I look at the public and the private as part of the same space. I don’t see there is a great degree of differentiation in skills, quality of knowledge that comes from public private partnership (PPP). In attitudes, yes but not in the skills.

When you think of creating value out of public-private partnership, you need to see beyond that is 20, 30 or 40 years ahead. Unless you are able to see what it will deliver in future we end up recreating the past. In umpteen number of technology based governance initiatives that is what happened.

The amount of learning curve that we have had to go through is phenomenal. We are still about 5 or 6 generations behind the rest of the world including the US, Europe. We missed out on learning from those who created these technologies. We started learning by doing. In learning by doing we wasted a lot of money but we also enjoy doing things and learn a great deal but we still remain way behind.  

There is a reason for this and that is that even if a good thing is given to us, we take time appreciating it. We need to go through a whole learning curve to go through how good and why good thing is. Let us imagine this way - when we see a book on the shelves, I have heard people say they could have written the book. But there is several generations gap between the skills required to read a book and to write a book. We need people who live in these areas who can see beyond.

The world is created by those who see the future. Those who see 20, 30 or 40 years or generations ahead. Gandhi was a great leader because he saw India becoming free in 40 or 50 years. Others were not so great a leader because they were constrained by their own ambitions and aspirations.  

Is it our aspiration to give Indian citizens good governance? If that is so, we will use technology in one way. Or is it our idea that we will create a unique ID that is totally meaningless, does not add any value, does not give governance and is a waste of resources. Its like saying this: you don’t know how to read and write, so why don’t you start using computers? Having said that, there is some vision in even this project and let us see how it plays out.  

My critique is that we have a deficit of thinking to begin with. We have a deficit of learning experience to begin with.  We don’t even want to understand how those who create a technology globally do indeed use it. We don’t want to know that. Even when we want to know that, we are way behind the curve. Even if I want to know, I cannot know. Because there is learning constraint something we did not create. We have to accept cognitive constraints as given in this matter.

Is there a map of citizen-government interaction today? It has been about 15 years we began thinking of it. At the beginning I had counted some 240+ points of interaction between the state and the citizen. That is not a constant and will continue to evolve. At some point in time we look at the dynamics of citizen-state relationship and begin mapping from that point of view, may be we will have a starting story. If you ask me, we have not even created a starting chapter. How can we use technology? We have not looked at how the 95 percent people in the country will study. We have not paused to understand the meaning of the limited number of internet users in the country. Is it any more significant than telephone was some 15 years ago? So what is the impact of e-governance today? Not much more than the relative use just 15 years ago.

So we have to create a “cellphone” as a metaphor, the kind of transmission and how technology can help. How will citizen-state interaction lead to good governance? That will not change because of the public private partnership which will keep us more or less in the same space. A guy working in private sector may be a bit more efficient than the government guy. The attitudes may also be different but all that does not take us very far.

Take for example the immigration form. In the past 25 to 30 years I have seen 30 changes. But there has been little attempt to learn from the rest of the world so even now the form will not pass muster as anything more than grade 1 of governance process. Why are we so far behind on this one? If we cannot create a immigration form, how can we create technology based governance? We are that level. We are in the grade 1 of the governance process.