Aadhar or Aandhar?

Now, as little details of the totally non-transparent Aadhar are coming out in the press due to the recent scam by Mohammed Ali, we realize how pathetic Aadhar's software has been, and the only place for it seems to be the trash bin. It is a shame that it has come from a high-profile personality such as Nandan Nilekani and thousands of crores of tax payers' money has gone into it.

First of all, a few weeks back, a news item appeared that an entity --- not even a human being --- by the name of coriander with father named biryani was issued an Aadhar number. There is no idea what biometric was used to get the number but the face was that of a mobile phone, not even a human being. The Aadhar software failed to detect the fraud.

And now there is news that Mohammed Ali, an enroller of Aadhar, has created 30,000 Aadhar ids in a span of six months. Given the rate at which he has created the ids, they seem fake. Out of the 30,000, 800 have been created in the physically-disabled category stating that the people did not have hands and were blind as well, thus they did not have any of the biometrics -- neither fingerprints or iris --- needed by UIDAI. The interesting point is what biometrics were used for the rest of the ids namely around 29200 which were in the regular category. And if the ids were fake, what was the much touted de-duplication software of UIDAI doing that it passed all of them? The fraud was detected only because someone noticed that one enroller had created a huge number of ids in a small time. In other words, if Mohammed Ali had created only a couple of thousand ids --- those which a normal enroller enrols --- this fraud would have gone unnoticed. Not just that, there could be many other such Alis who are already around and who have gone unnoticed and probably will never be caught.

UIDAI claims that the project will detect and reduce frauds in schemes such as NREGA. Now UIDAI software itself seems so full of security holes that NREGA and other schemes themselves may be already doing a much better job than UIDAI on fraud detection.

Another fact that has come up is that for enrollers, if the biometric fails twice, the third time whatever is given  is accepted by the UIDAI system by default and authentication granted. This, for a security system in this time and age?

And UIDAI claims it has companies such as Ernst and Young as security consultants?

All in all, Aadhar seems to be the mother of all scams where thousand of crores of tax payers' money are spent by fooling a government that is not aware of the issues. Not just Aadhar should be scrapped immediately, but a thorough probe is needed, especially since people had warned of the issues beforehand and no notice was taken. Indeed each and every paisa spent from the tax payers' kitty needs to be recoverd from the perpetuators, backers of this scam called Aadhar, which is more appropriately called Aandhar meaning darkness in Marathi.

Samir Kelekar

Bangalore

FDI in the wrong places

FDI in the wrong places

---------------------------

FDI in multi-brand retail okayed because it is going to create jobs, while it is
going to make kirana shop owners go out of business. So, now kirana entreprenuers have
to learn English and be sales boys at Walmarts or at best be suppliers to walmarts.

Manmohan's UPA sucks. It is Without any policy of what to allow FDI in and in what not to.

As it is, in the IT industry, everyone has been turned into an outsourcing shop
or a coder
for MNCs. There is no product industry in IT. There is
no funding available for innovation or products. India's best IT products are online
shopping malls and we are saying our IT product industry has finally come of age.
With no insult meant for the online shopping mall entreprenurs --- every entreprenuership
is tough --- what saddens me is that today
there is no value for technological innovation in India. If one has to give oneself
a shot at a high tech product startup, silicon valley in the US is the place to be in.

Even in other areas where thousands of crores of public money is being spent, there is
no innovation or research. For instance, the UID project that spends thousands of crores
on a biometric technology product does zilch research in biometrics. Consider someone
from India who has done a PhD in biometrics; he will have to leave the country. The
same is with the nuclear power industry.

For one of the largest mobile industry in the world, except Tejas Networks, there are not
many
Indian companies worth their name that make serious equipment for mobile networks. And
for one of the biggest banking industries in the world, almost every prodcut bought by
banks
is either from a US company or some other place abroad.

Consider fabs needed for chip manufacturing; India has zero fabs and we
import all our hardware from china or elsewhere.

Who is making our technology policies? Do they have any vision?

At this rate, we are setting ourselves to be clerks of the world and on top patting ourselves
on our backs.

We need to have a policy where foreign investors need to be given incentives for funding
innovative product ideas in India. We need policies that give concessions to those having
founder-level shares in startups.

printf ("Good bye Dennis Ritchie \n");

Hearing the news of the death of Dennis Ritchie, the co-inventor of
C and Unix, brought back old memories of 25 years back.
Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ
where Ritchie and Thomson invented the C programming
language and Unix used to be the mecca of
research in the computing sciences in the 80s.

Those were the days when the craze for startups and being the next
billionaire wasnt there. In a sense it was a golden age, where
we youngsters measured ourselves by whether we could get a research
paper published in the top Computer Science journals or not. And
stories of geniuses from Bell Labs were legion. Bell Labs was
where the transistor, arguably the most influential invention of
the 20 th century was invented. The transistor changed computing
for good. And communications was influenced by people such as
Claude Shannon who came up with a marvel called Information Theory.
Information theory told you exactly how much information can be
passed over a wire over noisy channels. Try pushing more information
and
you will certainly fail. Shannon showed that there was
a natural limit on how
much sensible information one can communicate over a wire over noisy
channels. And
Hamming, the master of coding theory, came up with an error-correcting
code called the Hamming code. Errors arise because of noise when
information is passed over a wire and one needs error-correcting
code to retrieve the right information when received. These concepts
are widely used in communication today.

Thomson and Ritchie were pioneers no less than Shannon, Hamming or
Schokley who invented the transistor. The fact their inventions
are still used widely 40 years later shows their profoundness and
the wide impact.

For us, even to have a glance of these guys from far during our
occassional visit to Bell Labs was an achievement of a lifetime.
When I finished my PhD and joined
as a research professor at Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey
california where Hamming was a professor emeritus, seeing Hamming
walking on a lawn from far off used to be something to tell the world
about.

Ritchie, from all reports, was a very private person. He said of
the C programming language which he invented "C is quirky,
flawed and an enormous success." And of Unix, he said this "Unix is
simple; it just takes a genius to understand its simplicity".
Unix itself was developed out of utility programs written
to support game development on a PDP-7 computer.
Tinkering with things, rather than pursuing deadlines, seems to be a major
theme of those times. Writes Doug McIlroy one of the participants in the
Unix project,
“Peer pressure and simple pride in workmanship caused gobs of code to be rewritten
or discarded as better or more basic ideas emerged. Professional rivalry
and protection of turf were practically unknown: so many good things were
happening that nobody needed
to be proprietary about innovations”.

For us, as students in the 80s,
Getting root (that is, administrator in Windows-speak)
access to a unix machine used to be our
prized possession.

Ritchie was awarded the Turing award besides many others. Indeed,
in those days, we used to look forward eagerly who gets the Turing
award for the year. Turing, an eccentric genius, came up with the
concept of a Turing machine, a most fundamental discovery that
underpinned the concepts on which computer science is based. And
ferverently wishing that I could come up with something similar, I
remember reading all research papers
available in related area, including the original one by Turing,
during my PhD prgram. Narendra Karmarkar,an
Indian
who was at Bell Labs then, and who made the pioneering discovery
of an algorithm that helped solve the simplex optimization problem
in what is technically called polynomial time, and saved millions
of dollars to organizations was a special icon of ours
matching others at Bell Labs.

Times have changed now. We worship businessmen, and money-makers more
than those who spend their life times with intellectual pursuits. And even though the world
has grown more prosperous, there is increasingly less time to tinker
with things, or pursue research for its own sake.

Close to 25 years back when I applied for my PhD, what
mattered most was how interested I was in independent
thinking or pursuing independent research. Today, I am told
it matters more in the US is whether there is a funding available
for the project in which you are interested in a PhD.

Bell Labs still exists today, but it is Apple which is more famous.
However, Apple's Mac OS X or iphone's iOS is based on Unix which
Ritchie invented. And objective C, the language used to program
iphone apps, is an object oriented extension of C.

So, Ritchie is gone. It is a sad day. All I can say now is using C, the language
Ritchie invented -- printf("Good bye Ritchie \n");

Bangalore 13 th October 2011

The community spirit

When I was appointed as a non-executive director of the Goa govt. firm Infotech corporation of Goa by the then IT minister Dayanand Narvekar in 2005, I took the post with much enthusiasm. I thought this was my chance to contribute something to Goa.

Reality dawned very soon though. At the first board meeting of the IT corporation, I was a bit taken aback to see the discussion hovering around real estate. Not so familiar with terms such as FAR, landscaping, I decided to keep mum. But then, when the next board meeting also turned to be the same, I pinched myself to check whether I was dreaming or this was reality. After I consulted some of my friends who are in construction / real estate --- after all in Goa, if you throw a stone, chances are it will hit someone who is in real estate business --- I figured that the IT part of Infotech corporation in fact was just a fig leaf to cover the doling out of real estate in the Dona Paula IT park to friends and kin of the IT minister and his other cronies.

Obviously, I put my foot down at the subsequent board meeting. And I didnt last very much in the board after I had done that, as Narvekar finding that he couldnt get his bread buttered, reconstituted the board overnight and threw out the only two IT professionals on the board and replaced them with more of his cronies. The other person replaced was Mr. Sandeep Verekar of Anant Infotech.

But one particular incident in the whole episode of my tenure of the board remains still in my mind. One invitation for the board meeting was sent to me by email. The secretary apparently typed my email address wrong and hence the email must have bounced. However, those at the IT corporation not knowing even the A B C of sending an email did not know what an email bounce was. What they did was they duely took the printout of the email sent and filed it in their file. What a waste of trees, I would say, when the copy did exist in the mail box. In fact, among one of the things IT is supposed to do is to save paper, but by printing everything again and filing it, this purpose is completely defeated.

Coming back to the incident, obviously, I didnt receive an invite to the Board meeting in which it was decided to dole out Rs. 30 crores by Narvekar to his buddy in the name of infrastructure development. I did object to me not being invited and I was shown the printout to convince me that I was indeed sent the invite. I did not know whether to laugh or to cry seeing the IT knowledge of those of our state who are meant to be in charge of IT. It was indeed very difficult to convince these IT challenged people what an email bounce is. In my career of more than 25 years, I have faced many a top IT professionals asking me tough questions, but I hadnt faced such a challenge. Here was Narvekar strongly defending his men --- saying you cant criticize my men, they are my men after all -- and here I was a lone man against a whole army trying to tell them what an email bounce was. With such people in charge, any wonder that we are indeed the IT backwaters of India.

Narvekar is no more the IT minister now, the Dona Paula park has been stalled if not entirely scrapped, and IT is no more in the news nowadays in Goa. Perhaps, the Govt. looks at IT only as a department where they can give out contracts for purchase of computers and other stuff and get hefty cuts in the bargain. Thus, a state where a number of bright students graduate in the field of IT, all have to go away to Bangalore, Mumbai for jobs.

Is there a way out for us then ? Or are we forever doomed to be IT industry's backwaters ?

In this two part column, I will put forth my views on what we can do in the IT field.

Here is the state of affairs in India today re: IT. Internet penetration in India is growing. As of 2007, the number of Internet users were around 40 million. The urban internet penetration was about 9%, while the country's overall internet penetration was 3.6%. Obviously, we have way more to go, but we have had a good rate of growth. Along with Internet penetration, many businesses are now moving to the Internet. Ecommerce is slowly coming up, if not booming.

In the next few years, my guess is that even a small business in India will have a website and will start doing business via the Internet. This gives rise to huge opportunities.

Website design is the most basic of opportunities. Though commoditized, the market for website design in India is huge. And the nice thing about electronic/Internet business is that one doesnt have to make the physical trip to the customer's premises; this gives rise to huge possibilities of saving of time and effort as well as scaling. To give an example, Cisco, the US based mammoth networking giant, sells 25% of its goods electronically without even having a face-to-face meeting with the customer. Yahoo, google, ebay the leaders of the new economy make their billions without even a single physical face-to-face interaction with most of their customers. Video conferencing is always a choice if one wants to get the feel of seeing the other person. This is a double advantage --- if one can avoid a face-to-face meeting and still do business, it means one can save on travel and consequent fuel and other transport expenses; traffic on the roads too is likely to be reduced. And lack of infrastructure in our cities is not going to pinch us as much. Besides, with good broadband which is now available in major cities in India and even in Goa, one can just work from home.

IT and telecom not just help businesses which are directly into IT such as web site design, but it also helps other businesses which have nothing to do with IT in the product that they sell --- these are called brick and mortar businesses. Today, car mechanics --- at least the more e-savvy ones --- routinely send SMSes to their customers to remind them when their car is due for service. An SMS has an advantage against the phone; one can read it at leisure, unlike the phone for which one has to interrupt everything and take the call. India by the way is a leader in the mobile market worldwide with mobile penetration growing fast. Cellular market penetration is projected to increase from 19.8% in 2007 to 60.7% in 2012, due to the increasing focus on the rural market. Gartner expects that by 2012, there will be 637 million connections in India. Even this gives rise to huge opportunities; marketing one's product via the SMS has already caught up in a big way.

IT infrastructure, and things such as websites are just enablers for more businesses to take off on. Most businesses are about reaching out to the customers effectively with a goods or service which they want at a price they can afford. In Delhi, Namita Sibal sells Indian paintings to art conneissures worldwide via a website indianartcollectors.com ; she manages both her household as well as the business, working from home. Her revenues for 2008 were predicted to be Rupees one crore.

It is amazing how the young have taken to the internet; it is akin to a duck taking to water. There are many a young fellas into startups. In Bangalore alone there are more than 800 startups, various kinds of businesses mostly by the young. Some of the more prominent Indian startups include bharatmatrimony.com a matrimonial site started by a person in his twenties, slokatelecom.com a WiMax router company targetted towards the Indian rural market among other things, drishti-soft.com a company that makes software that helps call centers deal with calls better, to a webdesign company Globals Inc which has one of the youngest CEOs in the world.

The nice thing about IT is that it doesnt take much capital to start a business. However, having capital makes it easier to scale and sustain in adverse times. The prices of computers and the peripherals needed, the prices of internet connections, the prices of telecom have come down drastically in the last few years and continue to come down. A huge number of softwares needed for businesses are available for free. At one level, all what it takes is brain power, and tapping of the right market. Surely, electricity which is still in the hands of the govt. is unreliable. This has given rise to the UPS market which is in private hands.

Health care is another booming sector. I am told in the West, patients can access their medical records sitting at home. In India, as far as I know, this is not possible yet. This gives rise to a huge opportunity. If I could access my health records electronically, I could perhaps forward the records to another specialist easily again, and get a second opinion. In that sense, IT makes communication easy and more effective; this also means that vested interests who thrive on hiding information would oppose such an initiative. No wonder, the Goa govt. doesnt have the basics of e-governance in place while they make big noises about e-governance. In the recent Mahanand case, we have found that lack of exchange of information about missing people has led Mahanand go on a killing spree. Of course, having information is just the first part; acting on it is important too.

Another important field is network security. For e-commerce to be popular, there has to be good security so that customers can buy goods without worrying that their credit card numbers would be stolen. India is lagging behind in security, and that is another area where there is a good opportunity.

Coming to Goa, what could Goans do in this field ?

Goa faces a few serious lacunae in this regard. Goa does not have close physical access to the Indian market. Goa itself is a small market; selling something to companies in Bangalore and Mumbai would require presence in these cities which would mean additional costs. Neverthless, Goa does have some industry namely in the area of pharmaceuticals, hospitality etc. Even these industries need software, and Goans could target these areas.

Also, to some extent, this problem can be solved by targetting markets abroad. Today, communications has made the world a small place. There has been no better time for small businesses worldwide. On the Internet, one can make a product in Goa and sell it to a peson in faraway Brazil without spending a penny on marketing. Search engines such as google help one market the product. Payment gateways such as paypal help the customers pay for the product using credit cards. And cheap hosting services help one host the product on servers in the US, Canada etc which are available at very reasonable prices. All one needs is an idea and oodles of hard work. Of course, the latter is the key. However, marketing something internationally and succeeding is also more difficult because the competition is severe.

This brings me to the second lacunae of Goans, namely that Goans in Goa are not known to be hard working. A part of the reason is the susegado atmosphere in Goa. In Bangalore, every morning, you will find the whole city rushing to work. And without much of a break, they will work till late evening. In Goa, we need our afternoon siesta and a good break. However, this aspect is not insurmountable. Today via the Internet, news is available from all over the world and one could virtually live in an atomsphere and environment much different from the local environment. It is not that there are no state-of-the-art IT companies in Goa. I have heard of a gaming company right in the heart of Panjim ( rz2games.com ), where it seems young geeks go and do their coding on the beach. They are attired in shorts and T-shirts. In fact, if one thinks the right way, one could take advantage of the unique pluses of Goa namely the beaches and combine it with work.

A third disadvantage in Goa is the lack of support services. Here in Bangalore, if you need some hardware or a computer part, it is available instantly at a beck and call. In Goa, it may not be. This just means that more planning is required. Also, this also gives rise to opportunities in selling hardware, peripherals. Btw, trading of goods is another huge area that has turned up in India. Selling of hardware and support services is another opportunity.

Fourthly, and this is a problem in India in general, which is lack of capital. Most of the investors in India are in the so called old economy, and they dont understand IT related businesses. As a result, they dont invest. Banks do not give venture funding. In general, this makes the IT business hard. As a result, most IT professionals choose employment over entreprenuership. Most of the big IT companies being in Bangalore and other places, getting an employment in such places is much easier than in Goa. As a result, Goans migrate. This problem is kind-of-a catch-22 phenomena. Big companies dont come to Goa because there is no good climate for IT, and creating a good IT climate in Goa requires that there be a number of companies which leads to more IT skilled people being there and so on. Our governments being what they have been --- they aren't helping for sure. As a result, what is required is super human effort on the part of Goans.

Given all of the above, I feel that even though it seems theoretically possible for Goans to break into the IT big league, the practicality of it shows that there are a number of areas in which the going is going to be tough. Thus, I feel it is not so easy to get Goa out of the IT backwaters without some help. Unless for instance govt. takes a strong initiative in providing venture capital or inviting companies from outside to set up shop in Goa or even inviting entrepreneurs from outside, it is going to require a super human effort. The Kerala govt. for instance has invited a number of entreprenuers from outside to set up shop and today Kerala is a thriving IT destination. In the absence of the above, the future does not look bright. Of course, there are a few Goans who have already started some companies in Goa due to their love of Goa, but as they say one swallow doesnt a summer make.

All one can conclude is that we need to put severe pressure on the government to do its part. We cannot let it get away. After all, too much is at stake.