Many years ago, when Dewang Mehta was helming NASSCOM and Pramod Mahajan the Ministry of Information Technology, a slogan was coined —“Roti, Kapada, Makan, Bijli and Bandwidth” — a subtle, yet powerful take on a long-held populist catchphrase.
Like its predecessor, this slogan too encapsulated the Indian aspiration of growth and prosperity, except that in adding a technology term not common in popular parlance back then, it articulated another fundamental requirement of our changing milieu, quite remarkably, well ahead of its times.
Today’s digital world bears out why that thought was visionary. As we find ourselves in the vortex of a technology shift quite unlike anything seen before, it seems more pertinent than ever to place the digital or telecom infrastructure next only to the education infrastructure and well ahead of the road, air and port infrastructure.
Who knows how close we are to the age of teleportation, when a fabric or a handset designed and engineered in Chennai would be 3D-printed at scale in Lima or Johannesburg, using cotton and carbon fibers. Indications are that much of this will happen sooner than we can imagine. And when it does, trucks and ships would no longer be required to transport finished goods, and each country would be able to balance its material resources and power, taking us closer to a utopian society.
Amid such breathtaking progress, it seems surprising that the human mind, instead of being allowed the freedom to race ahead and turn dreams and possibilities into reality, should be constrained by speed-breakers and fight regulation.
Imagine if every app available globally was required to be licensed in India — that too only after the bureaucracy pronounced it safe and fit for national interest! Or what it would be like if every medical scanner had to be licensed specifically for India, subject to official ruling on whether it upheld our special requirements of privacy, confidentiality and data rights!
The dizzying pace of change pervading all walks of life makes a strong case for us to move away from the Raj mindset of licensing, controlling and monitoring, and embrace the Net mindset of self-regulation and quick action.
For example, if prohibited content is created or made available on the Internet, we have the technology that provides us the speed and ability to knock it off in quick time. To be sure, such material comes our way only occasionally; just about one per cent of it would possibly fall in that category.
Instead, if we start dictating that every piece of content be screened before it is made available for public consumption, it would mean a cumbersome throwback to the Raj era.
The trigger for this thought is not just the animated debate around Net neutrality — the mire of everyday rigmarole is much wider. Take, for example, an inexplicable rule laid down by the Regional Transport Office. In our industry, employees move from one city to another in the course of their employment, often across different States. When they move, they take their vehicles — cars and two-wheelers — with them, only to be asked to re-register those vehicles in their destination States in order to get local registration numbers and avoid paying penalties. Should running a vehicle with a number plate from a different State be treated like a crime? Worse, the process of re-registration is never easy because the vehicle owner has to prove that the vehicle is not stolen, was not involved in an accident, and is not the subject of any police action. For a handful of instances of such fraud, the entire society has to go through the daunting task of securing no-objection certificates.
In this globalised world where ideas, data, capital, goods and services refuse to limit themselves to national boundaries and move freely as if in defiance, is it too much to ask that we behave as one nation and allow free movement of goods, services, people within our own country?
However, for that to happen and for us to reap the real dividends of free enterprise, our deep-rooted permit raj ought to make way. The citizens may well have fought for Net neutrality and obtained it, but time is also ripe for the next, far more arduous struggle against the mindset and culture of approvals, NOCs and licences.
(The author is Chairman, ICT Academy of Tamil Nadu.)
