When Reliance announced on June 3 that its rights issue of Rs 53,124.20 crore was subscribed 1.59 times, what caught my eye in its media release was not so much the fact that it was India’s largest ever rights issue, nor that it was the world’s largest by a non-financial institution in a decade. It was the following information:
“A unique feature of RIL’s rights issue was that, despite its record-setting magnitude, it was completed entirely on a digital platform, defying the formidable constraints imposed by the Covid-induced lockdown… None of the stakeholders across 800 Indian cities and many financial centres abroad — regulators, bankers, financial institutions, retail investors and others — had to step out of their offices or homes, and yet everything related to the rights issue was conducted smoothly and with utmost efficiency. This shows not only the power of the emerging digital age, but also the potential of India to be a pioneer and an innovator in this age.”
A few days ago, I was in my home town Athani in Karnataka, to be with my 91-year-old bed-ridden mother. Reliance’s theme song for the rights issue, ‘Naye India Ka Naya Josh’, on TV channels was on all the time along with grim news about the corona crisis. Since Athani is a small taluka town located in the state’s rural hinterland, far away from both the country’s tech capital Bengaluru and its financial capital Mumbai, the song triggered a few questions in my mind: When will we see “naya josh” (new enthusiasm) for a “naya Bharat”?
RIL’s chairman Mukesh Ambani says in the media release: “Our vision is always rooted in furthering India’s inclusive and accelerated growth, propelled by the adoption of digital technologies that help improve the lives of all 1.3 billion Indians.” But when will old Bharat — rural, underdeveloped and, hence, excluded from the emerging new India — benefit from the digital revolution? When will work from home, learn from home, earn from home and other digital solutions reach, and change, the lives of our farmers, farm workers, small traders in small towns, artisans (most of whom belong to the SC, ST, OBC and Muslim communities) and suchlike denizens, who still constitute nearly two-thirds of our country’s population?
“India, that is Bharat” — How synonyms became antonyms
We are not unfamiliar with this dichotomy between India and Bharat. When the makers of our Constitution, after considerable debate, called our country “India, that is Bharat…” in Article 1(1), they intended the two names to be synonyms. However, they somehow became antonyms both in popular imagination and also in the discourse on the country’s glaring socio-economic disparities. The ‘India vs Bharat’ binary is part myth and part reality. After all, there is much poverty and underdevelopment even in urban India. Nevertheless, India and Bharat came to be seen as two polar ends of the development divide. Manoj Kumar’s hit films ‘Upkar’ and ‘Purab aur Paschim’ in the 1960s and ‘70s equated patriotism with ‘Bharat’. In the ‘90s, kisan leaders Sharad Joshi and Mahendra Singh Tikait launched big agitations against the ‘exploitation’ of Rural Bharat by Urban India. Most recently, some people, believing that ‘India’ connotes something culturally alien, even made a futile attempt urging the Supreme Court to rename our country as only ‘Bharat’.
Yet, in a transformation less noticed by the media, digital technologies are slowly but surely narrowing the developmental distance between Bharat and India. Strangely, the prolonged nationwide lockdown necessitated by the corona pandemic has accelerated this ‘Bharat-India Jodo’ phenomenon. Let me illustrate this with what I have observed in my own family.
Digitech is doing ‘Bharat-India Jodo’
Shridhar Kalagi, who works for an American IT company, ThoughtWorks, in Bengaluru, married my niece Gayatri, a lawyer, last year. A few weeks before the lockdown, they took an unusual decision to relocate from Bengaluru to Athani, so that they both could pursue their professions and also indulge their passion: farming. Now, using BSNL’s high-speed FTTH internet facility, he works from home from 10 to 6 on weekdays (or longer if his company wants), and devotes his remaining time to modernising the family’s farms. Not infrequently, he takes his laptop there and does multi-tasking. Moreover, he is teaching farmers and farm workers to use apps on their smartphones for digital self-empowerment, and for this purpose wants to set up an education centre for digital agriculture.
This trend is now spreading even in what were once called BIMARU (poor and backward) states — Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. For example, Shridhar, a keen watcher of national and global trends in agri-tech, drew my attention to how a Patna-based startup DeHaat (which means village in Hindi) has just raised Rs 70 crore from investors as it plans to expand its services across India. It is supporting hundreds of rural micro-entrepreneurs who distribute agri-inputs to farmers, and provide assured and remunerative markets to their produce. With India’s agriculture market estimated to be worth $350 billion, there is enormous scope for its digital transformation, which will benefit both ‘Bharat’ and ‘India’.
Tech folks are working from farm, forest, everywhere
If Shridhar has taken to “working from farm”, my younger brother Sanjeev is planning to popularise the concept of “working from forest”. A gynaecologist, educationist, environmentalist, permaculturist and Gandhian activist in Dharwad in north Karnataka, Sanjeev has developed a dense forest with incredible biodiversity on what was a barren 17-acre land in a nearby village. The forest, called ‘Suman Sangam’, has become a hub for social activists and artists who desire solitude and nearness to nature. “We also welcome IT professionals from big cities who would like to detox themselves by working in the midst of trees, birds and butterflies,” he said to me. His prodigious son Minchu, who works for a software start-up in Bengaluru, has come to Dharwad to work from home — and also from his family’s forest — during the lockdown.
I asked Minchu: “Do you think lots of young people like you would prefer to work from villages?” His reply: “Definitely. In the digital age, your office is wherever you choose to work from. This is, of course, not entirely true, but true in many ways for many people. Thanks to new technologies, the future of work will become radically different, and highly conducive to decentralised development. Already, big tech firms like TCS have announced that a large percentage of their employees would be enabled to work remotely. Therefore, governments and companies should work together to make it attractive for talented professionals in big cities to come and work in small towns and villages, for short or long stretches of time. They will have the best of both worlds.” His father says: “Those who come to villages should not only work for their companies, but also do some voluntary work for the villagers — such as teaching in schools, preservation of rural arts and crafts, improving the environment, besides learning from the native wisdom of rural communities.”
Five ideas to promote ‘work from Bharat, work for Bharat’
So what should governments (central, state and local), tech companies and people themselves do to accelerate the adoption of the motto — 'work from Bharat, work for Bharat'? Here are five ideas.
One: Ensure high-speed broadband connectivity and uninterrupted 24/7 power supply all over India. In addition, speedily improve living, educational and travel facilities, including air travel from many more mid-sized cities. This is needed to attract big investments into Bharat, and to create attractive employment opportunities for rural youth. It will also reverse the ‘brain drain’ from cities to villages, in the same way that our ambitious entrepreneurs and talented professionals began returning from the United States to Indian cities in the past couple of decades.
Two: There are still nearly 40 crore (mostly poor) Indians who use 2G-dependent feature phones. Unlike smartphone users on 4G networks, they are deprived of even basic internet services. The government must, by policy, end 2G services and enable India to move to 4G and 5G. Remember: China has already started 6G development after just turning on its 5G network.
Three: Following the example of TCS and other tech companies, the government should unveil a policy that incentivises all government and non-government employees (with necessary exceptions) to remote-work from their native villages and towns, for flexible periods of time. This would especially appeal to city people who are separated from their parents and relatives. It would also help them take care of family assets (like farms) in their native places. More consequentially, tens of thousands of families in ‘India’ would be able to re-discover and revive their lost socio-cultural roots in ‘Bharat’.
Four: We should not think of tech-enabled ‘work from home’ as a concept applicable only to city folks. It is no less needed for villagers themselves. Lots of activities of farmers, traders, entrepreneurs and others in rural areas can be digitally transformed, so that people can perform them without having to unnecessarily step out of their farms, shops or homes. For this, government offices, banks and public utilities should make almost all their services available online, drastically reducing in-person interactions. Besides cutting corruption, this will increase rural incomes and also save people’s time and energy for more creative pursuits.
Five: ‘Naya’ Bharat is impossible without all-round empowerment of rural women, who have deep and nuanced understandings of the strengths and needs of the community. For instance, through the Covid-19 pandemic, women’s self-help groups (SHGs) have taken on the responsibility to produce masks, run community kitchens, and even provide banking services within the community. Digital technologies can help girls study better and women learn new skills, support micro-entrepreneurs, and connect the nearly seven crore women in SHGs with a wider market for their products and services.
Technology has given us an unprecedented and unmissable opportunity to make ‘India’ and ‘Bharat’ truly synonymous and synergistic, and thus enrich our greatest asset, unmatched by any other nation in the world: our people.
(Sudheendra Kulkarni worked as a close aide to former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the PMO. Author of ‘Musing of the Spinning Wheel: Mahatma Gandhi’s Manifesto for the Internet Age’, he is a votary of reorienting the digital revolution for inclusive and sustainable development in India and around the world. He tweets @SudheenKulkarni and welcomes comments at [email protected]. Views expressed are personal.)
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