TECHNOLOGY

 

Why India needs tech for the common good

The government needs to start creating markets for public interest technologies to address development and social challenges.

Government spending on innovation has contributed to some of the world’s most used applications across a range of fields, including technology and healthcare. For instance, most of the promising new drugs we see today are a result of research done by the National Institutes of Health. The internet actually originates from ARPANET, a programme funded by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The current global positioning system (GPS), originally Navstar GPS, began as a 1970s US military project. The iPhone’s touchscreen technology was created by a professor and his doctoral candidate at the publicly funded University of Delaware. Even Siri, Apple’s digital personal assistant, is a spin-off of DARPA’s project PAL (Personalised Assistant that Learns).1 The Satellite Instructional Television Experiment by ISRO and NASA made available 2,400 black-and-white community TV sets across several villages in six Indian states for the first time in 1975 (when most urban homes didn’t have a television).

Since the 1970s, a multitude of factors—including the rise of capitalism, targeting of public debt in the wake of the global financial crisis, and calls to spur private investment by cutting down government spending—have increasingly reduced the government’s role in facilitating the private sector. In India, the R&D spending as a percentage of GDP has been decreasing. It is now approximately 0.66 percent of the GDP, almost equal to what it was in the 1990s (it spiked from 0.8 percent in 2004 to its highest—0.86 percent—in 2008, after which there’s been a continuous decline).

The trend has more or less been the same in many countries. For instance, budget sequestration in the US (which entails the withdrawal of funding in certain areas) has led to cuts worth USD 95 billion in the federal R&D spending between 2013 and 2021, and the European fiscal compact is squeezing educational and R&D spending.2 These moves are based on the assumption that market forces, when facilitated, regulated, and administered by governments, will themselves efficiently allocate resources. However, as we have seen over the years, market forces are blind to societal and environmental concerns.

What is public interest technology?

Though in its infancy, public interest technology broadly means advancing equitable tech-enabled interventions for the common good. If not done well, these tech-enabled interventions will fall short of addressing equitability. For instance, VI-SPDAT, a data tool designed to help homeless people find housing facilities, ended up unintentionally improving white people’s chances of getting housing over people of colour in the United States. This happened because many of the questions this application asks the users do not reflect vulnerabilities that people of colour are likely to say they experience. The United States Electronic Immigration System had similar faults. Software designers failed to collaborate with civil servants while developing the programme, and as a result they could not tailor the technology to make it accessible for all.3

How can the government create a market for public interest technology?

Creating a market for public interest technologies requires looking beyond adding tech solutions to tackle government and nonprofit problems. The government needs to establish systems that seamlessly integrate technology-based solutions, design new academia for technologists that enable them to understand the ethical, social, economic, and political ramifications of new technology, create jobs for public interest technologists, train civil servants and nonprofits to become a part of the movement, and establish networks of various stakeholders.

Understanding the current problems communities are facing, applying appropriate technologies, and iterating the solutions continuously by understanding the pulse of the public is a time-consuming process, which necessitates setting up an entire ecosystem that nurtures this process and rewards the stakeholders. By taking an active part as investors eager to maximise their returns, we believe that governments have tremendous potential to develop sustainable markets for public interest technologies. 

The pitfalls of technology in India

Arun Maira speaks with Kiran Karnik (former president, NASSCOM) and Osama Manzar (co-founder and director, Digital Empowerment Foundation) on the rise of digital technologies in India and why equitable access to them must be prioritised.

In the last decade or so, online platforms, AI-powered services, and delivery portals have become an integral part of people’s day-to-day lives. The government’s Digital India campaign is an example of the rising importance of digital services.

Despite this push towards adoption of technology, lack of access to hardware and lack of know-how is causing the exclusion of many. To put this in perspective, according to the India Inequality Report 2022: Digital Divide by Oxfam, approximately 70 percent of the population has poor or no connectivity to digital technologies while more than 60 percent of Indian households remains digitally illiterate.

On our podcast ‘On the Contrary by IDR’, host Arun Maira spoke with Kiran Karnik and Osama Manzar on how access to and knowledge of technology is a factor of existing inequalities, and what the government can do to bridge the gap. Kiran Karnik is the former president of NASSCOM and has also worked at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). Osama Manzar is the founder and director of Digital Empowerment Foundation, a nonprofit that works on increasing digital literacy in India.

Digital technologies aren’t accessible to all

Osama: The power of real technology is not in inclusion, but in the exclusion that it causes. And this is systemic. I would like to explain this with an anecdote. When I was visiting a digital centre in Chirala, Andhra Pradesh, I saw that there was a long queue of people [with] INR 50, an Aadhaar card, and a phone in their hand. On enquiring further, they told me they were going to give this INR 50 to the service centre [to] update their Aadhaar card. [This is] the role technology plays in inclusion [but also in exclusion]. [People] are excluded if the Aadhaar does not match; they are excluded if [their] data is not updated; they are excluded from food, ration, pension, banking, and so on if by any chance this connectivity doesn’t work. And they’re paying for any discrepancy in [the system].