If a policy becomes a “political football”, with every political change, the policy changes. But policy is a marathon, not a sprint, and sometimes takes years for it to mature and emerge, said Nandan Nilekani, co-founder and chairman, Infosys.
Policies require bipartisan support and persuasion by different parties to ensure that they remain consistent, he said, while delivering a lecture organised by the Public Affairs Forum of India (PAFI).
Citing an example Mr. Nilekani said Kamal Nath, when he was Union Road Transport Minister, asked him how to simplify highway toll collections. Following this, a committee was set up and it suggested RFID tags so that vehicles could pass through tolls without having to stop to pay. The current Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari pursued it and introduced FASTag system and all these led to an increase in toll revenues, he said. Another example is the Aadhaar project which was started by the UPA government and the current government has pursued it with the same vigour.
According to Mr. Nilekani, a policy is a consequence of an event that happened. For instance, the Tsunami that led to the death of several people in Chennai in 2004 led to the creation of the Disaster Management Act, 2005. The very same Act is now being used during the pandemic. Similarly, the 26/11 terror attack in Mumbai led to the formation of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. The tragic Nirbhaya incident in Delhi led to Nirbhaya Act that handles incidents of sexual assaults.
Giving another example, Mr. Nilekani said on January 25, 2011, an additional collector in Nasik district was burned to death by the so-called kerosene mafia. The incident led to the outbreak of outrage and a huge outcry for reform in payment of subsidies. Pranab Mukherjee, the then Finance Minister, asked for a reform structure and that led to Aadhaar-based direct cash transfer facilities in many areas, including pension and LPG subsidies.
“Events create policy windows. There is a problem, there is a possible solution and what is required is a political will to fix a solution,” he added.
On the acceleration of digital payment, he said the National Payment Corporation of India and payment system UPI came up in May 2015. It had not seen much traction as people hardly used it. It saw 100,000 transactions in October 2016. Today, it has 2.3 billion transactions a month owing to two huge incidents: demonetisation and COVID-19.
On vaccination
Talking about COVID-19 and vaccination, Mr. Nilekani said though presently the challenge is about the supply of vaccines, in the next 6 to 9 months the challenge will go from supply to how vaccination can be done at scale, he said. As per him, India will become the vaccine capital of the world as many vaccines are expected to be approved and manufactured in hundreds of millions of doses every month.
