Does India have a comprehensive IT Strategy ? Why does India need a CTO ?

For years I have asked one question to leaders from government that I have met at seminars & conferences, if #Yahoo & #Google can afford investing in a CTO, why is India not hiring a CTO? India's data will deliver much more value to #Indian Government than the value from data collected by #Google. Political leaders can't even imagine the monetary and value returns from the insights just from the data analysis. Let me reiterate that here I am just referring to 'value that we will derive from data analytics on a pile of data which is really a fraction of the over all value'. Under s CTO the unified-distributed data strategy will deliver exponential value. 

                     There is no doubt that data empowers people and #India is way behind in using its data because our politicians never took help of IT experts except Congress which brought in Nandan Nilekani in 2009, to lead #Aadhar. As of date #Aadhar seems to be messed up pretty badly because of political ambitions of different parties. Every IT software is built on a vision on what needs to be achieved by that software. Once vision is documented ( as in final ) then a plan is created and software is built. It does not mean once you define a vision it cannot change, a vision can change but not drastically. You cannot build a software to distribute social security and then one fine day make it mandatory for buying a SIM card or use Aadhar for taking daily attendance of employee at work as it is being done in Mumbai Municipal Corporation today. 

                      What we as people need to understand is that we cannot have different political parties, scrapping up previous governments implementation and implement something new just to score political brownies or else because the new leader fancies it! In India the current PM seems to announce first and then tell his team to implement it and it does not work that way! We have seen a series of data leaks reported by Tribune new paper and government has not taken any action against tribune so it is safe to assume the data leaks happened. 

                                 Software like Aadhar is custom made and very complex code. If you keep changing it, eventually it will start having issues like data security as we read in news papers and even more complex issues which politicians cannot even imagine. What is worrying Indian IT leaders is that Unique Identification and Bio-metrics of each Indian is at stake and one mistake and you will take away the privacy of common man, does not matter if he is rich or poor. India needs a formal & steady #ITVision vetoed by all parties No politics! Obviously this cannot be done by Rahul Gandhil or Narendra.Modi so government need to rehire an IT expert like Nandan Nilekani or rehire  some one with similar experience to educate the elected politicians and then coordinate with all political parties & help define the India's IT Vision for next 25 years. So if tomorrow if Mamata Banerjee or some other person becomes Prime minister that person should not scrap or completely alter all the #IT Strategy of the past governments. 

                                 What #Indian people should realize is 

1. The current political leadership is making a mistake by not on-boarding all political parties to define India's IT Strategy. 
2. Just giving a slogan of Digital India does not make the Prime Minister an IT expert so unless he hires someone like Nilekani, Narayana Murthy or someone with similar experience we will not havea sound IT Strategy
3. If a political leader imposes his vision on the country without on-boarding key political parties the strategy is bound to fai when he leaves power. 

 Nandan Nilekani is talking about Data Strategy for India but political leaders are yet to understand the need for a long term IT Strategy  that includes a Data Strategy. What India need is a mature political leadership who understand Information & Technology and instead of thrusting their half baked ideas on the country they hire the CTO and let him do the work ( way too late to talk about it but better late than never )!  

 Note - Nandan Nilekani's post How To Empower 1.3 Billion Citizens With Their Data

Mr Nilekani may not agree but the #Vision for Aadhar and subsequently thr #ITStrategy seems to be changing far too frequently. The politicians don''t understand that you do not play flip-flop with IT strategy every 5 yrs. If this game of political one-upmanship continue it can permanently destroy the systems like Aadhar so much that it will have to be redesigned from scratch. 
                                         We have seen that the concerned citizen of India don''t like to confront the government except a few people who filed Public Interest Litigation in #SupremeCourt. It is fortnate that SupremeCourt was wise enough to strike down the  nefarious changes in #Aadhar Guideline that allowed private companies like banks, telecom companies and insurance companies to use Aadhar. At one point of time citizen have to realize that once we elect government it is our job to monitor it and bock any moves that is not good for the country. If citizen don't speak & act against any nefarious law then we are responsible for the state of the nation. You may not understand what is this data and internet revolution that everyone is talking about but you have to know that it internet & related technologies are already affecting lives of people, it is changing the world, and it is affecting everybody including those in the remote villages. Some of these villages don't even have electricity in 2019 but they have mobile connectivity & internet and people actually travel to nearby town to charge their mobile phone (t!)  US elections and even Indian elections saw matriculation and misuse of of citizens data. Some crazy &ignorant person from government agency TRAI shared his Aadhar number and challenged people to hack his bank account. He did not understand the concerns regarding Aadhar. No one is saying that Aadhar is so fragile that if your number is leaked your bank account can be hacked. At the same time do understand that today there is so much of persons data available on internet that by searching and correlating a lot can be found about the person and it can be misused to do commit some fraud. or at least create trouble for you. The concerns about Aadhar are much larger and much different than simply misusing someones Aadhar number. Beware! India's IT & data strategy or lack of it will decide if #India rules the future or goes back dark age 

Note - I have posted a series of posts about on my blog about different concerns with #Aadhar and they can be read over here What's wrong with Aadhar? My blog posts in chronological order