 Thanks for all for coming. I got a chance to introduce myself to many of you yesterday during my session, where I was talking about some of the work that we did in the UK government when I was there and that now involved with public digital of helping form very multidisciplinary teams, both in government and in the private sector. But to make use of this, what I was calling the agile dividend, all the sort of ability that we've developed to build and deploy technology, in order to then start thinking about how do we bring more people into those conversations, how do we work with more disciplines to have more in fact. I'm not going to recap too much of that. If you missed that, I'm sure it'll be on the YouTube channel soon. But Viraj, if you could sort of share a bit more about eGuard and about digits. Now, great to be here. Thank you for inviting me. So first of all, our name sounds like we're part of government. We're not part of the government. We are a philanthropic mission. We like a startup, which is trying to see how the transformative power of technology can be used to make our lives easier. When we live in cities, when we apply for health services, I don't know how many of you have got a COVID vaccination certificate. A lot of you. So that was the technology we built. It's called DIVOC. And the whole idea is to see how, especially in capacity constrained environments like India, Africa, some parts of Asia, how technology can leapfrog the development journeys of society. So I think we all know the story of Aadhaar, UPI in India, how they have completely changed the landscape of how financial inclusion happens, how people get benefits, and all those kind of things. So EGIR Foundation was founded in 2003, actually by Nanda Nilikani and Anshika Nathamuni, to really see how the cities can work better by the use of technology. And we've had a journey over the last 20 years. And for the last six years, since Nandan came back from his Aadhaar stint in the government, the focus has been how do you create what we call public digital infrastructure, which is essentially a set of specs, protocols, and software on which multiple solutions can be built to help societal problems from issuing vaccine certificates which are non-reputable, to paying your municipal taxes, to keeping your cities clean, to getting your licenses to do various pieces of work. So ideas that you build, so there are three parts. Obviously you need to build some kind of a foundational infrastructure. So you look at Aadhaar, UPI, they're not solutions, they're infra on which multiple solutions can be built. So by kind of extension, they're mostly open source, and we are a non-profit, so we don't work for profit because it's very important to create trust in the system. So one part of it is building what we call population scale digital infra. Second part is what James was referring to, having a multi-disciplinary approach, just building software or code or specs is not enough. You've got to create conditions from a policy point. If you work with governments, you'll see how this community adopted to create services, solutions for the citizens. So we do a lot of policy and advocacy work with the governments, both in India and overseas. And the third part is how do you get markets and the ecosystem to come in, use this infra to build solutions and platforms that they can use and they can monetize. So again, we work closely with people like Big Four to small software companies to see how they can use digit. Our platform is called digit, which stands for digital infra for governance and inclusive transformation. For them to use that and work with governments to deliver programs. So for example, if a government in Karnataka decides to do a reform of how you pay your house taxes or how you raise grievances or how you apply for a water connection, one option is every city builds their own system and every department builds their own system. That's how governments typically work. I'm sure some of you have gone to the websites. You'll have that experience that you log into one website, say you submit the form here, go to another website. So how do you get away with what we call a whole of government experience? So idea is that you kind of work with what we call Samad Sarkar Bazar, the markets, the government, and the community actors to use this infra to create impact at scale and speed. So today, you've heard the Coven story and that was done in five other countries. In India, more than 26 million citizens use our services. We are about 2,500 cities and towns in India from small towns like Mandir to Chennai use our platform. And now we are looking to work in Africa and some of the other countries to see how we can take the same thing outside India. So that's a short brief on EGAR Foundation. I think there's been a lot of conversation at this conference over the last few days about many of the challenges of any kind of transformation. And certainly my experience was that once we started talking about both bringing a kind of consumer product mindset to think about how we provide government services and starting with needs and then deploying the best skills and technology and design that we could to do that, people kind of bought that to start with. But when you started saying, in order to do that, we have to work quite differently. We have to think about the services that we buy in a different way. We have to think about the skills that we get in a different way. You started to run into lots of obstacles. And open source is one of the particularly sticks for me. Governments are used to buying things, not to talking earlier about, there are these funny hurdles to taking something for free. And more than that, if they are getting something new, it needs to fit in an existing box. But once we start talking about this kind of infrastructure, you're breaking the boxes, talking very differently. How has that sort of engagement happened to you with these governments? With a lot of difficulty, it's not easy. It's a classic wicked problem, as they call in the systems thinking. It's a problem which is dynamic. It keeps changing. It's a problem which has high complexity. It has multiple stakeholders. And it has got a temporal kind of quality about it. So I think there are two or three things. One is you need to work with government, especially. Government is not a one composite. There are governments in India. There's a government in New Delhi. There's government every state has. And the government every city has. So I think you need to find champions like anywhere else, people who actually believe in that story and people who believe this and able to take risks. I think that's the first thing we always look for. Is there a champion who can actually give it a three year shot and say, yeah, I'm going to take this risk? Yeah, you can buy SAP, you can buy other ERPs, and it might still fail, but that won't be a risky decision because that's a common practice. So I think one is finding those initial champions. We call them exemplars. And I think once you find a champion, it's important that you don't leave them an open source of that challenge. It's difficult to find resources. It's difficult to find people who understand it. So our approach is the first few champions we find in a new area. Like Punjab was our champion. There was an amazing officer there who said, yeah, I've gone to IT Delhi. I understand what you guys are doing. I'm willing to take the risk. I remember sitting in a meeting with the minister, him. And the minister was asking him, are you sure? This risk was taken. And he said, yeah, I think I'll make it happen. But once he kind of walked into it, we supported him to the Held. In terms of we had even program teams on ground. We helped them deploy it. We helped them do that because we use the kind of modern DevOps architecture. It's very difficult to find those skill sets. So for a couple of years, we ran the DevOps for them. So you need to actually be invested in their success if you find those champions. And the third thing is you have to look at the human side of it. I think sitting in Bangalore, it's very easy to imagine that you can design an app. It'll work in Longowal, which is 20,000 people. But you've got to have that humility to meet people where they are and actually change things. We realized, for example, we said, you need to log a complaint. Please take a photo. So in Bangalore, everybody understands you'll take the photo of the garbage heap. The first 1,000 complaints we got, they were photos of the people. Because when you're dealing with the government, government asks for your photos. So I think those are the kind of things you realize when you start working on the field. So and the third thing is once you have a champion and once you have an exemplar which is successful, then it's easy because a lot of the bureaucrats know each other. It's a small community. Then you say, hey, Punjab has done this. Can you do it in Orissa? Can you do it in Uttarakhand? Or can you do it nationally? And that's exactly what happened. So you need to now take those champions and let them advocate for you. So that's been our journey in kind of trying to, but it's hard. I think giving something free is very hard. Getting engagement is very hard. And that's why you need a champion who's really invested in the success. Yeah, that definitely chimes in my experience. I think it really fits with kind of some of the poor starting points of Agile as well. Yeah. The kind of, we're getting to value fast. I think large organizations of all kinds in every sector, mostly think about the big win. They think about the thing, if we spend this much money over three years, five years, we'll achieve this large thing. And their IT approach will follow that. And what we can do with the combination of sort of the practices we've developed and the sort of technology infrastructure we've got, is how about a smaller but much, much faster win which can build momentum in capital? I think that human part's really interesting. It's a theme of conversations. We've been having a lot and connects with what I was talking about yesterday. One of the things I find exciting is that if we get this kind of infrastructure right, we get the skills right, the ways that we can create new opportunities to experiment. So yesterday in my session, I talked about the universal credit service in the UK, which is the way that people apply for. Mostly benefits if you're unemployed, but generally for low income households. And a big part of the purpose of that service is to help people back into work. So there's a coaching element to it. And there was an assumption that you want efficiency in that service. And so what you should do is every time somebody comes for a coaching session, you give them the next person who's available. But that means they won't get the same person over time and they won't build a relationship. And there were other people who were saying actually, for this kind of personal development that this is part of, you want a personal relationship. And you ended up as a fairly classic kind of impasse of two opinions and normally, highest paid person would win in that conversation. But because that team had really invested in their agile practices, they knew how their infrastructure works and they knew how every part of the operation works. They were able to reframe that as an experiment and say, well, I'd actually run an AB test. So some people will go into the queue, some people will get a dedicated support person which might be less efficient, but we'll build the human relationship and let's see which works. And over, I can't remember the period of time, a few months, the data was very clearly pointing to the human relationships win. What I liked about that was, partly people got jobs, that was very good. But it was as much a kind of validation of a lot of these practices that we've been working on. And that real focus on, we can kind of get the technology, we can get the agile practices, we can get the services system thinking in place. And then we can do, we can start thinking in this way. You were talking about how, I think you found that a lot of the time, the real success comes from kind of the operators, the government staff who are working. I don't know. If you could sort of, of a similar kind of breakthroughs. So very important you're making. In fact, I think we don't realize we all think based on our few experiences we have with the government employees and government that they're all inefficient and, they don't want to work hard. But like anywhere else, our experience has been 80% of them want to do an honest job and go home and sleep easy. So two things. One is, I remember speaking to this revenue officer in one of the municipalities in, it's called Zirakpur in Punjab. And I was just doing a research and just talking to him. And he said something very, very insightful. He's a post graduate, you know, pretty smart guy. He's been working in this job for seven, eight years. And typically they'll have a target of, you know, 100 crore of collections of property tax and everything in a particular, particular locality. And he's saying, look, come with me. Look, I'll show you what I have to do. He said, if anybody comes on the counter and they want to seal their last, last three years kind of receipts, he took me at the back office. There was this file, like 12 feet high cabinet with ladder and everything. I have to go file by file, pull it out and show it to him. And I think in my cousin who's like 12th fail or, you know, didn't pass the high school, he drives a taxi and he has an app, right? So that's the, so in a way, the government is still in the 19th century way of working with files and everything. And the efficiency and dignity of work is just not there for a lot of people who work in the government and front lines. So, so I think the point you're making about how to make their work easy. And one year later, I went to him and he said, oh, now I used to do two transactions, say, now I do 15, right? So that's the, that's the level of the front. And the point you're making about, we forget a lot of people live in small towns in India, right? India has 4,800 cities and towns. 50% of them are less than 30,000 people. So chances are a lot of people will know each other. They respect in the community, you know? So, you know, we, even today 80% of transactions, although the platform is, you can do a WhatsApp chat bot, you have an app, you have a web, 80% of transactions still happen on counter. But that's how communities work, right? I don't know how many of you have old parents, but they love to go to the bank, you know? They'll say, I'll just go and meet them and chat to them and come back, that's how communities work. And we should never forget, you know, technologies about humans. They should make them more dignified and strength in the communities. So he said to me, you know, now people really say, oh, now you can come back home and also do, my kids are saying I can come back home and do my work on my mobile phone. So that's the kind of things we miss sometimes when you look at as technology as a just a commodity, which is just about efficiency, right? I think there's a very strong human element to that we should just keep looking at. And the point you made about value is really important, actually, because typically, especially in government and technology programs, just take way too long. Just the cabinet is full of failures. But this particular thing is in 90 days, we'll have 100 towns and cities live. And that happened and that was just a, you know, the kind of the main headline of success that this person has, yeah. Yeah, the thing that requires, and that's a great success, but sort of comes back as well to that kind of bold and risk-taking leadership. We had an experience recently where we'd helped an organization run a small-scale pilot for their new service, which was absolutely the right thing to do. But there was a front-page news story saying only 200 people were able to use this service. And that's the sort of story that any organization wants to avoid because it's cast as this is failure. Even though we knew, you know, that's success. They tested it with 200 people months earlier than they normally would have been confident doing any kind of testing. And it worked really well for those people, but they learned some lessons. And most leaders are not incentivized to put themselves in that position. Even if long-term, that's the way to get to success. Really required kind of doubling down on supporting those bold leaders who were able to sort of let that wash over them or have a kind of... What do you expect us to launch this at scale without ever testing it? Kind of response. Yeah. And yeah, I would always see the same thing kind of every sector. There's a sort of risk aversion that comes out, but it's the bold leaders who break through. Absolutely. And I think the point you make about pilots and... Because government is all about scale. They are very good at scaling. I mean, we don't understand scale. They just can do... If something works, they scale it very well. Whereas they find it difficult to innovate. So I think when we talk to the government, actually we don't use the word pilot at all. Because pilots are used... And governments, cupboards are full of pilots which they have done and then they said, yeah, it's done now. Because the commitment is not high when you do pilot. So we always call them examples. At least 50% of your state will use one service and if not everything. So that there's a commitment and there's a file and there's a... They are training people. They're showing the politicians it's happening. So it's very important to... We actually stay away from doing pilots. We call them exemplars and we call them scale and speed exemplars. So both the things are called out, that we do it fast. That's our job. Scale, that is your job. So I think that's the... Yeah, that language point's really important. We didn't actually call this thing a pilot, but I sort of slipped into that language quite naturally. But yeah, I talked yesterday about situations where you want to bring everything that this community knows is kind of agile values, practices and principles. But that language doesn't necessarily resonate. So we tend to use language about test and learn more often or find other things. But I think one of the... One really important skill for anybody who's trying to achieve transformation is to be able to very rapidly understand the kind of the corporate language of whatever organization you're talking to and kind of connect your principles with it, whether it's adopting that language or kind of subtly drifting it. Yeah, yeah. The exemplars is a good one. Yeah, well I think... Pilots are just sometimes in the government, pilots are just used to... You'll do pilot, come and do it, then you'll go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then another of the things... So I work in the UK and then also I work in... Canada and a number of other places has been about building new skills and practices within governments, but also then changing the way they relate to suppliers. So once you break away from the mentality that everything is a large-scale IT program, you can think very differently about the companies that you might bring in to support you. You want more skills internally, but you're not gonna do everything in-house. And that's been kind of enormously exciting in places. There are companies trading on stock exchanges that are doing it because we created a procurement environment and a collaborative environment that let them work with governments in a different way. We're also seeing, again, the same sort of things on that big private sector clients who absolutely need to break away from our established supplier base. I think one of the things that's also really interesting is you can kind of create new marketplaces of once you've got that infrastructure in place, people can create new services for people in quite different ways. And you were talking yesterday about kind of how that's playing out with your platform. So I think that's the most amazing thing over the last six years or so. The possibilities, and that's the advantage of the infrastructure approach is that when you create it, you might have some use cases in mind because you cannot create without use cases, right? But when the adoption happens and the network effects kick in, people find their own ways of using it. So when we built Digit, it was primarily for urban service delivery, normal things that you use in a city. But now there are partners both in the commercial sector and in the NGO sector, like Piramal Foundation is using Digit for all the work they do on education and health in five states. They're saying, why should we build everything ourselves? Our main work is on the ground, trying to work with communities. They have more than 10,000 people working in these states. Why would we not leverage something that's already built? It's open source, it's reusable. And they'll go live with what is called India's 4.5 million outstanding disputes cases, which could be easily resolved. They're all sitting in the courts. So they've built a E-justice kind of a solution on top of Digit, which will be going live in Chattisgarh. So I think your point is valid. It's a, the ROI on, actually, on digital public infrage is a public part of it. Everybody can participate. They don't need us in the room. They don't need to pay us license fee. There's no gatekeeping. It's on GitHub. There's a lot of documentation. Of course, if you need some help and design, you know, we help you with the design part of it. And then the governments that like Punjab government, after we kind of did the enablement, they had an internal team, which we kind of enabled, they have built three or four new solutions on top of it. And the market players are just finding use cases as they get more attuned to how this works. So today, if we did a rough calculation, just the programmatic money that the government has committed, the NGOs are committed to the markets are participating. It's almost $700 million of, you know, market, which is riding on something. So which is really, you know, as they say, it is not what happens in the platform, but what happens on the platform, which is, which is of value. So leverage is, leverage is huge. And that is really two things. One is the way it is built and two is the, all the resources you provide, you know, around that, not just the documentation and APIs and all those things, but also some of the design thinking, like you were saying, changing their mentality from saying you don't do everything in one go. You can run spreads, you can do verging. It's easy to deploy things in a, in this kind of a DevOps environment and all those things. So it's a, it's a constant thing, but I think we are finding, you know, if you get the right stakeholders and do enough design thinking, impatiently rather than saying this is how you do it. So we do a three day immersive workshop on, you know, reimagination technology for governance. And I think people, some people move, some people don't know, most people move and start thinking in a different way. Yeah, I think it's enormously exciting that we've been, there's been a sort of civic technology movement kind of globally for probably 20 years now. But, and that's been a mix of people doing not-for-profit and kind of very open source work. And I'm gonna wait a moment to see if that goes quiet. Carry on and hope it's not too distracting. And there've been a lot of kind of for-profit businesses, but most of them have really struggled because while it looks on the surface very easy to provide a better user experience apart of governments, the kind of plugging into kind of the data you need, the business processes that exist, that they're making sure that actually you're not making things worse for people by giving them a deceptively simple user experience that doesn't actually connect with getting the service delivery that they need behind it. It's really high, really hard. And I think that we're at quite an exciting moment for people who want to innovate and see business opportunities in that space that some of that hard work is being done of it shouldn't be the case, but the data's not in the right place. So let's actually invest in that because that kind of stimulates it. It means innovators can focus on the innovative things, not the hard work behind the scenes. A lot of the complexity has been absorbed. And also I think now there is a playing field where you can have, you have markets government has, you know, if today digital is a national platform for urban governance, so it's been adopted by the government. They have a five year mission running on it called National Urban Digital Mission. So it creates for innovators both the space to create something and also to test it and market it. So I think it definitely helps in order to do, and they don't worry about how to deploy it and all those kind of things. So I think definitely there's a big thing. In the UK government, one of our design principles used to do the hard work to make things simple. Which was very much about this. But then one of the things I think is really important is in any sort of platform development, it can be hard to get the right feedback loops, particularly in the early stages of it. So the more we can get people, hopefully including people in this room in this community, doing some of that work of trying to create new services on top, trying to partner with governments to do things, the better we can establish that feedback loop Absolutely. I think this is one of the kind of concerns we have that not enough people challenging. We're saying we got open APIs and all those funky stuff, but I think if more people use it, then there's a community which can actually challenge that have you thought of this? Have you thought of this? For example, I was talking about some of the tech decisions we made in 2017, now we're really rethinking. They were made for India. For example, we have Kafka as a tool, but if you go to, yes, for one million people, you need that kind of scale. But if you go to a country which has 20 million people and 2,000 transactions a month, why do you need to have such a heavy infrastructure? So definitely I'll invite you all to look at the code, look at the website, look at the GitHub site, and yeah, if you're interested in volunteering, give us a call. We're always looking for volunteers. Let's say you're trying to solve very, very complex and huge problems, so more the merrier in that sense. I'm wondering if anybody's got any questions for us. Excellent conversation. Thank you so much for that. Can you hear me? Barely. Is it better now? Much better. All right. Thanks, Viraj. You actually opened up a big door for innovators and vendors to use the infrastructure to help the public and public services. As you were pointing out, a few of the things that you realized that government officials work effectively and they are doing the best of efforts. And you also mentioned about how the technology will be helpful to get together and have the communities work closely. Are there any other insights like this which you encountered or you saw, and that were all moments for you? Because in urban cities, we don't realize all of these. We take the technology for granted. And we think that we don't work with humans. We work with technology. And we never visit the bank, right? For example, you were saying 80% of the transaction happened at the counter. So are there something like these which are eye-openers for us, like some things which we take for granted, but you saw them differently? So definitely the other thing is when you look at, and that's what I'm saying, most of you read the four India story, India's different levels. I think other thing that we realized was even basing things like access to services, right? We take access to services as a given. It might be hard, but if you need to raise your voice and say, I want to complain about something or I need something for my community, you can do it. But there are marginalized communities which don't even have access to services, right? So one of the things they, even if they have access, they don't raise their voice because they don't want to be seen, okay? So I think that's where working with intermediaries is very important in a country like India. Because everybody, even on the digital part of it, there is a margins of society they want to be invisible in some way. So sometimes they're invisible, sometimes they want to be invisible, right? So working with local social workers, for example, in Andhra Pradesh, which is one of our, we've been with us for seven years, we have a big program. There were 70,000, what they call ward volunteers. They go door to door. If I'm an old woman in Islam, I need my pension to be processed. They go door to door with laptops and everything and actually deliver services that are in there. So I think the access is a very important thing that we don't realize sitting here. And the choice that everybody should have. We will never think of an assistive service as a choice sitting here, but assistive service is a very big, and you need to enable that on the same platform. So that's the kind of, from WhatsApp chatbot to assistive service, that's the kind of, you know, width of channels you need to make available to people. Yeah, thank you so much. Another one connected to that is, like you mentioned about creating this infrastructure as a backbone for vendors and innovators to use. But how do we support, because you're saying they will use it for free, but then how do you monetize and at least to maintain the infrastructure? Because you're supporting the public and government, but this infrastructure needs. How do we support ourselves? How does this infrastructure itself should support? I mean, how do you monetize? How do you support this infrastructure? So right now, for the first kind of, we are supported purely by philanthropy right now. So we have Gates Foundation, Nanda Lilikani, Omedia Network, and Tata Trust. And the idea was that you cannot be a creator of a public good because there's a element of holding trust as a, so that everybody can work with you. So I think we're looking at a couple of models going forward from a, because we provide a lot of services to both innovators and governments around the platform, not the tech part of it. The tech will keep running as a foundation because it's important to keep it open source and non-commercial and it's a MIT license. So if you're an innovator, you build something, you can choose whether you contribute back or not. But some of the services you provide, we are thinking of whether we should start a for-profit organization, which can actually get, not profit, but actually get some revenues which can be plowed back into the foundation. But still, it's not a question we've answered. We'll be still thinking about it. All right, thank you. Build on both of those. Through a couple of years ago, Omedia Network, who are one of the funders you just mentioned, commissioned us to do some sort of work on opportunity, but also work to be done on open sourcing governments. And we were responding in that piece of work partly to a sense that this, because we've got something that's open source, you can take it, you can put it in place and that's great, it just works and there's no more work to do and it's continually free. And we're laying out that there's a number of elements of capacity building that are needed there about changes in your vendor environment, changes in how you think about owning and operating software, whether you have a vendor for you or whether you do it yourself because open source lets us change and respond much more quickly. We actually wanna harness that and we have to because otherwise we're opening ourselves up to some sorts of risk. So I mean, hopefully that's an interesting report for people that's on the public digital websites. But yeah, it's a really important topic and that we make sure we keep bringing that to the fore because people get very excited about open source digital public goods. They are a fantastic addition to what people can use, but they're not investment free. But I was also thinking about saying about the communities and the people you work with in those communities. We do some work in Madagascar where I'll get the statistics wrong if I use them, but more than half of the population, as I remember it, don't have regular access to electricity, let alone mobile devices. So most of the services they receive are through centers in their community, in their town or village. And so when we've been talking there about introducing a more digital approach, partly that's about ways of working within the kind of central government, but then it's about how do we design things so that the first value that's seen is equipping those local centers to provide better more joined up services to people, ideally designed in a way so that if they hit a point as this country's sort of been hitting over the last few years of sudden massive growth of access to those things, they're positioned to adapt really quickly. But we even see the same sort of things going on in our work in the UK and the US, and in the private sector where last year I worked with a large clothing retailer and they were looking at their planning processes for the stock that they produced. And the sort of thing about how do we keep up with all the Chinese marketplaces that produce lots of stuff on demand. There's a realization that actually that's not their differentiator, like actually the slightly slower but more deliberate design-led approach to things is important for them. But they'd really missed how do we support the people who do that design and planning within our business to operate more efficiently to get things out a bit more quickly. And so the best thing that their technology department could do was to go and partner with those people and say, yeah, there's lots we could do about the consumer experience. There's lots we could do that's sort of on demand and so on. But actually we're gonna double down on supporting our staff who we trust to be great clothing designers. Yes. So some of those sort of, you're not always thinking about the person at the end of the chain. You're sometimes thinking about the intermediaries kind of plays regardless of internet access regardless of any of those dynamics. Hi. I have two questions, I'll keep it short. The one being given we know how India's government services have been majorly paper based over so many years and so many years. Even moving on to, though we want to move into a digital space, what's been your challenges and experience around one on the digitization part? Second is also about the standards, be it so process rest versus message queues versus something else. And typically because you don't want to be creating state by state different type of standards and how is the, this is more from the angle around standards. How, what's been experienced as well as challenges faced between the governments because they might have standard, they don't want to change. That's one. Second question is around lots of jobs which means primarily you're moving into a digital space where we always have been like, now I'm a revenue officer and I have a big office which has like seven people employed right now. All of my work is going to go digital. So what's been the resistance on that from that perspective in the people who are working on this with you or from the government side? Those two questions is what I have. Thank you. Maybe I'll answer the second one first. So I think if you look at from a people who use the technology on the supply side in the governments, I'll give you some numbers. In a municipal environment, in a city environment for per 10,000 people in a city, India has 2.3 or 2.4 employees, municipal employees. London has 16, New York has 12, Bangkok has nine. So we are, a lot of governments, departments are not hiring for a long time. So there's a huge understaffing. So it's not that people are sitting there and there's no work. I think they have got too much work if you ask me. Second is we do a, and I told you about the employee story. Other part of the story is we do an independent survey by 60 decibels every year, 30 decibels every year, which talks to employees, citizens about what is the, the net promoter's score of employees is about 82%. It's one of the highest in the world, they say. And that's because on an average, their self-reporting number is the same 19 hours a week. So I guess I would say, and when I joined this sector, I've worked in private sector before that, before this for till 2016. I thought same that the employees will actually, people who are in the front line will have resistance. I think they welcome it because it's really, takes a treasury out of their work and gives them dignity to belong to the 21st century. The world has moved, right? When they're getting Amazon and all these things delivered on their, why can't they have the same experience when somebody puts a request for water connection? It should be like Swiggy. Your connection is in, it's assigned to Ramanatham. It is now going to be measured and that's what happens, and that's what happens with the platform. So I think we've been very, very happy with that. The second part was around, you know, how do you, sorry, what was your second part of the question, sorry? Standard, yeah. So I think, yeah. So it's a, it's a, we have been pushing the central government to do standards and we've got few standards published. So the trick here is to realize that India is a federal state. You cannot have one standard. In fact, you can't even have a state level. Because local governance is, is a local subject, you know, article 76. So you got to design the platform that you abstract saying, okay, we know, everybody needs billing. You know, a bill is a bill is a bill. You know, whether you're doing it for your traffic violation or for property tax. So abstraction has to be right, but you know every city calculates the property tax in a different way. Every city has a different workflow for fixing a sanitation problem. So those things are very, very flexible from a configuration perspective. But on the basic fundament, what we call, what we call the shared services, there are 27 of those. The specs and standards don't move that much. I mean, I've got some of the core team people here. They can talk more about it, but they stay pretty, pretty stable. We have, we have issued them as recommended specs. Adoption of them is standard happens slowly in the government. So I think they've adopted three of those for public grievances, for property tax and one more for trade license. But what we have seen is you typically have to do five to seven percent kind of configuration for a local context, but you need to have that flexibility in the platform. You cannot dictate one standard from sitting from daily or from the state capital. On the jobs part, it reminded me of one of the earliest services we worked on in the UK was the lasting power of attorney. So it's preparing for the eventuality that you can't manage your life anymore that sort of dementia or other aging primarily. And that had been a massive pile of paper forms. Most people paid a lawyer to do it, which meant only people who could afford a lawyer did it. And with, we have a very aging population, this was going to become a problem. We worked on a new online service for people to do that application. Made it much simpler to fill in the forms. And what we saw was that the staff, you still had to print out the form and sign it because there was a law that said that and it's taken several years to change that law. But we made it much easier to get to the point where you could just print the forms and sign them without the lawyer's help. What had been happening previously was that somewhere over 25% of the forms when they arrived in the office were immediately sent back because of mistakes. And it was mistakes like you had to write your address five different times and if you've written it slightly differently that was a mistake. So you had all of these staff who were employed to take things out of envelopes. Say, yep, standard mistake, put it back in an envelope, send it back again. Very, very rapidly that number went down as soon as the online service was up. And we got this message from the back office staff saying we've got a problem dealing with the calls we're getting. When we go into our case management system there's no way to record positive feedback. So we had to help them add a button to say somebody's called up because they quite like the experience which was great for their dignity, their job satisfaction, but also them meant that with an aging population that is gonna need more help with this service they were set up to scale to deal with that new demand. There was still gonna be people who needed help that you could focus on the actual help, not the, nope, you wrote your address wrong sending it back to you. Viraj, am I audible? Yeah, we can hear you. So, whenever we discuss the inclusion charters and when we talk about the corporate social responsibility initiatives that organizations can run, right? There's a lot of these technology assisted solutions like people, the young geeks, the technologies, all these people bring forth ideas on working in partnership to solve some kind of providing assisted solutions. Basically the low cost assisted solutions, mainly in the context of India, like maybe the solutions that are already available may not be compatible. And all these ideas keeps coming up in our conversations. So one thing that I wanted to ask you was about what kind of partnership opportunities probably can we run a group hackathon because hackathons are very effective in terms of at least building POCs, validations. So are these opportunities available? Something that we can co-create and then see how to position it because maybe the requirements from government the base at which we churn, maybe it will take time but can we do something around this? Absolutely, I think we'll love to do that. I think please understand we are a philanthropist so we are very thin on resources. So we always say we are a scarce resource in the system but what you're saying is music to my ear. Jojo Mehra, our chief product officer is here. So I think if you wanna talk to him and see we can organize a hackathon do something together, we have a list of problems you wanna solve including how do you kind of in Africa, there are some countries where even literacy is an issue. Can you work with icons and stuff like that and speech? So we've got a bunch of problems and you can bring your own problems and see how we can jam together and use the platform to solve some of those problems but we love to do that. Yeah, I actually will bring volunteers also who would execute that. Yeah, that'll be awesome. Thank you. Hi Viraj, my question is it's not a question I just wanted you to share your journey on that COVID-19 certificate, right? That was really amazing and fabulous so I just wanted to, if you can just give us a gist about it, how was the journey? Because it was a very short one and the result was awesome so. So I think the theory of scarce resources is very important for organizing like ours because we can't be doing things that other people are doing. So two things happened in COVID when the first lockdown happened, that's our other story and there was a very harsh lockdown and people could not even go to the factories to produce food and everything. So we got together with Ministry of Food, with TRY, with PNG, Unilever and a bunch of volunteers. Within seven days, the first national COVID-19 pass was made for essential services. So factories could issue those passes themselves and there were again verified credentials and all those things and the more than nine states use it. So that's an example of again how collaboration can happen on open platforms and you know, those kind of things. The kind of dialogue of the COVID-19 is a similar story. When we thought that the vaccination is coming up, of course all the countries were gearing up for the large scale vaccination rollout but we thought maybe everybody will not be able to have it because you need to give millions of vaccination in days, not like a typical vaccination program. So we thought can we build something which is open source, fast to deploy and population scale for countries which don't have systems. So that was the thought process and it was built in a modular way that they can take the orchestration bit. They can, a lot of them have very good inventory system or they can just take the credentialing which is the verified certificate that I have actually been vaccinated and I can travel. So a lot of countries adopted just the, so it took us three months to build it and another, and that's what happens when you have, when you work as a mission, you know, we have, you know, and another 16 weeks to get into five countries but it was all on a, was kind of born on a hypothesis like this will be the scarcity in the system, let's solve for it, rather than trying to solve for how to move oxygen tanks with a lot of people working on that anyway. So it kind of works like that. Hi, my name is Ankur and the question I have is, I'll quickly share my context where I'm coming from. So for the last 12 years, I've worked in consumer space and I've built products and a lot of them failed because, and one of the examples was, I was building marketplace at Grofers and I was building tools for sellers in India and being an engineer, I always looked at Shopify and I thought it would be cool to just build something that sellers can just sign up and get this to life without any human intervention. My biggest learning there was, we spent 18 engineers two months and nobody used it. We actually just got seven sellers on board and I learned that, like I did not do user research, I did not really understood who our user was and they were really scared of tech, actually that's the problem, right? And we should have built tools for somebody else in the chain. And that led me to really see how it's very difficult to empathize with consumers in a diverse ecosystem as India, right? And if you don't do that, it could lead to a lot of wastage. You build something and it is not really used. My belief or my current assumption is in government, that doesn't happen because government can enforce usage, right? That if you have to sign up, if you have to do anything, you have to have an adhar. So however tedious processes, you just have to go and do it. I want to know from your experience that has there been a scenario where you build something but it was not adopted on the ground as much as you imagined because of the lack of understanding of the user or the solution is not really good for them to be able to use it effectively. Has that been? So I think, yeah, and that has had plenty of times for us and it's a good point you made about government. They have prisoners not consumers in that sense, right? So they've got hostages. But what I think India is also a, so we initial part of our journey, we work with some of the slightly more advanced states like Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. So some of our products were very, very complex, right? So I remember we deployed in Punjab, the first version of a property tax system and it just didn't, it was a small pilot and it just, people are not able to use it and we did the demo to the kind of CEO of the Urban Department. And he said, I just want something simple. People should know how much they have to pay and just pay. I don't want all this, whether you need a mutation, whether your house, I don't even have the basic registry of how many households I have in Punjab. So I think understanding where a particular state, where a particular kind of system is, is very important. So I think we've had, I've got, I can give a lecture on that, one of the failures we've had. Even something like WhatsApp, we realize that unless it sounds very cool, right? But unless you make it really easy for them to adopt it, not from a citizen point of view, but you need to get somebody to do the WhatsApp service, the billing and all those things, the procurement of that was so tough for the governments, right? So it's not as simple as the SMS service, you need to get another commercial entity. So thinking through some of those things also becomes, becomes important. How will they, if you do something, how will they procure it, right? But we did a recently, we did 80% of India doesn't have a sewerage, the underground sewerage. Basically they have septic tanks and they need to be kind of emptied at a better frequency. So we designed a app saying, okay, somebody will raise a, you know, I need my septic tank cleaned, the truck will come, it'll kind of suck out and go out. We realized 60% of places that truck can't go inside, they usually have these small scooters on which they, on which they, it was during COVID so we couldn't do so many field trips also. So this keeps happening all the time. And I think you just, every day you learn something. Yeah, I think you have a couple of things. One of, when people talk about digital public goods around the world, one of the ones that they, they talk about a lot is a service we built called Notify. Yeah, it's very, very simple. It just kind of orchestrates access to, to SMS, to email, to print in some places. But rather than each different government service having to go and set that up for themselves, it's a simple API you can plug into. I think about 17 different governments have picked that up and used it. It's because we didn't even set out to make it an open source product, we just put it on GitHub with an open license and some people saw it and wanted to use it. We never actually set out to make Notify. We started out thinking that what was needed was a status tracking service. So I've applied for my passport, I've applied for this license, where is it in the system? And I still think from a complete end user point of view that would be a very attractive thing. But the user research we went out and did is we started to build prototypes of it. People were saying, yeah, not sure if I'd use that or not. And we did, like there wasn't the confidence to kind of, we'll let, build it and see. But more importantly, we realized most of the underlying government services just weren't ready to use it. We couldn't get reliable data about enough services to be able to guarantee to people that what they were seeing there was right. So pulling back to notifications, going that's a thing which most services can much more easily connect to. It delivers 50% of the value because you at least know that you'll get a reliable text message saying your passport's got to the next stage of processing. Kind of did the job. And that was a really important thing because it was partly, it was working against the logic of the system which says we're gonna fund you to do the thing you said you were gonna do. And we went, actually the thing we said we were gonna do was the wrong thing to do right now. But we're gonna keep the money and we're gonna do something different with it. The other thing, and I think that kind of ability to do research is so super important. Another of the services we worked on was a carers allowance. So if in the UK you have a member of your household who needs 24 hour care, there's an extra benefit that you can get to help you to help them. And the easy bit of the work we did on that, to talk about it, is we made it much easier to change the forms that you fill in and move to unnecessary fields and so on. The really valuable breakthrough was when we realized we finally put some analytics on the surface. And we saw that the spikes in demand were at two or three o'clock in the morning. And so we went out and did some research with some of the users to say why is this? And what's because I'm spending all of the waking hours caring for my relatives. This is the only point in the day where I can provide that support. And what we were able to do was partly we had about the online experience, but it was more change the opening hours of the support center on it. To say we were providing nine till five telephone support for that service. That was useless, completely waste the government resources. Having a one a.m. to three a.m. service looked a bit more expensive because you have to pay people for working out of hours. But when it was there, when people needed it, an overall that reduced waste in the system because people could get through the service first time. They got the support they needed quickly. And so they didn't need to draw on all of the things that come with failure. But you sort of mentioned doing the research. I'm always fascinated by all the subtle things that you learn when doing research that go well beyond the kind of does this user interface make sense to somebody or even do they want this product? But what's going on? The last talk kind of covered this. What are their life circumstances? How do we connect to their life circumstances? Okay, I had a question. So I feel like in a country like India where we have so many challenges, so something which you have come up with or your volunteers and all whatever you have come up with. So that's really helpful. So my question is around the efficiency of the system which has been put in place, like with respect to vaccination and all, I completely understand it's helping everyone. But there are certain other things also which I am not sure how many, what all apps you have, but I feel there are many government apps which we have where we lodge the complaints or we ask for help. So my question is around the efficiency of those systems. Whenever we are lodging a complaint and all, so do we collect any data? How many of them are getting resolved? Some KPIs around that, how efficient it is and how much is it really helping the general public? So that is my first question. So after that I'll be asking second one. So absolutely, I think so. I guess the biggest thing when you, as a citizen interact with government is usually things go into a black hole and you don't know what's happening or what is overstatus tracking for example, right? Second thing is when it is resolved, nobody asks you, let's say you complain about there's a garbage dump outside my house, needs to be cleaned. So there are two or three things. One is the whole experience is tracked through a, what I call a chain of custody, saying you have raised a complaint. It's a irreparable data which goes into the, every event which happened on that complaint is captured and reported back to you. Second thing is in terms of whoever touches that on the supply side to kind of create greater transparency and accountability, it's captured. So I can send you the links to some of the dashboards. You can actually see a complaint go through the various stages, say it went to Manju Nath, he said, needs to go to Sanay, it goes to him and after a certain time it escalates. By the way, Bagnore doesn't use our system, so. But it goes, it escalates to the next level. So essentially, if you look at end to end measurement of it, only way you can measure it, the citizen satisfaction is, what is the SLA it's been done in and what is the satisfaction of the citizen. So I'll give you example from Punjab and Andhra Pradesh. In Andhra Pradesh, when we started in 2016, they used to get across the state 15,000 complaints. And only 70% of them were resolved. Today they get more than 120,000 complaints a year, okay? And 99%, 95% of them are solved in the SLA. They used to take 23 days on an average to resolve a complaint, today it's four days. So systemically, it's not that there are more complaints because people have more trust in the system, right? See, people don't mind waiting for government services. I think we all expect it'll not be like Amazon or Flipkart, but they want to know what is happening and who's accountable. Is something happening or not? Lotta, you just put something in, I just, where is it? So we've seen time and again on service delivery and this is what we call a systemic impact that people know because there is, there is, every event is being captured so they can be audited at, you know, and when citizens see that something is happening, they engage more with the government. So my second question is around, like whatever you guys are doing, I think it's a great work for the country. I came to know about it today, to be very honest. And why we are not doing some kind of branding and marketing around it so that more and more people who are willing to get engaged, they start getting engaged with it. I've got my marketing head. We just had a marketing head like two months ago. So yeah, so I think you're right. I think Nandan Hoosana about says, you guys are the best kept secret. So I think, and it's a gain, how a organization evolves. We evolved from a organization that worked in trenches and culture is that you don't want to take a lot of credit. It's basically government does the work, but your point is valid. It's an asset that the whole society should know about. And it's not ours, it's open source and people should be able to leverage it to solve problems in their own context. So I take your feedback, we're working on it. And this is a part of it that actually last year and a half, I've started talking more. Even I used to be just busy, talk to that bureaucrat and somebody said, this is your main job. You need to go and talk to people and get the story out so that people can engage. But your point is valid. Thank you. Hi, Vresh. I'm here. Yeah. Question from myself. So while building these public digital infrastructure tools, who's your, whom do you think as a customer? Is it the government officials who's gonna use it or the public? Because both may have conflicting priorities, different needs. So whom do you have in your mind as a consumer or a majority who's gonna use it? And I would like to know your thoughts on that. I think we're very clear. A consumer is, you know, Ahmad or the citizens of the country. How do they get easy to access transparent services wherever they are? I think that's the end point we want to go to. But to do that, you have multiple stakeholders that also need to align. The point you were making earlier. If we don't have the right tools, I can create a lot of, in fact, a lot of the problems in civic tech have been that the demand has been created. So the supply side is not really, you know, if I create a beautiful complaints tool for everybody, but it doesn't link into the, like in Andhra Pradesh, actually when you raise a complaint, standing here and say it's a sanitation complaint, it maps your GIS and straight away routes it to the sanitation officer for that ward, okay? But if you don't do the supply side and look at them and say, how are they going to use it? You'll not succeed in delivering it to the citizen. Third thing is the policy side. The people who run the city is the city managers. If they don't have the data on their fingertips to see what's happening, how many black spots are they in the city? How will they allocate resources, right? So I think that's the challenge of a product manager in this kind of a, you do have a really multi-stakeholder, or you're constantly trading off, right? But I feel this narrative of clash of interest, I don't think we have experienced it that much. Most people want to work efficiently, solve problems, right? There are champions who want to deliver good services that they get the system around it. But I think if you design it well and keep all the point of views across, it should be, yeah, sometimes it works. Most of the time it works, sometimes it doesn't work. Yeah, I think when we talk to organizations about transformation, we often talk about going through sort of four different phases of it. And the first one is a kind of finding your champions and getting to enough people on the same page that you can do something. I'm picking the thing where you're going to make the first impact. And almost always that first impact is somebody outside your organization. It's your customers, it's your citizens, it's whoever. But in order to serve them, you have to work radically differently from how you used to. You then go into phases which are usually, okay, let's try and do that a few more times and see what lessons happen when we try and repeat it. And then you go into a phase which say, how do we make this sustainable and make the new way the easy way to get things done. And having kind of infrastructure, having platforms helps you move through those phases more quickly. But you still need to go through them. And it's that getting to people outside of your organization because every organization exists to some level to serve people outside of itself. None are entirely about themselves. That's the thing that tells you, are we on track? Are we going in the right direction with this? And usually also builds the political capital internally. We've done something better for our customer, we've done something better for our user that lets you get into that scaling, sustaining. Thanks, James. Time for one last question. We are already into the lunch hour, so we'll wind up with this. Out of interest, I just want to know, is it somewhere connected to my GOV app? Because being there as a change agent, I post, we take part of quizzes and we create taglines for all the ministry's schemes. And we have a point, we have a dashboard that's been built. And I see that the public grievance portal for ministry of consumer affairs and all that was integrated, like you said, it was different earlier, where we go into the my GOV website and then we will be able to take it. I've seen that the GOV as part when you conduct hackathons and others where we contribute as a public. So to answer your question, we have my GOV as a mobile app which integrates with all your work where we can be contributors from India. My GOV, Abhishek Singh, who's the head of MATE, we've been working with him to see, we're working with something called a unified service interface. Actually creating standards and specs for a, when government was more than 650 services, right? How do you create a standard and a spec that everybody can use when they're building that service? So I think we can work very closely with Abhishek Singh and Mike of team. Sure. Thank you, James. Thank you, Aresh for an insightful discussion. And because most of us have been users of the system. So thank you so much for this. Thank you. Thank you, team. Thank you so much.