, eight minutes. First of all, thanks for the kind words. Digital India is not only a government program, a government of India's program. We have to work with the state governments. We have to work with private players. And we are open to suggestions 24 by seven for improving it. The first thing I would like to tell you and this government is working with an open, very mindset and the Prime Minister's key word always is outcome is more important. This is how we are going. We change the duty structure within a fortnight. Once I heard about it and the budget, you saw that. In the last about 35 years for the first time electronic goods got so much of support. I think in the whole discussion what we are missing is the innovative idea of Indians. And let me give you two instances. The smartphone is rising in India by 45%. The highest growth outside the USA. Quite kind information. Just two quick, very earthy examples. One of my professional juniors always gets her supply of food grains from her village home in Madhya Pradesh. She likes the pulse and the wheat there. One day her grocery shop owner in a remote Mufassil town got it loaded on the goods train, used the WhatsApp, sent the receipt, photocopy on her mobile phone, the exact wagon number, the station at which it would reach in daily on what date at what time. His old bank account number for electronic transfer. And she was amazed. He has never been taught about anything electronic. But he picked up the need to employ that technology for his business. The second is more fascinating. Raja Sharma, the famous TV personality, had gone to have an Archduck program, famous program, people come and ask questions. He was having lunch. He said an interesting thing for you to know that whenever he used to return from his studio, his servant was found to be sitting on a particular motorcycle before a particular house playing with his smartphone. The third day he asked his wife why the hell he always sits there. He said very simply the Wi-Fi connection in front of the house is the best. And he uses that to save Brazil football. That is India. Therefore Indians are prone to use technology. You only create the enabling atmosphere. You don't have to have much of education for that. That is a big assurance for India. On the farm sector you have a point. We need to work more. We can learn from your experience. As far as your query is concerned, I see a very powerful role for private players in the distribution network. For instance, once the broadband area is in place, the huge market of India, and the rural market is rising very fast, e-education, e-health, e-commerce, e-detail, all are going to come in a very big way. Distribution of broadband in the urban area and the rural area. I have asked my officers to work out a very proactive platform as to how to virtual internet can become a reality as far as distribution is concerned. There are big ISPs are there. There are big pro-service providers are there. How can we have a virtual operator who can become, take small broadband and distribute it in a cluster of areas? And I have asked the tri to finalize the whole guidelines in that. The larger issue I would like to highlight, it is a very proactive government. And yes, the brief of the prime minister to me is what? I want government available on my mobile phone. I think that is a mission statement. And we have got a mobile SEVA facility where I am told nearly 360 facilities are available. Election commission, where you are registered as a voter, you can get that pull information and push information. From railway ticketing to air ticketing to so long, all are available. This whole disaster management information is being done through mobile phone in a very big way. Now once broadband becomes a reality, a whole range of canvas opens up for business, for retail, for involvement of private sector and newer forms of PPP model. Your point of simplification and sophistication is well taken. But my take of India is a little different. And this take I always acquired after watching India as a political activist for my student days. And India is a place where rocket science will work and java technology will work side by side. Where 4G will work and the simplest mobile where I can only give a best call and SMS will also work. India cannot be segregated, but allow Indians to play with their technology given an enabling atmosphere and they will go for a smartphone in a very big way. I think this mindset of Indians must be kept in view when you design the policy. Yes, a regulatory measure should be as free as possible and today I want to inform you that I have already constituted a committee as I said in my initial comment head by the secretary telecom. Talk to the stakeholders, ease of doing business must be also replicated in my department and whether you need to revisit the guideline, do visit. And I think this is a statement I am making when I am the minister for telecom I am not only the minister for BSN and MTNL I am the minister of the sector. The sector needs to grow. The same I have for IT also. The sector needs to grow. And when I go abroad and see great interest of big manufacturers to come in India I think this is a very big, big opportunity. As for the Twitter part is concerned for sensitive information. That is the question India firmly believes in freedom of expression, freedom of press. But the big India, the diverse India and we have got fundamental right of speech but that is subject to reasonable restrictions. So while permitting complete flow of information stakeholders like you have to take those concerns on board that while exercising that right we don't allow terrorists to spread their own message allow riotous life situation to happen in India. How can that be done? I don't see much of role of the government because I am a great supporter of the freedom of the press freedom of expression. But you as the big operator have to take that factor into account as to how it can be handled. Ladies and gentlemen my concluding remark is only this I am greatly honoured to come in this very extraordinary economic summit by the World Economic Forum in conjunction with CII feel free to give me suggestions. We have to make digital India a great success. I am appealing to all of you I am just a phone call away if you feel that some concrete suggestions will improve digital India implementation. I really appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. I think I have your permission to leave. You can carry on. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen. In Parliamentary democracy cabinet meeting is more important than India economic summit. Thank you sir. I am sorry. So I think as a follow up we will do what we had originally planned which is to have you talk about your experience as digital India and farming which seems like an intersection not made in heaven. So can you elaborate and specifically around some of the examples you mentioned earlier on where you see it working and the idea was how can some of these things scale up while there are lots of interesting ideas can they really have impact. Sure. So first of all very very pleased to hear the Honorable Minister say that he's open to suggestions we were looking forward to and I'll make sure that I get a hold of the mobile number at some point. So yes the one of the challenges we have seen is the biggest challenge in fact has been how to institute behavioral change at scale and let me give you some of the examples of what I mean by that. So another example I was sitting in outside our stall in Nagpur there was a big farmer Mela, a farmer fair and I was just deliberately standing outside and there were farmers walking into our stall and looking at what kind of services we provide and information around market prices weather intelligence advisory everything that they need to know to improve their productivity price realization etc. So a farmer from a particular state walks in and when he's coming out of the stall I ask him so do you know about this company? Do you know what services we provide or they provide pretending not to be from the company? He says yeah it's very good this is everything that I need to know it helps me improve my productivity etc. So I was sold from the info that he shared on my behalf about our company and I said do you use the service? He said no I don't. And I said why don't you use it because you said that it is extremely beneficial. He says no no you know I was using it in the past and I got some benefit I made about 20,000 rupees more by realizing higher price but then it wasn't really available close by you know there wasn't just easy access to this. And this is just one of the many many examples that we encounter where particularly for an application or a service that will run on the Digital India platform which we call in RML parlance the vitamin applications. I'll explain how they differ from the antibiotic or killer applications. But what we have seen is that for an average farmer who is 51 years old even in the very difficult subnormal monsoon season when we are telling them to use mulching in a certain way when we are asking them to do pitcher harvesting when we are asking them to put certain drops of sodium carbonate to save water when it is likely to rain all of that is like you know if you want to impact his productivity he will use water much much better in a very very difficult situation that the country encountered this year it requires the gentlemen and mostly gentlemen really to change what they have been doing for decades and over generations and it is very difficult to do it in a very short period of time so there are two things that really impact that one is and if I may add to the list of S's the fifth S that I would put solutions. So you just can't put an IT app or you can't just put the infrastructure you need hyper local content you need the service to support that you need the right level of awareness you need the right level of education and then you need hand holding over a period of time for the impact for the solution to be really benefiting that individual and the solutions which are vitamin in nature by that I mean the impact of that and the benefit of that comes over a period of time so it's not an antibiotic it's not a Facebook or a WhatsApp that if I don't see it tonight or if I don't see the first thing in the morning you know my life get disrupted completely it is something that I need to use consistently over a period of time maybe over a couple of crop cycles maybe over a few years before I realize that this is really really beneficial so this is a vitamin app and a lot of what digital India is trying to do with e-health, e-governance so it will require first of all you know complete solutions and a lot of time for people to embed these solutions in their behavior, in their daily routines and which is a very different you know cattle of fish than just you know awareness and providing things and leaving it in the hands of the individuals so that's one aspect of solution and the other is around scale how do you get there but I'll come to that later let me just leave it at that and then I was going to probe you a little bit on the second part of what you were saying the innovation around light last mile access if you want to elaborate a little bit on so I talked about it it's basically using this unused spectrum which is in between TV channels it's in the 200 to 600 you know megahertz range therefore it gives you long distance capabilities our studies have shown 90% of the spectrum is unutilized in most big cities on even more so in the rural areas and therefore that's an opportunity so I think last mile access is going to become critical I also want to talk about innovation because the minister talked about innovation and I think you know sometimes we don't really need the latest technology to solve some you know light threatening problems and I'll give an example of tuberculosis you know TV for example you have to ensure that you continue to take your dosage and if you don't then it actually reduces the potency now in India Microsoft Research actually came out with a very innovative packaging which when the person took his medicine it actually exposed a number you then dialed a 1-800 number and with that number which you entered it did what was called a missed call the IVR system would record that that dosage and that person if he didn't take his medicine and he didn't dial the number then they would activate a healthcare person to go across and give him and tell them to basically take the medicine so there are examples of this where even low end technology can actually solve some of these different kinds of problems you know we talked a lot about MOOCs and we've done last two years we've been investing in working with three colleges three universities we have about 40,000 students enrolled we call it MEC, massively empowered classroom and what we've learnt is that with MOOCs most there's a less than 10% probability that the student will actually complete his program and the reason was that only the guys who are really interested in gaining higher knowledge completed the programs most students felt that unless it impacted they didn't impact them in terms of the work which they were currently doing in the university then they wouldn't do it so involving the local professors creating the interactively between the professor and the student enabling students to talk amongst themselves became very very critical and it was a blended program not just some online course from somewhere but the professors had an opportunity to actually build on it we call it massively empowered classroom it's about taking technology adapting it for emerging markets and it's something which we are now planning to scale across the rest of the world so just two examples of innovation what would be your examples that we talked about especially given that India has a very large public sector often seen as an area of huge improvement so what has been your experience well first of all I think I'd just like to comment I think what both of my colleagues have commented on here is the importance of education and the role that education has in ensuring the success of digital India and I think you know when you look at some of the processes that we've been alluding to here it's about how we flatten some of those out and that it right goes not just to the information that a farmer gets but also how he gets paid potentially and you know the empowerment of that using technology to a device that's in his hand perhaps would also be a change enabler when we look at this that and educating and when I look at you know this this flattening out of processes I think from a public sector perspective in India that is an enormous opportunity we've been working with many public sector entities and what I see in the public sector are very many processes that are 150 years old at least if you look at how for instance technology is procured it uses a tender procurement process that can sometimes take two years to actually go from woe to go in this industry two years is a very long time and the world has changed so I believe that there is a huge opportunity to iron complexity out that in terms of digitizing the public sector there is no point in digitizing existing processes that don't correlate to the business need of the government today but that we refresh those processes and then digitize them appropriately so that they enable the government to react in all the transparent and accountable and auditable ways that we require to the business requirements of the community and to the needs of the citizens here in India so I guess you know one comment I think applies to both things you mentioned that very much in agreement that behavior change is hard and is critical and you don't there's not an app for that although sometimes an app or a piece of technology opens up a new set of possibilities but it's people who change behavior and can change one another's and your example of MOOCs not being you can't just drop the MOOC and walk away and understand holistically the social context within which it may or may not work so given all of that one of the ways that I think about the technology layer that layers on top of the behavior change that is not happening is a kind of amplifier and optimizer of those human processes and sometimes that optimization amplification step can have astonishing scale astonishing effect that almost takes you through a phase shift in human behavior as a result and so just to take that MOOC example which I'd love to learn more about offline as more and more of the what are probably right now face-to-face physical interactions between people which we will always want and need leave a digital trace a lot of the advances in science and kind of graph analysis and so forth all the stuff that's coming out of sort of big data analytics so-called area can allow us to again map what's happening why did this child learn in this context with that MOOC and this other child who seems quite similar not oh look at this the coaching dynamic that this child experience here looks completely different maybe it's that so this idea of having this kind of data and then you know what in in the world of web based services AB testing at a scale which is again if you go and look at how Google is tuning its offerings it's this massively parallel experiment that is letting people's idiosyncratic individual preferences and interests tune and train the machine and imagine all of that layered on digital India so a lot of the practice again we don't have to invent there are being invented behavior change in marketing effective marketing is behavior change if you look at the technologies of behavior change of identifying in a network who are the influencers what is the message that's most likely to reach that influencer now if we're talking about a network of children and informal coaches and teachers in a village and you take that kind of thinking and say who are the influencers what's working what's not let's do the randomized control trials you know a fancier way to talk about AB testing the kind of platform capability that we could create so that all of the different innovators inside India and out can plug into a platform like that and create a system that continuously learns and it's not machine learning and it's not just human learning it's human machine learning there's and I think we're seeing in bits and pieces but there is I can identify with that because that's the area where you know Microsoft has been investing a lot and you know I don't think the minister had a chance to talk about it but there is the government is thinking about setting up a national cloud and a national cloud was just not a bunch of servers which is actually serving out applications and services but there is that layer of you know data analytics intelligence which is going to be built in and in terms of examples can I just throw one more example on the table that's kind of concrete it's become my favorite ever since I visited this little town so there's a tiny town in the south of Spain called whom it's in the province of Granada population 3500 and when you look at just through the data feeds we have access to all tweets and so we look and we see there's this little hotspot continuously incredible amount of public conversation coming out of this little spot in Spain if you go and visit the town the first thing you'll notice if you run into for example a member of the tiny police department in whom is they all have Twitter handles embroidered on their uniforms and the police cruisers have Twitter handles the police dog has handled so what this is actually doing is every time you see that police officer it's an invitation to speak to that officer in a way that's publicly visible so there's this this is a Twitter specific example the generalization is using this transformed public sphere where anyone can enter and be heard and everyone knows so there's a kind of epistemological hall of mirrors everyone knows everyone is there and could potentially see what that does it's not just a police it's every member of the town if you work for the town you're on you're on Twitter so we've been finding as we're starting to look at the data these little examples of responsive loops that often have actually three or four players that form a kind of social circuit so somebody is walking down the street sees a street light is out tweets that the street lights out this is a typical example we just saw a couple weeks ago and it's later the mayor José Antonio tweets back and says thanks for letting us know the electricians on it he's going to fix it tomorrow he tweets public promise just got made next morning is a tweet from the electrician with a photograph ladder still up light fixed saying thanks for letting me know lamp fixed and then there's two retweets and a favorite a little bit of love and recognition so you look at just what happened in that dynamic the fact that there is public sphere where everyone can talk and everyone can see there there's a combination of carrots and sticks the stick is if I'm the electrician it is now like there's been a promise made on behalf of me by someone who has some authority and everyone can see that so there's a stick I better go and fix it and the carrot is what used to be a thankless job I was just invisible suddenly I'm getting favorites and retweets for doing my job so there's this combination of sticks and carrots that is compelling a kind of dynamic now that work because there's a magical mayor it's a little magical town it's only 3500 but I see in that a little bit of maybe the future of how do you take those principles how do you leverage the incredible power of digital networks and then have people understand if you take certain roles and take some meaningful personal action there's actually an expected system that could go into play and how do you bootstrap systems like that when all the elements are there in raw form but at a different scale in a different culture, a different context to actually enable this kind of behavior change that everyone in that town wants to see so they become responsive to their own needs that's my example can I just quickly react to that? just let me make a quick process point so far we have kept it within the so we have around I think 25-30 minutes so what we will do is we'll do one more set of discussions but we'll also open it up for questions at this point so if anyone has questions please feel free to ask and I might be rude in cutting you if you don't have a question but a statement for the whole sorry about that already okay so let him and I'll get back to you you know the example that you gave they similarly profound examples of behavioral change when I see the villages with the farmers it's been now seven years for us doing this in 70,000 villages with several million farmers but even now at two date every time I go it gives me goose bumps you know they have been able to use the information to negotiate with the middlemen they have been able to increase their productivity by just putting two drops of the chemical in one liter of water and by using it 10 days later and not 20 days later they have been able to you know save their crop etc so that's when it works it is just beautiful and the impact it creates on the lives of people both emotionally and financially is just remarkable and that's sort of what we are trying to achieve as I understand with the digital India program but to scale that kind of behavioral change while the technology layer and the analytics will be tremendously powerful and we are applying many of those now in the recent past started to do that and marketing literature does tell you quite elaborately how you can create that behavioral change so I was listening to Sanjeev from Unilever and Kajol and the others who were talking about behavioral change in the context of sanitation and how challenging it is even if you put a toilet there people just don't want to use it for beliefs and behaviors they have been following for decades and it's a more pleasant experience to defecate outside etc which is a real challenge that's why these things are not working despite massive outlays so I heard examples of how and really theories about how we can actually do that by investing in education awareness sort of campaigns ads etc etc below the line programs above the line programs and I was doing the math in my mind and I was saying well this just ain't going to work in our business so to scale it it would be easier for Unilever or a PNG to do that but to scale something which is impacting such a vast population of the country for the private players while they have a big role to play I think and to make it sustainable it does require private investment it does require private ventures it has to be done across the world people have realized most of the social problems will have to be dealt with some way or the other by private sector but the government has a very big role to help bridge that gap and if that is understood well while one part of the problem is to give these solutions to you know affect behavioral change over a period of time and then work with the private sector take away some of this heavy lifting that is needed to do it at scale so that people start to change their behaviors and create a framework where multitude of private players competing with each other or one another and the creative destruction that will happen let that happen and not come in the way which we have unfortunately seen in the past coming in the way so I think government solutions have to be provided by the private sector the government can incubate those and if they are already existing I think they should perhaps nurture those but to achieve scale government needs to create that framework for these solutions to scale and they have a pretty big role to play in the next few years can I just give a small quote about my experience on IT it's been very simple and you know there is this quote which I came across I can't remember who was the author but it goes like this it says that a lot of the challenges and problems we see in the world today is because of Stonehenge emotions medieval institutions and God like technology so basically it's in our IT language it's people, processes and technology technology by itself can't solve the problem so it's really what is happening not just in India but everywhere else perhaps a little bit more accentuated as we start getting the next 500 million on to the internet but we got to worry about our Stonehenge emotions we got to worry about our institutions that's why we got to change make a lot of regulatory and it's not just technology so there was a question my name is Ajay I report macro economy for the public broadcast I was wondering if we could imagine that while we are talking about food security in India can we also imagine about right to broadband along with the right to food and if you can imagine how is it possible just want to have an idea from the panelists I think yesterday we had the privilege there was a private sessionist even with Samir also hosted and we had the privilege of discussing elements of this topic and there was certainly this view that broadband and internet should be considered in the same way as any other utility water electricity and so on and it came back actually to the some of the discussions that we had in the group were really around the role of government for a period of time because there is a view that if we look at the market in India it is enormous and commercially it's enormous commercial opportunity but it's also very fragmented and if you look at it on a per-panchat basis it doesn't justify the cost of infrastructure to move into a single panchat and create this access but if you segmented the country if you looked at policy that allowed you to make it commercially viable and that is a policy change that is required for a period of time to create the framework so that the actual private sector can exercise on that framework invest appropriately and then deliver the goods and services that are necessary so I do think it's a timing thing but I also think that to the point of both my colleagues here that government has a very big role to play in helping India to build that platform facilitating that process of demand and time as we find it today so that ultimately the services can be delivered in this way. Can I just add an additional point to this question? So in the US and in Singapore they've actually passed a law act policy which basically frees up some of the spectrum which was originally meant for TV channels 200 to 700 and they've defined a narrow spectrum which is available for all citizens so it's free spectrum which enables you to do things like Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi currently is at 2.4 gigahertz which is on the other side but that's why it's only 100 meters but they've actually passed a law to free that spectrum so that anybody can use it okay so I think that's the kind of policy change which would be required for the kind of technology I was just talking about We had a question whatever we talked about today it does become a reality in the next 10 years what kind of income and output multiplier do you see and what kind of job multiplier do you see? Akhen has our guess basis some data actually so we have seen if it works and independent studies have done this analysis and validated this as well so World Bank study was done which said that if the younger farmers so the right segment which is more I'm unable to change their behavior the average farmer if the younger farmer were given access to this product which is the right information at the right time personalized to that individual crops and region etc and his preferences then they can make a 9% increase in price realization in just one crop cycle there was another study done by Akhen which said the income increase could be between 5 to 25% so even if I were to take a low the lower end of that figures and there are many such studies out there that's on the agriculture side which is still about 700 million people or so or at least 100 million plus cultivating households it's a tremendous impact in income realization about 10% just by enabling them with the access to a solution and to do it at scale I would say you take even half of that and the 5% to an economy of the size of India you can do the math how big that impact could be and it doesn't really, the interesting part is it doesn't really cost that much all it requires is having the right framework within which private players can work with the government so that's one statistic at least I can throw so I do have a statistics on SMB and it's a comparison of the BCG study which was we Microsoft participated in that I don't remember the exact data but it is by geography, by nation, by country we have the numbers for India and for most of the other countries but what it basically showed was that SMEs which used IT their growth was substantially larger than companies which didn't use IT factor of 3 and they also provided employment which was 15 or 30% greater than SMEs which didn't use IT if you give me your name I can actually send that across to you but there are a lot of statistics which shows that it actually enhances employability and employment it all needs to be put together I think in fact we have someone who had quoted those numbers so I'll give you the rough numbers I think you missed the question for sorry to put you on the question really was what's the multiplier of broadband access or access on the economy overall and what I remember of the number was for every 10% increase in connectivity it was something like 3.5% increase for the developing world versus 1.9 or 2% for the developed world and the surprising thing whatever the percentage in the numbers were in places like India and China than it has elsewhere for many reasons and I think you had quoted those numbers sorry I wasn't ready for that I'm from AT&T that was a report actually done by Mackenzie and googled three years ago and they kind of had those numbers out the upside for developing countries with broadband penetration is far higher not just use of IT just penetration of broadband by itself in India ranks at about 12% in terms of actual broadband penetration any other question I'm a farmer and I can only tell you that if the technology the speed of internet is not fast enough in the villages we'll be using the technology like most people use computers you just use the word or the excel and you don't use the other applications I'm feeling I'm not sure and I think the panel can tell us is the cost of net data access increasing because if the cost is everything else is supposed to come down with competition but I think the cost is increasing that means to be clarified exactly again the data shows that India has some of the highest access cost for broadband it's increasing also it's increasing and high already anyone wants to take that question you probably could because we had a very good discussion on that yesterday so we are going to include I'm sorry I just came to say there's an empty seat here far from me to be in the ministry I think the cost of access as the distinguished gentleman put it is amongst the highest in the world in India in the sort of top 10 and that is a factor of couple of things including purchasing power parity vis-a-vis what Indians can pay our per capita income is about 40% of China is slightly less than that so it's fairly high in just in absolute in relative terms but also I think the reasons are very expensive spectrum fragmented spectrum and duties just so you know out of every 100 rupees that an operator gets approximately 35 rupees is just paid as levies to the government for every 100 rupees that they spend on costs the single largest cost is a spectrum in fact starting this year the outflow for spectrum payments to the governments will exceed the investment that they're making in infrastructure in India so that then causes the kind of challenges that the gentleman just talked about and it will get worse because as you go to video then the capacity that is required to put that through is much higher and will become far more expensive. But that's using the current 2G, 3G, 4G technology so you know I think you know we need to understand that there are also a lot of other ways of doing broadband other than through cellular. And I guess just to Ajit to your point it is a challenge recently we saw some of the farmers downloading our application it's an android app for a 3MB app it was taking them in some parts as much as 15 minutes and was costing them about 75 rupees to just download and the service itself was being given free. So what we have done and I think most of the companies will do that till the solutions really come on the broadband side so we cut it down by half made it 1.5 we're bringing it down to 1 making it bare minimum you know in terms of the size of the app so that it can be downloaded quickly but that is indeed a challenge so we saw about 50% of the people who were trying to download the application abandoned the session halfway because it was just taking too long it was costing them too much and 80% of them are on prepaid so they knew that their balance is going to go away if they download the SAP they might as well use for the antibiotic apps the Facebook and WhatsApp. Can I just I'm sorry for this but you know in the villages the government says you've done rural electrification no electricity comes in and we are very worried that you might have broadband but there will be no speed coming in those lines and I think as a farmer there is a case for competition commission of India to act on the telecom and internet companies at the moment and that really I mean that's the feeling. Alright we have someone else who has a question More of a comment from our discussion yesterday which was talked about and just for the gentleman there we talked about cost which was associated we also talked about value the reason that you are asking that question is the fact that you are seeing value to the fact that you will have that access and at some point in time the value is going to outstrip the cost that is associated with providing that access so you know it's a question of timing like we talked about so we go to think about that as well that there is going to be some we have to figure out how to increase the value to a point that the farmers would be willing to pay the cost which is incurred I'm not an operator so just disclaimer from that point Any other we have one more question Hi my name is Laishyam Bhai I am sorry to be sounding a little pessimistic compared to most of the people over here what I wanted to understand is when you talk about digital India and connecting all the villages across India there are so many villages across India where you don't even have the basic electricity so when we have those kind of situations forget about your broadband connection so how do you kind of connect with those villages also and when we talk about connectivity and digital India are we talking about connectivity through the mobile network or are we talking to the broadband and is there a possibility of the digital divide increasing all the more because of this Before I lock that question to someone here just a quick summary of some of the conversations that have happened exactly this question thanks for asking that because I was going to otherwise ask the elephant in the room question which is that while you're talking of access there's a problem of electricity water many other fundamental things I would say two things one is there were similar questions when mobile telephony was first introduced that we didn't have many of these things also and now we have almost 700 800 however million phones so how people actually use the phones and what they do with it is something that's very hard for us to force these so I wouldn't trade off access and phones and broadband verses having basic infrastructure at least with one part of the answer but I would like you know anyone else who wants to take that question you for example I think if we go by and there the private sector has a pretty big role to play but if we go by the use case the end user the solution that is needed for the end user then I think one can figure out ways around it so for example when we started you know smart phones were not even there and even phones were not there seven years ago and we started the basic feature phone with simple SMS's and a phone call you know things that the farmers were able to do and they were able to charge and were behaviorally accustomed to doing and there were ways and means in which they could find their way around so I think as long as we keep focusing on the end solution and the behavioral change whatever is available right now we'll be able to make use of as private sector but once that starts to happen and the use cases start to get proven then is when the government should come and you know there's a big way to help bridge that gap till it becomes sustainable so the only other point I just want to say is that first of all I don't think anybody has a solution which is for 100% and every single citizen of India in every single village in every single nook and cranny I think if you want to really get prosperous we've got to keep moving on it the technology I talked about Whitefy in Kenya we're using solar power so it's possible to do some of these with that kind but even then I can guarantee you there may be certain parts of India where you don't even get to see the sun perhaps so all the time or perhaps for long stretches of time perhaps in the monsoon so what do you do you don't have broadband so I think we'll have to solve some of those issues as you go along I just wanted to comment on I often hear this you know you're thinking about smart phones in a village and there is an electricity and I think that looking at holistic sort of system solutions and recognizing that it's really difficult to kind of set priorities and say oh electricity over phones you know yesterday I was in a village with they had a community toilet and associated with that community toilet was a collection of sun lanterns and there was a habit formed the girls in the village would use the bathroom on the way to school they would deposit their lantern they'd pick it up at the end of school day they'd use the community toilet they'd take the electricity home and the sun lantern through which they could charge their phone they also had light with which they could read there's all of these elements integrated you know I think it's very difficult for any of us to sit here and say which human need access to information the ability to express yourself which a smart phone enables is that more or less important than electricity it's very difficult to for us to say oh you're right electricity first or you're wrong let's get to this health element or this learning element so I think there are a couple systems and sometimes it's surprising to see how pieces start to fit together alright I think we have just one last question thanks my name is Nikhil Pawar I'm from Media Naama which looks at internet issues I wanted to get a sense of the house from the perspective of net neutrality and where they think India's headed because we can talk about all the services that we want to provide on the internet but if there's going to be balkanization of the internet or selection of services and currently the consultation process that's about to begin in India for looking at revenue share arrangements and mobile operators that has a restrictive impact on access to services because those who can't afford to pay telecom operators effectively can't afford to provide the service to consumers to quite an extent so I just wanted to get a sense where we're headed in terms of net neutrality what do you think and sensitivity it's a tough question I really don't think I'm equipped to be able to answer that I know from both my personal and from a company perspective we believe in net neutrality I think the way it's happening here in India it is a bit of a challenge and it's completely different from what's happened in other parts of the world with the services and the application service providers we're able to get and provide on a new tool basis out here the power is with the operators who has the pipe can dictate what goes through that pipe and I think that's where the government and the regulatory authorities will have to pay a bigger role comment not on net neutrality that's a two-day discussion between us because you know we have it's a very very complex issue but I just want to talk about the point that is made about rural and how they'll get it I just want to leave this number for the distinguished guests here the mobile telephony which is the cheaper easier part to get out for the first it's been about 18 years first two years we had 2 million subscribers in the next six years we got 200 million subscribers in the last six years we've got 400 million subscribers additional total of about 657 depending on what the numbers are so the moment you put mobility and wireless to anything the growth is usually phenomenal and exceeds most expectations that you would have that's just a trend across the world and so rural will you know eventually to that point it just they will find technologies to fund that part the points that you made about pricing I just want to say that telecom sectors perhaps the only sector in India where every single cost incurred by operators is fined almost on a monthly basis with the TRAI who regulates the tariffs and then decides not to regulate it for the past few years because the cost being offered is actually comparable the reason why the price is so high and not because there is a large margin there is a margin of course is because the input costs are really high and that requires structural reforms thank you I think with that we should end the session thank you everyone for being here and everyone joined this was initially meant to be a free-form problem solving discussion became a panel and then again a free-form problem thank you thank you