India is rapidly digitising. There are good things and bad, speed-bumps on the way and caveats to be mindful of. The weekly column Terminal focuses on all that is connected and is not – on digital issues, policy, ideas and themes dominating the conversation in India and the world.
Bill Gates met Narendra Modi during his India visit and the choreographed conversations of their meeting are all over social media promoting each other with the upcoming election. The highlights of the meeting show how Gates was impressed with what was happening under Modi’s leadership in taking India forward with technology, including Modi’s use of it in politics with his NaMo app. The meeting represents the coalition of two power structures that promote Digital India and uphold economic and political control in present-day India.
Modi declares in the meeting that he has ensured Digital Divide in India is addressed and has networked every village in the country. This should take us back to 2014 when Narendra Modi met Mark Zuckerberg along with information technology (IT) minister Ravi Shankar Prasad where Facebook was asked to be a partner in the “National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) programme” to connect all villages in India. What followed was Facebook’s free basics programme and the fight for Net Neutrality in India, where Indians rejected Facebook becoming the gatekeeper of Digital India.
Modi’s push towards Jan-Dhan Aadhaar Mobile (JAM) Scheme forced Aadhaar, UPI payments with demonetisation and networked every Indian with Reliance Jio taking the centre stage of Digital India. Modi’s JAM policy was a direct result of his meeting with Nandan Nilekani and what followed is a series of legal battles in the Supreme Court around fundamental right to privacy and Aadhaar.
These meetings of Narendra Modi with various billionaires are not some courtesy calls being made for promoting his charismatic leadership but are to discuss collaborations with the Government of India. Each meeting represents the diverse interests of domestic and foreign companies that want a piece of India’s digital economy. The Bill Gates meeting is nothing different with Gates’ interests in India’s digital economy.
Modi declares his next interest is to use technology in healthcare, education and agriculture if he comes to power. Incidentally, these are the sectors where Digital India hasn’t taken over yet. With JAM and India Stack, there was a push of digitisation in governance, commerce, payments, taxation and other such sectors. The approach of building stacks was to be extended to Health with Health Stack, Agriculture with Agri Stack and Education with Unique Student ID APAAR.
Interestingly Gates asked how Modi has handled the COVID crisis so well and ensured everyone is vaccinated. It is important to understand Gates’ interests in vaccines and healthcare, with his foundation becoming the driving force on healthcare policy across the world. Even during covid-19 crisis, it was Bill Gates who controlled how vaccines were manufactured by restricting the Intellectual Property over vaccines.
The COVID vaccination policy in India was largely designed by Nandan Nilekani and his favourite bureaucrat Ram Sevak Sharma being made the head of National Health Authority. The launch of apps like AarogyaSetu and Co-WIN were part of a public-private partnership, which was promoted to sell vaccines to the private sector. It was the Gates Foundation which funded the creation of Co-WIN by giving a grant to the e-Government Foundation of Nandan Nilekani.
COVID-19 in India was a site of several digital experiments with consistent pushback from the citizenry. Everyone who shared his Aadhaar for vaccination drive was being enrolled into the National Digital Health Mission with a National Health ID being created for him/her without their knowledge. For India’s digital evangelists, the Covid-19 crisis was a moment to profit by building a Universal Health Interface along the lines of Unified Payments Interface (UPI). These plans have been largely abandoned by the India Stack evangelists but they are likely to come back in future.
The Gates Foundation has been also directly helping India with the PM Poshan Abhiyan under which, the Poshan Tracker app is used to collect health data of every child and pregnant women in India. The Anganwadi workers have been creating Health IDs for all the government beneficiaries and storing their health data using these Health IDs. All of this digitization using state resources further enables India’s digital economy.
Beyond Health, Microsoft and Bill Gates have direct interest in digitization of farming. Gates, who happens to be the largest owner of farmland in the US, is one of the largest investors in the agriculture sector. Microsoft along with the Government of Andhra Pradesh was already experimenting with pilots on how to use AI in agriculture by partnering with ICRISAT. Gates was also in Andhra Pradesh for AP AgTech Summit 2017 sharing stage with his grand old political friend Chandra Babu Naidu.
Bill Gates with former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh N. Chandrababu Naidu.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is now championing Digital Public Infrastructures across the world with several grants being offered to institutions to promote them. Digital Public Infrastructures largely being India’s national information utilities like Aadhaar, UPI, GSTN, Health Stack, Agri Stack among others. Some of the Aadhaar volunteers like Sanjay Jain have joined the Gates Foundation to promote Digital Public Infrastructures across the world.
Also read: Digital India Has Run Out of Freedoms
While these Digital Public Infrastructures help build a digital economy by converting citizens as consumers for digital companies, it gives control over citizens to the Government. Modi’s India has increased digitization, which has forced the population to drive up formalisation of the economy. Modi’s claims of addressing the digital divide, while partially true, the missing story is that of Internet Shutdowns and control in Digital India. India is the world’s capital of Internet Shutdowns with the Government shutting internet down whenever there are protests across the country.
Bill Gates represents a global economic order, which promotes philanthropy as a guise to influence various state actors to promote businesses in policy. The Gates and Modi meeting is thus a meeting of two power centres that are collaborating for profit and control. By campaigning for Modi, Gates is ensuring his economic interests are covered in an economy with a billion customers.
At the same time, Gates is needed for India’s IT sector to take their experiments across the globe. It’s a symbiotic relationship that has evolved with liberalisation in India and the global capital that continues to grow. In the words of Nandan Nilekani, Modi has expanded digitisation in India within a decade, which would have otherwise taken 47 years with conventional means. Narendra Modi is needed for India’s IT sector and India’s IT sector has in return given him control over all of our data.
Srinivas Kodali is a researcher on digitisation and a hacktivist.
