 Namaste. Welcome to yet another edition of India First Leadership Talk. Today, we have with us an exceptionally dynamic IS officer, Shri Rohit Kumar Singh, currently serving as Secretary Department of Consumer Affairs. He has worked extensively and provided leadership across ministries and departments. He has led some commendable government initiatives and policy interventions to make our lives better. Let us move on and know more about him and his accomplished work from the man himself. Very, very warm welcome, Shri Rohit Kumar Singh. Thank you. Sir, you have had an amazing journey. Please tell us something about your journey, your childhood, your schooling, various opportunities, challenges, struggle. How has it been? So my father was in a transferable job in UP state electricity board. He was an engineer. And so early childhood, we would go to schools wherever he was posted. But then I was sent to a boarding school, which is run by the J. Krishnamurti Foundation, which is located at the banks of River Ganga in Varanasi. It's called the Rajgart school. So from 6th to 10th, I was there. And then in 11th class, because that school was only till 10th. And 11th, I was in Queens College in Varanasi. And then I got selected for IIT because at that time it was permitted for students to take IIT exam after 11th class. And I was at IIT BHU for five years. Then I went to US for graduate school, completed my master's in computer engineering and a few projects for big multinationals. And then came back to India, taught a little bit at IIT BHU. We actually set up the department of computer engineering there. And then moved on to the IES. So in brief, this has been my journey. Since your father was in a transferable job and you moved on for your studies from different places and then eventually to a boarding school and subsequently to IIT BHU. How has been your journey and what kind of qualities such as adaptability, these new cultures you have learned very early in your life? So I think you are very right. The best lessons of moving from place to place is how quickly you adapt to new situations. And you also get a very varied experience of small city, bigger city, a different country. So I think that has really helped me in the IES, because if you see how Indian administrative services, one day you are in one ministry, then you are shifted to another ministry, then to a PSU. So I think that the quality to adapt quickly to the changing circumstances, that has really helped me and stood me in good stead. And it's a very important quality even today for all those students with the kind of scenario change, scenario we are into. So one very interesting question I want to ask you, you did your masters from United States at Clarkson University, New York. And 34 years back or 35 years back, probably it was a better part of the world. And you were also teaching there and I can make out that you were one of the most brilliant students with the kind of acolyte you received there. So how come you decided that you will actually leave that the better part of your staying and then move on to India, will get into the administrative services and get into public service domain? So I think there were two factors behind it. One was the family. My mother has been a very strong personality and a great influence over me. So she convinced me that I could use my experience and talent better for India and for the people of India. So I think she convinced me a great deal. And when I joined the information technology revolution was just beginning and we could see the tremendous potential. And I always wondered how information technology can be used in India across sectors because at that time there's a big difference between technology where it was in the US and where it was in India. I remember when I went from here, I had also worked for a small period for three months in Tata consultancy services. And we used computers where the input was through punching cards. So we had a set of, there was no terminal to type. And then when I went to US, I saw a different set of computers running on Unix and IBM 370. And I thought if that technology is possible to use in India, especially in public domain, how much difference will it make? So I think these two factors, one my mother's influence and the other exploring India through this technology, that was somewhere at the back of her mind. And these two factors convinced me to return back to India. You very fondly spoke about your mother and it appears that she has been one of the greatest influence in your life. So tell us a little bit more about her and would you really call her as your role model in personal and professional life? Oh, totally. She is the best role model anyone could have. In fact, all mothers are role models for their children. But I think my mother being from a background of a conventional family with a very hierarchical society, she continued her higher education, post her marriage, did her PhD when I was born and then went on to become a very accomplished academician and she was a great expert in educational psychology. So we saw her through in the family we used to see her how dexterously she would manage both the home and the profession and constantly motivating all four of us children who are now, I mean we have good careers, all of four of us and I think she is squarely responsible as being the motivating factor and she always inspired us to work hard never to be deterred by a defeat and she would always say, and then the value of small savings which I think most teachers and professors in India have this feeling. So I think many of the qualities that one should inculcate in their children the value of savings, the value of good education, the value of hard work, the value of not getting deterred by failure. I think all of this came from my mother and not only to me, all four of us siblings and I think we have learnt the great lot from her. In fact in families where women are strong and women are the anchors, I think that is where the children do the best is my personal view. It's such a commendable contribution by your mother and we definitely require stronger women for a more inclusive society to make a much better community and of course in a nation. Now let's talk a little bit about your current job profile. This ministry's, your ministry's multimedia awareness campaign, Jagu-Grahant-Jago is a very unique initiative in its own space. So to what extent do you think it has been able to meet its objectives, make all the consumers aware of their rights? As far as consumer protection, the whole ecosystem is concerned. I think the fundamental pillar is awareness and unless the consumers are aware about their rights and unless they start asking questions about why MRP is not there, why expiry date is not there on this product and why the ISI certification is not there because it is affecting my safety. So unless the consumers start asking this question the producers, the suppliers will not be forced to do it. Of course there is a legal framework, there is a law but I think because the spread is so much we have 140 crore people and lakhs and crores of businesses. So enforcement cannot work unless the client that is the consumer is aware. So Jagu-Grahant-Jago campaign has been there for quite some time and I think it has paid dividends and people are aware and they ask questions but you know recently if you have seen the flavor of trade has changed there is increasingly use of e-commerce people want the comfort of their homes people want to click a button and the supply should come to their home. So when there was a small moment pop store a corner shop and people would buy stuff from there and if something went wrong they had a personal equation with the person who was selling. So it was easy for them to get a refund or a change or the guy himself would ensure quality but with e-commerce you know this whole balance has shifted the power balance between the consumer and the seller has shifted. So we need to be more careful we need to be more aggressive in creating awareness we need to discipline the e-commerce companies more to address the grievance result. So I think awareness is very important and it has become more important with the advent and rise of e-commerce. E-commerce platforms various large, hugely large aggregators I mean let's not really name them but they have become so powerful that the entire power equilibrium between a consumer and actually a company and then you are not seeing a product from your own eyes you are not touching it so everything is based on the information provided by the aggregator itself or maybe the seller himself or herself. So how and what kind of various questions what kind of various steps can be taken which is based on a concept of that consumers are aware of their rights they do what should be written what should not be written and another thing is that India is a country of multiple languages so we have a huge linguistic diversity so this jagu, graha jagu is this campaign is also in different Indian languages is it also in regional languages and then you know the penetration of radio or other say mobiles not necessarily smart mobiles other mobiles also is it also on all those platforms? So let's take it one by one So you are right as we said you also said that the power equilibrium is really in favor of the big e-commerce players because consumer is alone and these are huge when they have billions of transactions every day so now there are two three things one is the fairness in terms of what is being offered to the consumer has to be fair the choice options have to be fairly provided to the before the consumer I will talk about the associated thing of reviews now when you and I buy a product on an online platform we see how it has been reviewed by other buyers so some says four star five star but sometimes we don't know whether that review is genuine or fake so now with the help of Bureau of Indian Standards we have developed a framework for the e-commerce platform to address the issue of fake reviews so that the buyer the consumer gets an opportunity to get an honest review system now the second is grievance redressal we have something called the national consumer helpline on which we get about one lakh complaints every month now we have realized yes so we analyze the data and we realize that about four years back the percentage of online buying complaints was 8% but last month it rose to 50% almost half of my one lakh complaints were against these e-commerce players so we keep telling the big ones and the small ones that you have to improve your grievance redressal we also take punitive action if there is a violation of the act but I think this thing will only change when the consumer is aware and he starts questioning and his buying behavior is determined by the fairness of the platform about the other question on languages so on the national consumer helpline we answer in 12 Indian languages and we have only decided last week that we will add eight more languages so from next a couple of month onwards we will be replying in 20 Indian languages so your right language is a big issue on e-commerce also AICT that all India Council for Technical Education it has developed an AI-PACE translation tool so in case you want to even make use of this campaign jago graham jago campaign then the content can be immediately translated in different Indian languages now this is a time of social media exclusive the whole world is about what is being done on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and the number of followers all these people have and the greater the following those people eventually become social media influence so please tell us something about social media influencer trend of advertising and marketing brands engage content creations and then social media influencers they endorse different products, different services we do not know in the back end maybe they are paid money for it or they have received certain services or there is some gift for that so we are not really aware of so how do we deal with this kind of social media influencer endorsement okay so you are very right the advertising paradigm has changed with the increase in use of social media platforms so in conventional media whether it is print or television or similar other radio you know you can make out that this is an advertisement but you are right when a social media influencer with 5 lakh following says this product is good you do not know whether it has been paid for it or it is his or her honest opinion so only last Friday government has issued these guidelines which is in form of regulation for social media influencers which has very three simple points who to disclose so if you are a social media influencer and you are endorsing a product or a service you have to disclose and then how to disclose this if it is a picture then you have to say that it is paid and if it is a video it has to be disclosed at the beginning and in the middle of the video if it is a live stream then the constant ticker has to come so the idea is for disclosing this information to the consumer that whatever is being endorsed has been money has been money has transacted for that endorsement so sometimes it is not money it is a paid holiday or a free television or a free product so we have further modified the definition that if you have a material connection with the brand that you are endorsing then you have to disclose that I think the whole essence is disclosure to the consumer so that consumer knows whether it is an unbiased review or a paid review so this calibrate is buying behavior accordingly and sir, disclosure also a little prominently because sometimes you will see that it is actually a sponsored post and in the smallest possible font in very corner it would be written that it is a sponsored post so we have taken care of that that is a very good question in our guidelines and we have said the font size has to be the same and the speed at which the audio is coming cannot be, if you remember on some television channels they are very compressed audio so people cannot make out what they are saying so we have said that the speed has to be the same so yes we have to take care that the disclosure is very clear to the consumer I think it is a very important step and it will make our consumers very aware of it now consumers if I may say that we have to really catch them young so how can schools, colleges universities contribute to consumer awareness, their rights consumer protection and finally to grievance redressal so can we also take this whole consumer awareness campaign to a younger audience I mean to the audience who are at our schools or at our colleges so can actually do you think for something we should catch them young actually we should so what we have done is we are also asking for inclusion of this as a small part of the syllabus in their general CBSE or whatever boards they follow then there are some clubs which we call consumer clubs some are doing very well in Delhi, some are doing very well in other states and in addition to that our ministry also is responsible for standards, Bureau of Indian Standards with us and they are promoting standards in the schools so in the schools there are 4000 standard clubs where BIS people go and tell them that why standards are important so that the quality of the country improves which is indirectly related to consumer protection because if you are not getting a quality product you should start demanding that you should start looking for that ISI mark and other things so we have 4000 plus standard clubs and we have a lot of consumer clubs in various educational institutions and by incorporating in syllabus and other activity I think you are right unless we catch them young this thing has to be ingrained into our psyche that we cannot be taken for a ride just because we are a simple consumer and this entire thing it is actually it is an ecosystem you have manufacturers, you have suppliers some of them are very good and very quality conscience whereas some of them are not so good and do not reveal the complete information so see you have a complex job to do because you would also like that we have a concept of ease of doing business or ease of performing trade in national education policy 2020 we call it light but tight regulations so how do you balance and how do your department tries to do the balancing act that consumers are also not do then complete information is provided whereas at the same time suppliers, manufacturers, sellers these aggregators they also feel that there is actually an ease of doing business in the country because that is very very imperative for our economy so that is a very good question and that is I think the toughest job that I have like where do you strike the balance and how do you strike the balance between ease of doing business that means our laws our rules should not become an impediment in a good business but also we protect the interest of the consumer so that as I said consumer is not taken for a ride so we are constantly engaged with the industry and the supply side but when we call them for discussions we also call the consumer organizations so that there is always a balance I will give an example the labeling on the product on the legal metrology is also with our ministry and this you know the phone manufacturers came and said so the size of label is becoming too big because there are regulations from ministry of consumer affairs there are regulations from ministry of environment and forest and other regulations so sometimes the label was becoming bigger than the pack of the phone itself so we handled this problem about six months back we talked to them so now we have permitted them to use a QR code so we said instead of the three things the price and what is contained in the package like whether there is a charger or a plug or not and third which is very important for our neighborhood is country of origin so we said these three things only you print on the label for everything else have a QR code so that a person who is going to buying a phone obviously can scan that and can have access to that information so this is one example of how you strike a balance between ease of doing business but at the same time not compromising the interest so you are trying to have an enabling environment of mutual trust transparency and informed choices so tell us something about this fair digital finance we spoke about it a little while from now but then this with the ministry how is it leveraging disruptive technological advancements you know such as India stack like now we have Aadhaar then we also have various UPI transactions we can even use AI for making this whole ecosystem a much better one so how do you feel that various schemes various administrative policies the framework how can it be make much more efficient much more deliverable much more enabling by using that story of India stack and since you come from that kind of background and from the very inception of your academic career so how would you think and you know and reason it that this kind of technological advancements be a bone be an enabling factor for your ministry so I think not only for our ministry for the entire E governance framework the use of latest and upcoming technologies is very important for all the ministries and it's upon the leader the secretary or who's leading this initiative he has to take you know a macro view as to which parts of his work domain by infusion of technology can be made efficient for example we talked of you know BIS standards we talked of legal metrology where there are weights and measures which need to be certified whether this is actually one kg or not so there's a lot of credentials that are part of our system so if you and for credentials you need traceability for example when India is exporting cotton to the western world they would like to know whether this cotton is of you know what variety so the whole traceability thing is important not only for the confidence of the domestic consumer but also for export for example a lot of products are sold as organic so it says it's an organic product but how does one know whether it's a genuine organic product or not what is the traceability how will we know whether fertilizer was used or not used whether an organic you know ecosystem was there for the product so for addressing traceability we are working on blockchain platforms because blockchain is one platform where you cannot tamper with the transaction or with the once it's there in that database and you can't tamper so we are now putting we just started this we are now putting the entire standards framework the entire legal metrology framework on blockchain technology so that for the user whether it's a consumer or industry the traceability is established the other thing is we are using artificial intelligence in analytics of even the complaints that we get on the national consumer health line we are constantly analyzing as to why this particular you know product is getting more complaint then we have 750 companies which are directly connected to our health line so we seamlessly send it to them that see consumers are complaining a lot about this product and also we have about 750 consumer courts in which as we speak there are 5,20,000 cases pending across India so we did a massive exercise about 2 months back and we analyzed as to out of these 5,20,000 cases which are the you know most occurring cases with the highest frequency and we did a little analytics and realized that one third of these 5,20,000 cases is like 170,000% are only pertaining to insurance so that means there is something wrong in the way insurance is being handled in our country so I went to my batch mate and friend who is now in the department of financial services secretary who handles insurance we said let's sit together and take a good look at this your entire insurance framework as to why people are getting this satisfied in coming to our consumer course so I am giving these examples because using these technologies you can quickly come to conclusions and start looking at solutions to these problems so both in identification of the problem and provision of the solution these technologies especially the new ones can be a great help right sir and I think for having this kind of absolutely tech integrated framework we would also require an attitudinal shift I think an entire different psychological leaning for getting technology completely embedded into the framework because the other side also if I want to buy a refrigerator and I start looking at a refrigerator the moment I open any of the websites I will see too many advertisements of a refrigerator it's all right till this point but I am not even aware that some of them can actually be the sponsored one or the preferred one so I think we would need a different setup so now you were talking about organic whether the fertilizer has been used or not used so you have recently written a very very well written article that green washing stain so would you tell us something about it because we are in a flat world whatever I do today impacts everybody not only my cohabitants not only the community but also our planet earth so I understand that you are a very climate and sustainability conscious person so please tell us something about it so you are right I think India historically and culturally has been a society where we have been climate conscious because we realize that our existence which is called prakriti that you have to be in harmony with nature otherwise you cannot progress and if you start ignoring prakriti or how nature or the planet earth then disasters like what is happening in joshi mart or what happens elsewhere will keep happening so you have to be in close harmony with nature now India gradually over last 7-8 years has emerged as a climate change one of the biggest leaders in this framework of how to address climate change and honorable prime minister has gone to many cobs summits and he has in fact in the last one he introduced this concept of mission life which is lifestyle for environment which is mostly for us to use how to have less consumption repair recycle reuse which were always there in our culture and he is just re-emphasizing it so he is asking people and companies to be conscious of how we are adversely affecting environment what I wrote is that article was when there are people who are well intentioned on that some people will try and take advantage of the system some manufacturers some traders will paint their products as eco-friendly whereas those are not they will put a green label they will put a tree on the box as a symbol without actually telling the consumers what exactly that product is so that phenomenon of lying in that dimension is called greenwashing that you are portraying something as green whereas it is not so I wrote that article just to caution the consumer that do not just believe in what the company is saying go into their track record do some more research like your refrigerator example before you buy something or before you trust something to be eco-friendly do some more due diligence that was a cautioning article for the consumers the knowledge and information that we are getting through this conversation is truly amazing but we will have to stop here due to time constraints we will resume and have another round off conversation with Shri Rohit Kumar saying keep watching this space goodbye