They say Napoleon couldn’t have happened without the French
Revolution. They also say that the rise of Napoleon was inevitable in
the aftermath of the French Revolution. People and events are mere cogs
in the wheel of history. Once there is a necessity, and the conditions
are ripe, the idea takes fruition.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
in governance is an idea whose time has come. The necessity is there –
our people are growing ever more exasperated and demanding efficiency in
public services delivery while the traditional systems seem to be
unable to cater to these changing times.
Also, the conditions are
ripe – thanks to the use of IT there is a lot of data in the government
today in machine-readable form, and the technologies have reached a
level where they can rival any human on a real-time and cost-effective
way (the author used to work in the sector ten years ago). All that is
needed now is that leap.
AI would fundamentally transform methods
of governance in this country. We often hear complaints that the
implementation of government schemes remain confined only to papers.
Now, what if there is a way to check if things are happening on the
ground? Take, for example, the Swacch Bharat Mission (SBM). To make sure
that the toilets are built, the government has developed a mobile app
where the government functionary will have to go to the toilet site,
click a photo of the toilet along with the beneficiary, and then upload
it to the central server. Connectivity issues are taken care of by
giving offline photo-clicking mode and uploading the photos when the
person comes back on a 2G network. This curbs malpractice to a great
extent.
However, there are ten crore toilets that are needed to
be built and hence ten crore photographs. Is it manually possible to
check these photos? Or if the toilet is in use or is stashed with hay?
And is the same beneficiary appearing on multiple photos? What if 100
photos have been uploaded from sitting in an office? Clearly no.
The present system relies on people to do random checks to create a
deterrence effect but so has the system that we have relied upon for
past 70 years and the outcome is for us to see. It does not work because
of people either not having enough time or lacking the inclination to
do petty things.
Now what if you actually get a way to process
each of these 10 crore photos and generate an alert whenever the
photograph is not that of an entirely built toilet which is actually in
use (not stashed with hay or other stuff) and same beneficiary doesn’t
appear in multiple photos or multiple photographs don’t get uploaded
sitting in the office? Won’t cheating and malpractices go down by order
of magnitude as people realise that each photo would be scrutinised and
not just some small sample? Wouldn’t it be awesome to know we have ten
crore functional toilets on the ground and not just paper? That, my
friends, AI can achieve – and in a very cost efficient manner.
But
then the sceptics argue that in rural and remote India, the penetration
of internet is very low and as a result, AI will have limited or no
applicability there and will create a digital divide. However, contrary
to this, the need and applicability for AI are more in the remotest
areas of the country than in the heart of the capital. That is because
it is in these most secluded areas that the traditional governance
systems are entirely broken. Physical infrastructure is inefficient, and
the people are poor and unaware.
Generally, no one wants a
posting there – most people there would be on punishment postings, and
as soon as they come, they would start spending their energies in
getting a transfer back to the mainstream areas. As a result, there are
problems of severe under-staffing, lack of morale, poor quality in the
government workforce and weak monitoring of government schemes and
implementation. In Delhi and state capitals, there would be a lot of
people to check if toilets are built, we won’t need AI. But who will
check in the tribal areas of Rajasthan or Chattisgarh? Imagine if in
these regions, the government schemes start functioning as they were
supposed to do, AI will bridge the development and digital divide, not
accentuate it.
Likewise, again contrary to what the sceptics say,
the scope of AI is immense in traditional sectors such as agriculture.
For example, take the government run crop insurance scheme; in this crop
insurance scheme, if the yield is below a threshold, it would trigger
an insurance payout to the farmer. To determine the actual yield,
millions of crop cutting experiments would be carried out – much more
than what are mandated today. As per the scheme guidelines only, even
the ones done today “lack reliability, accuracy and speed”.
So mobile
app solutions could be developed where geo-tagged photographs of the
crop cutting experiment would be uploaded like SBM. Would it not be
amazing if we have a solution to check these millions of photos to see
whether an actual crop cutting experiment has been carried out by the
same person who was supposed to carry it out or has the crop cutting
experiment work been sub-contracted to unskilled individuals who went
there and clicked selfies?
Similarly, the government runs Kisan
Call Centres which receive lakhs of calls every month. Wouldn’t it be
priceless if we can get a timely warning from the call centre data that
say in Maharashtra, this year the distress level among farmers is
unusually high due to this particular factor? Perhaps then the
administrative machinery can be activated timely on a war scale to
prevent farmer suicides? Or say based on soil and environmental
condition reports from our satellites and based on what crop is sown in a
particular area, we can predict that this year vulnerability of this
crop to this pest is higher, and perhaps we can supply additional
required pesticide there and send targeted SMS / agronometric advisories
to the farmers in that region?
All these things have not been taken
from some science fiction movie but are very much available, proven and
economic technologies. Similarly, there is a Kisan suvidha app – the
flagship app of the agriculture department – where among other things, a
person can upload three photos of some pest infected crops and our
scientists would tell what the problem is and what the remedies are.
However, as with the case with almost anything in our country, the rush
is huge, there are thousands of queries and there isn’t enough capacity
to answer all the queries manually. As a result, many questions go
unanswered, and people’s faith suffers due to which they would stop
using it in future. Again, AI can help here. Even if the farmer himself
doesn’t have a smartphone, even in remotest areas of the country, today
someone will be having a smart-phone and there would be a 2G
connectivity nearby if not within the village. So these are solutions
which can work given the enormous social capital in our rural society.
Finally
a word on another common misconception – that AI will lead to loss of
jobs. One bane of our country is systems don’t work here. AI can make
them work. It can leapfrog us regarding development to the level of
Singapore or Western nations. It can bring immense prosperity to the
country. The government today is over-burdened, and there is a lack of
capacity to do the multitude of tasks it has taken upon itself.
AI is
our answer to capacity building. Human beings are not like horses – that
after the mass production of cars, horses were suddenly rendered
jobless. When machines started spinning cotton, we started to build
machines. Productivity gains always create more and better jobs than the
ones which are lost due to them. We are still far away from a
Terminator kind of scenario where machines may be able to replace
humans. That might happen 50 years from now, not today – and if it has
to happen, will happen regardless of whether the government uses AI or
not. But the massive productivity gains cannot be ignored.
Apart
from the examples mentioned above, there is a huge scope of AI in fields
such as grievance redressal, law and order, health, education, etc.
Today the West is using driverless cars and flying drones. 300 years
ago, the West was similarly inventing and using new technologies like
the steam engine and cotton gin. We chose to shut our eyes then, and we
all know what happened afterwards. Can we afford to make the same
mistake again?
By
Gaurav Agrawal
[ He Doesn't need any intro ] but for newbies
Gaurav Agrawal is
working in the Indian Administrative Service of the 2014 batch [ Rank 1 , 2013 ] . He
studied Computer Science in IIT Kanpur (where he worked in artificial
intelligence) and then Finance in IIM Lucknow. He also worked as an
investment banker in
Hong Kong for three years.