E Governance at the Grassroots

When I engaged the services of a smart, suave lawyer to draft the Trust Deed that I had to register, I thought that I was being smart. Getting good legal advice to have the paper work sewn up well seemed to be a good move. Drafting the deed well was the main half of the story; registering the deed itself would be child’s play afterwards; or so I thought. I was wrong.

Whereas the lawyer had drafted any number of Trust Deeds and drafted mine too in a jiffy, registering the deed turned out to be a nightmare. A visit to the sub-registrar’s office to register a document – any document at all is the best possible proof that if any job at can be performed by machines and computers, they should be asked to do so without any further ado and interaction with human beings is best kept at the irreducible minimum.

The first sight to greet you as you approach the sub registrar’s office is a slew of soft drink and bottled water sellers. That sight ought to make any one’s heart quiver; for if such sellers abound like vultures, it only means that there is a market for their wares in the form of indeterminable delays.

Once you alight, you are in the midst of what can best be called a maze with all sorts of people milling around – clients, petty shopkeepers, hangers on and tough looking people in tight T Shirts. Although there are enough signage; the one most prominent is one advising the client to “beware of touts”. And yet with no clear reception counter or window or help desk, and a swarming crowd trying to find its way through the chaos, the only one who knows the drill to get the job done with as little delay as possible is the tout. Getting your job done without a tout’s help in that run down office where the babu sits behind shuttered windows under a fan and the client lines up under the blazing sun without the pretense of even a canopy is like trying to cross the Sahara desert without map or compass.

I remember the times before e-ticketing in the railways became common when the bookings were all manual. Whenever we went on summer breaks, the first job to do was to make a trip to the railway station to book the return ticket. The process took effectively the whole day and was fraught with uncertainty as the bookings were made manually on a giant ledger and with the queue moving at a snail’s pace, there was no assurance that by the time, one reached the head of the queue, the ticket one sought would still be available.

If there is one area where e-governance has made a difference to a whole lot of people, it is in the area of railway bookings. Another may be banking, especially the adoption of core banking by many of the public sector banks. Several embassies have reduced human contact and give online appointments for visa interviews and other related formalities which too are of help. But what is surprising is that despite a few proven successes in improved governance; the government has not demonstrated the political will to extend IT solutions to other government offices that the public have to visit.

The sight of unsightly and ill manned offices with unhelpful clerks in the National Capital and confused clients roaming around under the raging noon day sun surrounded by touts and other unidentifiable characters who seemingly can “fix” any thing is enough to undermine any good that the government might have done in other areas. If e-governance is the panacea of the future, it is much more so at the places where the public congregates to interface with the government and is met with uncouth, sour faced clerks than in the Prime Minister’s office and other such high profile establishments. E-governance needs to expand at the grassroots and do so quickly.

The Putrid Pilgrim Trail

A doctor who has just started some charitable work in the island of Rameshwaram among Sri Lankan refugees has an experience to share. Hailing from Chennai, she was used to the thought of abandoning the comforts of city life and get used to the exigencies of rural life. But the one thing that greeted her as she crossed over into Rmaeshwaram and that one thing which she was not prepared for was the over whelming stench of human excreta hovering all over the island.

Apart from the infrastructural issues of there not being any adequate sewage disposal on the island, she wondered aloud as to why a pilgrim centre of religious significance should be so dirty and why whether or not the official machinery did any thing or not, the basic piety of the people should have served as some kind of an incentive to keep the place clean. Going by the press reports, the problem in Rameshwaram has been noticed and action asked for at least a year ago when A. Sellamuthu, Secretary for Housing and Monitoring Officer for the district, had directed the Rameswaram Municipal authorities to take urgent steps clean the island town. He had also noted that that “Rameswaram was an important pilgrim centre, which was attracting thousands of pilgrims and tourists daily. Hence, it had to be kept neat and clean always”

The question is worth asking as to why filth and squalor are so routinely associated with places of pilgrimages –except for the cash rich ones like the temples at Tirupati and Vaishno Devi and a few others and may be the Dargah at Ajmer. As for the rest, be it the shrine of a pir or a typical teerth sthan, the gathering of crowds for journeys of piety and pilgrimages are almost synonymous with dirt, disorder and chaos instead of harmony, serenity and order.

Remember the kanwarias who crowd up the roads every couple of months. Emerging from every little town and village that India has it would seem, they run through the land like locusts ravaging a field. Small time charities spring up to feed and shelter these hockey stick wielding pilgrims. During the time the season is on, these resting places are filled with leaf plates with flies buzzing, plastic and other waste lying around every where and ear splitting music of the crassest kind copied from the latest Bollywood hits but supposedly charmed to induce piety.

Or remember the Kumbh Melas, the largest gathering of humans on earth for any purpose, but not necessarily the most tranquil or peaceful. There are these akharas filled with opium soaked sadhus and their equally fanatic followers jostling for space and dominance. And oh yes, till modern times, the end of Kumbh Mela often sprouted cholera. The rather provocatively titled blog “ The Shit of the Saints is Still Reeking” talks pointedly of the 2007 mela in Allahabad and quotes the Chief Medical Officer of Allahabad alluding to the threat of diarrheal diseases, typhoid, and hepatitis as a direct result of the trash and human waste.

The Incredible India Campaign has run several direct ads on the need to keep and preserve our heritage –from vandalism as well as other acts that might desecrate them in any way. But they have largely concentrated and talked about historical monuments. But considering that so much of our heritage is tied up with religion and religious places and yatras and pilgrimages, it might do well to also talk of keeping religious places and events clean and sanitized so that the memory of having visited them might remain pleasant memories and not stories of nightmares.

The Money Plant

Ever since Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for his initiatives in micro finance, the sector has been attention that had hitherto been denied it. The Professor himself has been toasted around quite a bit and the Grameen Bank has now been invited to set up shop in Assam. But the success and spread of micro-finance in India has been patchy and mostly confined to the South Indian states where there has been a long history of thrift and credit societies and then subsequently of Self Help Groups. Typically micro finance programs have had three common characteristics in India at least –a) they have been women-centric, b) They have had an NGO non profit mindset, which has meant that business viability has been undermined) They have had a rural focus.

“Experience shows that microfinance can help the poor to increase income, build viable businesses, and reduce their vulnerability to external shocks. It can also be a powerful instrument for self-empowerment by enabling the poor, especially women, to become economic agents of change.”

But micro credit has had a very limited audience to play to. In the highly patriarchal societies of North India, where women rarely are allowed out to step out of their houses, let alone assemble in groups; the gender skewed methodology of first forming groups of women and then offering loans would not work. Neither would they typically work in highly urban societies which lack the homogeneity of rural communities and the system of trust and honor on which the foundations of repayment and low defaults are built. But to scale up and really make a difference to those outside the normal banking channels, microfinance institutions need to innovate.

As Vikram Akula of SKS Micro Finance puts it, the three key issues that a micro finance institution usually faces are lack of capital, the lack of capacity and the high cost of transaction. Ahuja, who started life as a Field Officer for an NGO driven microfinance program has the answers - answers which prompted him to start his own micro finance company with an entirely different set of paradigms than the one he was first coached in.

Vikram Akula talks the language of business - of generating capital by earning profits for investors, of not being content with a couple of thousands of clients, but in terms of millions of customers as any good sized business would have and in terns of using automation and technology to manage the high cost of several tiny sized transactions. He is currently doing a pilot using mobile phone technology to manage transactions. The penetration of mobile phones among SKS’s clients is adequate enough for Vikram Akula for it to be a viable option.

Does speaking the language mean that a microfinance institution has to forsake its social obligations? Not so. Shikhar Development Services is a newly formed microfinance entity that is trying to combine sound business practices with socially relevant innovative projects. Working in an urban environment with its own particular challenges, they recently conducted a survey which revealed that many parents with school going children had a significant cash outflow in the months of April – May when the school academic year started. Often the parents would not have the cash necessary to make the pay out and the child would drop out of school. Appalled at the finding, the company is now looking at the feasibility of developing a loan product that would enable parents to meet this predictable yet unaffordable financial need.

MFIs might have entered the picture with the aim to bank with the “unbankable” and often received societal support because they were perceived as removing the scourge of the money lenders. But today they attract a fair bit of criticism too and many feel that some microfinance institutions are blurring the line between constructive microfinance and exploitative money lending. There is also criticism that easy access to credit doesn’t seem to have made any perceptible change in the lifestyle and livelihoods of the rural poor and that at the cost of the poor a large number of MFIs have benefited; banks have found a convenient route to increase lending; and corporations have got a growing consumer market to target.

As more and more microfinance institutions enter the market, they would need to be ready to respond to such criticism and innovations and social responsiveness would become more and more necessary, both to compete and to stay socially relevant. Unlike the typical banks – brick and mortar structures where customers have to visit to access products; micro finance institutions have people on the ground close to their client base to listen, reflect and constantly innovate; a luxury that the typical banking institution does not have. Compared to Bangladesh, where the market as well as the clientèle has become more discerning; India is a relatively nascent market. Many will be waiting to watch to see if MFIs become hand maidens to established commercial banks working towards “financial inclusiveness” or manage to retain their independence and their soul.

The Devil and the Deep Sea

India’s elderly population are literally caught between the devil and the deep sea. The government might have provided adequate incentives in the budget for children to buy medical insurance for their ageing parents; but it is not working well. For in the entirely money-driven economy that we live in today, the elderly are not insurable and pose a business risk where the claims will be possibly higher than the premiums realized.

Strangely speaking, the public sector insurers – who are supposedly meant to have a conscience against the private ones, are not better in dealing with our senior citizens. According to the Business Standard, "A senior public sector general insurance company executive admitted that certain senior citizens may not be readily ‘insurable’ by industry standards, thanks to medical conditions; for example, people above 70 years of age. Most insurance companies are today reluctant to allot policies to senior citizens on grounds of ‘unprofitable businesses.

In a business and incentive driven business, even agents who typically are meant to have a long lasting and personalized relationship with their clients, have begun to start to look the other way. The insurance companies who are otherwise chasing business by drumming up clients by offering commissions to agents are not interested in securing the business of the senior citizens or for that matter any one above the age of 55 as they are the ones more likely to raise claims.

They are more likely to tom tom to all who care to hear about their reduced premiums for 20 year olds who are least likely in the prime of health hardly likely to fall sick and prefer claims. While no one of course disputes the need of insurance companies to make profits and survive in the market, the current stance of health insurers is akin to the man who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and then takes it back when it is running. This way of functioning defeats the very purpose of insurance.

Studies of household expenditure have shown that health care can use up to 40 per cent of a poor family's budget.

Narratives track the trajectories of households over the years: Illness leads to health care expense; usually this means a progressively higher level of care that becomes less and less affordable; this leads to debt, and it also means death, surprisingly often. It is easy to assume that death translates into change in the economic base of the family and has intergenerational impact only when it is of an able and earning male member of the household.

Although the government has announced schemes like the Varishtha Mediclaim, the schemes often come with fine print riders that put them out of reach of many. In many instances, the premium rates have been such that the schemes would be out of reach of many and the insurance regulator has had to step in to warn the companies. To sum it up,

The non-availability of enough products for older people, particularly senior citizens, who need medical insurance the most, and the lack of willingness among the insurance companies to sell such products to them mean that even if you want to buy a health cover for your aged parents, you may be unable to get them adequately covered.

Meanwhile, until we sort all this out, our parents and grand parents continue to swim in the choppy waters of uncertainty.

Harvesting the Spare Parts

Many years ago, there used to be a minister in West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu’s cabinet by the name of Benoy Choudhury. He used to be the deputy chief minister at one point and was responsible for all the land reforms carried out in the early years of the Left Front government. An austere, honest and humble man in life, he stayed that way in death. When he died, there was neither cremation nor burial - he had donated his remains to the government medical college so that students might learn some anatomy by dissecting up his body.

Recently, A.K.Antony set another sort of precedent when he donated his organs as did celebrities Priyanka Chopra and cricketer Navjot Singh Sidhu. Preity Zinta has done this even earlier. This is great. For just as it is desirable to avoid ostentatious ness in the happier moments of life, so too in moments of grief – especially when there is a lot that could be done with our bodies even after we have passed on. As Priyanka Chopra put it quite well, in a symbolic sense, donating your organs enables you to live for ever.

But while such romantic notions of eternity are fine; there is a case to revisit the entire gamut of organ donation in the country. For on one side, there is a scarcity of vital organs so much so that there is a thriving black market in them and on the other side, every such organs are being consigned to the flames or buried six feet under.

As Scott Carney writes in Wired magazine,

“Scarcity has long been a key driver of the global kidney market, but in regions like India, Brazil, Pakistan and China, sellers are dealing with signs of a surplus. Operations that once set back patients tens of thousands of dollars on the black market can now be had for a fraction of the cost in some places.” and body brokers are now connecting wealthy patients with healthy but poor people willing to sell their organs for cash. The international market for human parts is thriving: A kidney goes for $25,000 in Russia, a heart for $290,000 in South Africa

In organ donation, the main taboos seem to be religious and here it does not seem to make much of a difference as to which religion one belongs to. But the taboos are clearly relative. The large numbers of donors who are poor and living on the edge who are selling of their organs for a pittance clearly are prepared to sell to survive another day. The presence of affluent doctors like Amit Kumar acting as racketeers and brokers proves that religious taboos are not too binding at the rich end of society either.

Not too long ago, blood donation was handicapped by similar taboos and myths. Now while it may be a little premature to claim that all the taboos have gone away, it goes without saying that we have come a long way indeed. Though fringes of commercialism still persist in the form of the “professional blood donors”, the voluntary blood donor movement – aided by strong social backing and helpful legislation has grown. Perhaps, we need to go the same route for harvesting our organs and who knows the large catchments of voluntary blood donors who already know what it means to gift life through donating blood may become the bulwark of another movement – those who donate blood in life…. And their body parts in death…

Broadband and Smelly Armpits

It is a funny day. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology of broadband and wireless and all that, I can sit in my bedroom and rest my aching back and arms. and still write this piece. As I write, I cannot escape the irony of it – for modern technology can enable me to write a piece and have it read across the world but it may not help me in many basic areas of life. You see, the reason that my back aches so is that I have been carting water puffing and panting up two flights of stairs from the water tanker that the government has so generously sent around because the taps have been dry for a week and not a drop flows through the taps. And this is no slum – it is a middle class colony where all (or most) of the constructions are authorized.

As someone who has benefited immensely from technology, I am at a loss to think rationally as to how technology should be best used. After all the advent of the Internet and especially e-commerce has changed my life and the lives of many others fundamentally – the manner in which I pay my bills, do my shopping, travel, deal with the government, obtain my visas, and many other things has changed, perhaps forever and possibly for good.

As important as broadband and IT all that is and for all the convenience that it provides, I still wonder at the bizarreness of a country’s priorities where bandwidth is available in plenty and is even subsidized so that more and more people can climb on which is fine; but the priorities seem skewed when compared to the fact that we have inadequate roads, inadequate drinking water, inadequate electricity, inadequate bus stations, train stations and airports- the real infrastructure is crumbling and life is getting more difficult by the day in the real world but you can zap up and down the virtual highway.

While rationing of a scare resource, be it electricity or power is but inevitable, it seems that we do not have the technology to be able to monitor its use and enforce some discipline. Electricity, for instance, is generated at various points in the country and transmitted through transmission lines and each state is allotted a quota. But states overdraw as often as they please and it seems that we have just enough to indicate that this is happening but not enough to put a stop to this.

While the virtual infrastructure is important; if the country has to have any future as a good place to live, the political eye needs to turn around to attend to these pressing needs too. Roads and airports are getting some attention but water supply and power generation is actually falling behind as demand continues to outstrip supply. Having inherited a little over 1,300 MW at the time of independence in 1947, the country today has an installed generating capacity of over 1, 15,000 MW and aims to increase it to 1, 00,000 MW of new installed generating capacity is planned to be added by the year 2012, along with the sprucing up of the transmission network to ferry power across the country but even that may be slow.

While power generation may eventually catch up, no one has any answers to water shortages. While we can wax eloquent about India having surplus water and one of the richest traditions of managing it, but still the water crisis has reached critical levels in the country, and with only important but minuscule measures like rain water harvesting can yield minimal results. Meanwhile, with about 20 percent of the global population, India is struggling to meet her water needs with just five percent of the world’s available water and the gap between these numbers is widening – figures that most people are perhaps unaware of. With people in most places seemingly apathetic to these figures and the gravity of the problem, it is time perhaps for nation wide Pulse Polio like movement to be started to at least sensitize people about water shortage and water conservation. For that moment, we wait with bated breath and parched throats.

The Recovery Agent : India's Latest Export ?

In India, the term recovery agent or debt collector throws up chilling images of unnerving phone calls, bounces landing up at the door, goons intercepting your car at a traffic signal and throwing you off as they repossess in mid traffic and all of that. So unsavory have the tactics been that the courts have often been asked to intervene and codes of conduct have been laid out as to how banks will go about the business of collecting bad debts.

But according to the New York Times, India’ s “ability” to recover debts is some thing that attracts American companies very much and it might b the next big thing, that might be out sourced to India. It seems according to the NYT report that in recession hit USA, consumers are finding it hard to keep up their payments on time and this is exactly the scenario, where India’s famed recovery agents are just equipped to step in and ring in the coins.

“India will be the only place we grow this year,” said J. Brandon Black, the chief executive of the Encore Capital Group, a debt collection company based in San Diego. India is the company’s largest operating area, with about half the company’s collection force of more than 300. Although the stereotype of a collector may be “some guy with chains and a cut-off shirt,” Mr. Black said, collectors in India are “very polite, very respectful, and they don’t raise their voice.” He added, “People respond to that.”

Of course those in dialogue with India’s debt collectors would be best placed to respond to The Encore CEO’s comments that Indian debt collectors are very polite, very respectful and don’t raise their voice. Possibly he is right and the collectors don’t need to. Who ever said that a deep, coarse and gravelly voice was necessary to send your spine tingling and your mind twirling!

So are debt collectors going to be India’s latest export? It would seem to be so, though it does not look that the business model that the US companies are adopting would see them sponsoring Indian recovery agents for an H1B visa just yet. But the ubiquitous call center executive is swiftly evolving to perform one more function - the sweet talking tele caller who will coax and cajole though not threaten delinquent customers into agreeing to pay at least a minimum amount an earn bonuses for managing to do so.

Given that the call center based recovery agents would not have the luxury of dropping into some body’s house and bull dozing them into payment promises – both for geographical reasons as well as legal, the collection agents’ methodology is dependant very heavily on through study and home work of the clients’ profile and behavior patterns. Encore is for instance coaching its staff bout the intricacies of the IRS refunds- the refund season beginning in May and the caller might know based on their study and research, just how much refund a particular lien is likely to get.

One thing to ponder here is that in this system, although there is a lot of psychological pressure and implied threats of “further action” –meaning law suits, there is no physical violence involved. The tele recovery agents essentially depend on their wits and the eventual might of law suits to get the reticent clients to pay up. Does this mean any thing for India? Will these global best practices in debt recovery which Indians are using to service debt across the oceans get adopted in their own country or the Indian experience will continue to be that of hoodlums and goons and people howling in newspaper columns and consumer courts? Let us wait and see and in the meanwhile, not wanting to take any chances, not run up any unpaid debt at all!