The Men Behind Modi’s Digital Push

Here are the men tasked with bringing to life PM Modi’s dream of a “cashless” economy.

As the focus has shifted from demonetisation to pushing cashless transactions, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has begun to rely on valuable inputs from a team of professionals – some seasoned bureaucrats and some industry veterans – to make that transition smooth.

Here are five firefighters who are credited with the task:

Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant has emerged as Modi’s Man Friday. He was called for a meeting with the PM, which was attended by key officials from the Finance Ministry.

Sources told The Quint that in this meeting, Kant presented a plan to push cashless transactions and detailed how that should be done – from activating UPI (Unified Payments Interface) to getting collectors to push adoption of debit/credit/e-wallet/UPI/USSD and AEPS.

Weekly and quarterly prizes to go with this are additional incentives to go cashless. It is reliably learnt that the PM picked up these ideas and pushed his ministers and key officials to implement them.

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AP Hota – the humble and mild-mannered Managing Director and CEO of NPCI – is definitely a happy man these days.

He led a potentially game-changing UPI that suffered all this while because of the indifference of key stakeholders.

UPI now forms the backbone of cashless action by the government. Banks like SBI and HDFC, which had ignored and stayed away from UPI, joined the platform a week after the demonetisation announcement.

The crisis has come as a shot in the arm for UPI as its daily registration has now leaped.

The government’s advertising blitzkrieg has suddenly made UPI a known platform. But to compete against the likes of Paytm, it needs more money and a bigger mandate.

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This Maharashtra cadre IAS officer was brought to Delhi almost a year ago. Now AB Pandey is the CEO of UIDAI.

He was asked to chip in in whatever manner possible to use Aadhaar architecture to implement cashless transactions.

He has been asked to develop an Aadhaar-enabled app, which can allow online transactions using the Aadhaar number. Pandey is also leading the effort to get mobile manufacturers to see if all handsets made in India can enable iris and thumb identification to transact using Aadhaar. Using the good offices of Niti Aayog, Pandey is also working to get banks and merchants on board.

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A Tamil Nadu cadre officer and joint secretary in the PMO with an impressive track record and qualifications (he has a PhD in economics, is a chartered accountant and company secretary, besides studying corporate management and finance from London and executive development from Harvard Business School), TV Somanathan was entrusted with the task of coordinating with the ministries and banks and collecting inputs and ideas.

With his hands-on understanding of the issues, he vetted and presented them to the PM and has been pushing these plans for a quick execution.

Nilekani’s role surprised many when Bloomberg reported last week on how PM Modi roped him in to help with the universal payment system.

The government nominated him on a 13-member committee consisting of some chief ministers, Kant and others.

This committee has been asked to make an audacious plan to implement the universal payment plan as soon as possible. It was originally meant to be executed in four years and cover 5 billion people.

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Besides these five key players, there are other outsiders and insiders who have contributed significantly. For example, NPCI's COO Dilip Asbe and Pramod Varma, chief architect of Aadhaar and architect of IndiaStack, have been working behind the scenes.

(IndiaStack is a technology platform with a set of APIs that allows governments, businesses, start-ups and developers to utilise a unique digital infrastructure to solve problems towards presence-less, paperless, and cashless service delivery.)

Then, there are four other ministerial and bureaucratic committees.

Political and execution mess and policy haziness aside, these people are driven by their passion for technology.