OutSights Archives - ProductNation

24/01/202224/01/2022

Bharat Distributed Ledger (BADAL) for accelerating trusted commerce in India

India has made rapid progress in digitisation of the economy in the last decade becoming a world leader in identity systems, digital payments and tax, and a new data sharing and empowerment framework. However, many deep-rooted issues still exist, such as extending true financial inclusion; formalisation and creating a higher trust economy, that is essential for growth of mostly small businesses.

In this blog post, we look at innovations in blockchain, distributed ledger and other technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs as potential solutions to build a stronger fabric for the economy for decades ahead. The unique opportunity India has is to boost commerce by enhancing trust, thereby culminating the transformation already underway through existing building blocks of digital identity, payments and data sharing to boost commerce. Unlike many other countries, faster and interoperable payments or reducing the dominance of private money are solved problems for India; the missing piece is to digitise commercial contract enforcement, which on the other hand is a solved problem for developed countries. Lack of adequate contract enforcement caused by contracting parties having different versions of the truth; due to data systems that don’t interoperate reduces trust and creates friction for economic growth. Solution requires connecting the goods and services ledger to the money ledger, so that contracts of any kind become binding promises that can be executed programmatically. Using technology to solve this trust problem is a unique opportunity for India.

BADAL (also happens to be a word for Cloud in local language), a techno-legal solution in the form of “Distributed Ledger for Privacy-preserving Trustful Commerce; is proposed as an interoperable fabric underlying a future programmable economy across large and small businesses to create high trust economy.

We also look at the emergence of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) which is one of the core money applications of this framework and global backdrop in Annexure. There are many other use cases being proposed from land records to decentralised clinical trials for blockchain and allied technologies in different areas of government and business¹ likewise, that can be implemented in BADAL.

First of all, why is trust important?

Trust is the basic glue that connects strangers and promotes economic activity. Money is the basic economic institution in a society building that trust². However, trust builds slowly due to a combination of various factors such as the nature of institutions (political and legal) and the level of formalisation. While formalisation of even small businesses is increasingly addressed by the successful rollout of GST for India, formalisation of trust still remains elusive. At a core fundamental level, trust is a public good that creates friction-free commerce and is a recipe for rapid economic growth.

There is a high correlation between the level of trust in society and GDP per capita³. A study conducted by World Value Survey attempted to measure the level of trust in a country by recording the positive responses received to the question ‘most people can be trusted’. It found that countries with high GDP per capita such as Sweden, Norway and Netherlands recorded high levels of trust exceeding 60% determined in this manner as the graphic below shows.

Douglass C. North, Nobel laureate in economics⁴, found that ‘the inability of societies to develop effective, low-cost enforcement of contracts is the most important source of both historical stagnation and contemporary underdevelopment.’ The Union Minister of Finance and Corporate Affairs has rightly acknowledged the role of the “Hand of Trust”⁵when presenting the Economic Survey of 2019-20.

In societies like India, with limited ability to efficiently enforce routine civil or property contracts, businesses tend to restrict working with those similar to them based on caste, religion etc. (called associational activity) where there is an implicit social and moral enforcement mechanism or with members who have clearly demonstrated reputation in the past (usually the large or the older players). In both these situations, the economic benefit that a new firm can bring with new ideas or new techniques will be muted as its absorption is slower. Similarly, a new player will find it very difficult to compete with incumbents even if such players are economically more efficient. Economist Olson⁶ showed that associational activity is often more detrimental than favourable for an emerging economy. So we need better ways to break this trust logjam. Trust in the money system in India is comparatively high, as promises tend to be kept with sufficient legal backing and can be digitised with e-mandates or automated payments/ collections; but the same is not the case for goods (or services) ledger, leaving room for delays cascading into a logjam resulting in low trust. This is often felt in day to day life by citizens not getting routine services despite advance payment or small businesses not getting paid despite having supplied goods. Delays, defaults and disputes can become the norm if parties have different versions of the truth.

Every economic activity is thus like a mini-contract with one side on the money ledger (payment from party A to B) and the other side, on the goods/services ledger (from B to A) between counterparties, and can be converted into an electronic contract that automatically executes on both ledgers subject to interoperability. To assure the performance of contracts, the money ledger and the goods/ services ledger need to be connected in a way that is scalable, privacy-enhancing, non-repudiable and programmable. This enables a contract agreed between parties becomes a commitment, and fulfilment is guaranteed by code through the electronic contract. Assuring performance of contracts is critical for a country that is seeking to grow through startup activity, not just in tech but other sectors too.

Currently, litigants lose nearly ₹ 50,000 crores annually in wages or business lost which comes to 0.5% of the country’s GDP, because of litigation, an indication of how expensive litigation can be. The majority of civil disputes in courts are related to recovery of money (30.2 per cent) and land-or property-related matters (29.3 per cent) As reported in the 2016 survey carried out by DAKSH. Common reasons for dispute are different versions of the truth of contracting parties, prior to contract (past) or during the performance of contract (future). Having the same truth and programmability inherent in electronic contracts is a boon in this regard.

In an earlier blog, we have explored the benefits of adapted blockchain technologies to solve the problem of SME financing in India with a related post by global experts⁷. We build further on that and believe that India can harness recent advances associated with blockchain technology to enable trust between unrelated parties by combining the best of the scalable and centralized legacy world with a secure and private decentralized world. This can benefit the real economy vastly along with the financial world.

Innovations in distributed ledger technologies and BADAL

Distributed Ledger technology can help in two ways – first by being able to verify past performance before one party strikes a deal with another, and second, by being able to enforce a contract in most situations as performance unfolds in future. Thus, building trust about the past as well as the future.

We thus imagine a fabric based on the following basic principles to help create and grow a large number of applications to record economic activity even while reconciling with other activities and past data and help inject a level of trust by creating a reliable, immutable record of trusted data records and programmable contracts

Single platform to allow standards bodies and organisations to publish their schemas, and reuse other schema elements in composing workflows
Fully privacy-preserving capabilities to allow participants to publish relevant zero-knowledge proofs which do not require private data to be shared beyond the participating entities
A programmatic contracts capability that can help automatically carry out the relevant tasks as agreed on without any further manual intervention

By connecting a new digital money ledger (such as Central Bank Digital Currency, or stablecoins) with the new goods & services ledger, we envisage a boost to trust across economy and commerce. As such, BADAL is the first such framework we are aware of globally, uniquely suited to India’s needs, opportunities and strengths.

We have discussed the early version of this in detail in an earlier open-source document⁸. BADAL is thus a privacy supporting, trust enhancing mechanism of coordinating economic activity, and information recording and sharing. Originally this group started out of a process to explore the domain around and figure out the appropriate model to support CBDC, support data sharing between participants, and coordination and automation of event-based standing instructions across events in the goods and services ecosystem and/or money flow.

We then reviewed exciting developments in related areas first to understand their relevance given India’s unique needs. Blockchain technologies generally are seen to enable unrelated parties to trust each other and transact without depending on a central institution or intermediary. These technology innovations are around three key areas:

Maintaining immutability and integrity of data across the distributed ledgers of parties.
Governance mechanisms, especially for decentralised networks
The programmability of such transactions to allow automatic execution.

Public blockchain technologies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, on the other hand, are based on a philosophy of distrust of centralised institutions like Central Banks and are designed for unrestricted access and decentralised decision-making. But they have had to develop new approaches to contend with a few challenges, especially given the huge growth off late that see further wor:

The enormous consumption of resources to establish ‘proof of work’ that limits efficiency and scalability, leading to newer approaches
Exposing all transactions on these networks that generally do not allow sensitive data to be private on the key layer, is as critical for confidential business data as it is for personal data
Rise of many networks that are not interoperable with each other or with the mainstream economy, though some bridges do exist
May have ability to operate outside banking conduits and regulatory frameworks that challenges government’s sovereignty and financial stability through greater oversight has been coming recently

Research on amending throughput, reducing costs and enhancing privacy/auditability/KYC compliance has been ongoing at a rapid pace, especially over the last couple of years.

Despite these unresolved issues, Public blockchain-based tokens, so-called cryptocurrencies, NFTs etc have become an unregulated asset class, especially amongst the young rapidly given the ease of use, creating concerns on possible misuse as well as potential opportunities. We were also part of the recent consultation of the Parliamentary Committee on Finance on ‘Cryptoassets: Opportunities and Challenges’ and had shared with them some of our ideas above in our submission here⁹.

Various solutions have been employed to address some of these challenges:

Permissioned blockchains, such as Hyperledger Fabric and Corda, allow only trusted parties to participate. Corda uses Notaries for verifying transactions. Such solutions have been successfully used in finance, supply chain, property rights, healthcare, education and e-governance
Zero-knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) allow proving/verification of specific aspects of data without actually making the data public

BADAL builds on the above primitives and is offered as an open and interoperable platform to enable money ledgers such as CBDC/stablecoin along with applications relevant for finance and commerce. This can be designed as a permissioned network relying upon a few regulated entities, and interoperable to ensure that its benefits are widespread and at much lower costs than permissionless systems. It consists of a private ledger that holds sensitive user data with access restricted to participating entities only, and a public ledger that contains notarised zero-knowledge proofs about transactions between users. It supports different schemas (configurations) that enable usage across different use-cases.

This programmability coupled with immutability akin to electronic contracts, allows applications in BADAL to be used to leapfrog the trust logjam, without diluting sovereign privileges of control of money given India’s stage of development. BADAL will thus establish provenance that helps establish credibility and reputation of transacting parties, proof of title/ownership of goods and assets, proof of the history of transactions including promises made and ambiguously defined and fulfilled; automatic execution of terms of contracts along with privacy as a fundamental right.

Historically, monetary accounting has solved for only one side of this metaphorical coin- the monetary value. All monetary systems denote a money value to any transfer of goods or services. BADAL, being a ledger that can record value in any domain, solves for the non-monetary aspect of the transaction. Integrated with electronic contracts for a variety of applications, BADAL will enable digital claims on non-monetary assets, including new age asset classes such as crypto assets, NFTs, where claims can be financialized and liquidated. An inherent promissory layer can be enabled into the current transaction mechanism. This extends to all data types, from land records to hospital quality service quality etc, rather than just transactions involving money and goods/ services.

The ability to connect any of the data types across domains can give rise to massive amount of efficiency gains with automated execution thanks to new data from machines like cars, consumer durables like refrigerators or health wearables coming from advances in IoT (Internet of Things), 5G, Imagine a use case of automated crop insurance with sensors that monitor weather from a satellite in space to moisture in soil etc. and deliver claim benefit to the farmer with zero friction in real-time.

One of the biggest problems BADAL could solve at bottom of the pyramid is financial inclusion in India. This is not only in the form of increased monetary transactions through it, but also the ability for MSME’s to gain cheaper credit. This is a possibility as MSME’s will find it easier to prove their liquidity and income to banks and other lenders due to the monetary traceability the system will provide. An increased ability to prove financial stability will lead to greater leverage for borrowers and more systemic trust for lenders. This increase in the systemic trust will not only lead to an increase in credit creation but catalyse an increase in money velocity in India as a whole.

In a subsequent blog post, we will detail the potential use cases; as well as preliminary design of a prototype of one sample use case that is being built currently.

BADAL fabric supporting India Stack could boost digital India

India has pioneered transformations in Identity, Payments, and Data empowerment (these building blocks are popularly called the India Stack) through a techno-legal approach. These address friction of doing business, information asymmetry, and distributed systems. Breakthroughs along the way were public platform (identity), public protocols and standards, and techno-legal approaches to solving big societal problems.

Some examples of this:

Aadhaar enabled e-KYC has significantly reduced the onboarding cost for finance companies and utilities from ~Rs 1500 to as low as Rs10/¹⁰. This lower KYC cost has helped in expanding the reach of government initiatives like PMJDY and similar massive private rollouts like Jio.
Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has led to an explosion of digital wallets and payment technologies that reduce transaction friction. India has logged more real-time online transactions¹¹ than China and USA in 2020.
The recent launch of the Account Aggregator (AA) model (based on Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture, DEPA) allows the controlled sharing of private financial data by citizens with various financial institutions to get the best deals. This is a global first and in some sense, an export of a truly global standard¹² from India.
Open Credit Enablement Network (OCEN) is creating a way to democratise access to credit, to the level of making it accessible to a street vendor for small sums. These public goods prevent any large player from monopolising the data ecosystem and at the same time reduce the cost of providing service. For instance, microloans as small as Rs.300 can be availed on GeM-SAHAY leading to true inclusion at the bottom of the pyramid.

These techno-regulatory concepts are now being considered for adoption by several countries across the world. Overall, India is arguably ahead of most countries in adopting technology for promoting financial inclusion as well¹³.

The next building block now is the trust layer through BADAL, ensuring every commitment is met and every contract is enforceable, boosting transparency and growth over the next decade. Trust permeates through all three ends of this triangle as identity is the ‘who’; and data and payment relate to ‘what’ of commerce. In BADAL, identity and data sharing can be achieved without diluting privacy to enable trusted payments (& commerce).

Annexure: CBDC Developments

While BADAL provides fabric to money or goods ledgers, we describe CBDC in detail here, given its importance. Money was traditionally issued by the sovereign (through a Central Banker) and circulated in the economy through layers of banking intermediaries. With the advent of permissionless public blockchains, some of which also seek to portray themselves as alternate currencies, the sovereigns have taken note and introduced their own variant as a public good to protect the financial stability of the nation-states. This sovereign/state-issued digital currency is popularly known as Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).

Central Banks have been increasingly researching and in some cases developing prototypes of CBDC since 2017 as per a survey¹⁴ by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). 86% of the world’s central banks¹⁵ are studying CBDCs actively. Sweden has finished its phase-1 pilot for CBDC called e-Krona in April 2021¹⁶. China published its plan for a CBDC retail pilot called e-CNY in July 2021 and has already put this in production apparently timed ahead of the Winter Olympics that will be hosted this year. This seems to already cover a fifth of the population ¹⁷. The USA is evaluating its own CBDC¹⁸; has been considering a regulatory framework for Stablecoins and has come out with a detailed report titled ‘Money and Payments: The U.S. Dollar in the Age of Digital Transformation in January 2022¹⁹’. In India, RBI is actively studying the benefits of CBDC²⁰.

fig: Central bank’s work on CBDC advances further

While there are different types of CBDCs such as wholesale/ retail and account-based/ token-based, ultimately a payment using CBDC can be immediately settled. This is akin to using paper money and unlike a cheque or money transfer between bank accounts that require a process of clearing and settlement adding to inefficiency and costs. CBDC can potentially thus leapfrog depending upon the development of existing banking systems in different countries.

Advanced Economies (AEs) and Emerging Markets and Developing Economies (EMDEs) have different motivations for issuing CBDC to end-users (via Retail CBDC) and financial institutions (via Wholesale CBDC), illustrated in the diagram below.

fig: Motivations for issuing a retail CBDC

In countries like China²¹ and Sweden²², a significant part of money moves digitally on private networks and central bankers are losing visibility and control of money flows. Both countries are moving quickly towards the launch of a retail CBDC.
China is also possibly viewing its CBDC as a tool to emerge as a global reserve currency²³ like the USD. China was also home to some of the largest mining pools²⁴ that spend enormous electricity on cryptocurrency. In this backdrop, China has recently banned crypto-mining and private cryptocurrencies.
In the USA, payments are expensive due to its legacy system of banking. This has led to a burst of digital payment options, the latest being ‘stablecoin assets’ (digital currencies backed by real assets like US dollar, treasuries, etc) that also compete with their money-market funds. Stablecoin assets have crossed $100 billion 25 in market value and are a popular choice to transact in Decentralised Finance (DeFI). DeFi is a parallel financial system evolving around crypto-assets. DeFI is not subject to transparency and compliance required in the conventional financial world at this point in time. As DeFi becomes big and interacts with the conventional financial world, there is a growing systemic risk arising from failure or fraud in DeFi. The US Government, therefore, wants to regulate some aspects of DeFI²⁶ and may thereby bless some stablecoins and crypto-assets as explicitly permitted financial products. Earlier in 2015, Bitcoin was determined to be a commodity²⁷ by some authorities there. The US Fed has also begun a consultation process towards design choices and feasibility of CBDC implementation.

Indian perspective

In India, the focus of policy has rightly been on promoting financial inclusion to formalise the economy and drive economic growth. One important factor which drives the usage of unregulated informal value transfer systems is the lack of banking facilities and corresponding amenities for managing money, which leaves rural communities without alternatives other than a person-to-person method of transferring monetary value. Even though India has seen a significant increase in the number of bank accounts created, Reserve bank data still highlights little improvement in account usage and institutional borrowings, which feeds into the broader issue of financial inclusivity.

Initiatives like Pradhan Mantri Jan-Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) opened doors to big change. UPI has been very successful as a payment mode but still needs underlying bank accounts to transact and thus depends on the banking system & its motivation to provide access to the poor. The PMJDY scheme announced in 2014 has increased the number of adults with bank accounts to 43.47cr ²⁸ (~46% of 93.55cr adults with an Aadhaar²⁹). Despite this headway, there is still a lot to be achieved. The Financial Inclusion Index (FI) recently launched by RBI shows that India is at 53.9 on March 21 (vs 43.4 in March 2017) – a little more than halfway towards complete financial inclusion (FI of 100)³⁰. Presently, the banking system acts as the main gateway to financial inclusion as the banking system is the main distributor of cash. Hence, various government programmes (like PMJDY) rely upon banks for financial inclusion, despite those being not remunerative for banks. The accounts also have various restrictions on the number of debits/withdrawals to ensure low cost.

Even with the existence of such low-cost bank accounts, the poor do not have an incentive to use a bank account regularly as they do not save enough to use the bank account as a store of value. They use these accounts mainly to collect remittances and withdraw cash at ATMs as bulk of their transactions is in cash, not leaving a visible money trail that in turn makes financial inclusion difficult. Cash in circulation in India even now is Rs 29.38 trillion³¹ (~14.9% of estimated GDP for 2020-21 32) despite the availability of these cheaper accounts, demonetisation in 2017 and the subsequent formalisation of the economy with GST, RERA, etc.

In addition, the cost of handling cash by the central bank and commercial banks (currency printing, operating currency chests, logistics of moving currency, ATM operations, etc.) has been estimated to be ~Rs 21,000 cr (Rama Bijapurkar) and ~1.7% of GDP ( (Visa Inc., 2016). High adoption of CBDC can help in reducing this cost while creating enormous amounts of data and enabling policymakers to diagnose and regulate better. At a later stage, CBDC can also be used for targeted monetary policy actions when its impact on the financial system is well understood. Experts are concerned that CBDC may result in the disintermediation of the financial system. This risk can be mitigated by following design principles set out by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS)³³ (i) “do no harm” to monetary and financial stability; (ii) coexist with cash and other types of money in a flexible and innovative payment ecosystem; and (iii) promote broader innovation and efficiency.

CBDC inherently provides an alternative to cash to directly reach a customer and can complement the banking network to make adoption quicker. By providing a digital alternative to cash will enable building verifiable money trails that can lead to greater financial inclusion by private players providing customised health, insurance, investment & education products in compliance with privacy laws. In the financially excluded segments, CBDC, being a form of central bank currency, is likely to be well trusted and be adopted easily.

The blog post is co-authored by Sanjay Phadke, Dhananjay Nene, Sharad Sharma, Navin Kabra, R Barve, K Babel, V Agarwal, K Gokarn, Kalyan Narguru, Shashank B, Arun Maharajan, Karan Sirdesai, P Sahu, P Rao, A Kulkarni, Krishna Iyer, V Nene and A Lath.

If you have any queries or comments, please contact us at [email protected].

01/07/202101/07/2021

iSPIRT Balloon Volunteering Open House #4 – Opportunities in Technology

Building on the previous Balloon Volunteering Open House Sessions, we will give a flavour of available volunteering opportunities in the Technology space.

In the fourth Session, we have Dr Pramod Varma, Chief Architect of Aadhaar and IndiaStack, giving you an insight into what it takes to volunteer in iSPIRT. He describes our design principles for building digital public infrastructure and gives you a peek into the thought process of an architect in iSPIRT. Finally, he breaks down how we are redefining the approach towards solving societal problems. We are playground builders. We orchestrate or create a playground so that market players can bring out an array of solutions.

iSPIRT is addressing solvability. We have a multi-decade horizon as a mission-oriented volunteer-based Think-and-Do-Tank.

As part of this session, we have some of our volunteers explaining the technical challenges you can embrace as new volunteers at iSPIRT Foundation. The problems that we are tackling require a thought process that is new and innovative. We use cutting-edge technology.

In addition to the new technical volunteering options outlined in this session, other policy-related and ecosystem-building volunteer options also exist. Apply now on https://volunteers.ispirt.in.

How do you build using Lego Blocks? Watch the recording to learn more.

iSPIRT Balloon Volunteering Open House Session #4 – Opportunities in Technology [30 June 2021] from ProductNation/iSPIRT

15/10/202028/10/2020

Alex Osterwalder on building The Invincible Company

iSPIRT Foundation, Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), The CII-Suresh Neotia Center for Innovation, NSRCEL at IIM Bangalore, CIIE at IIM Ahmedabad and Mahindra Leadership University came together to host the first of the Global Leadership Seminar series on 25th September, 2020.

Our inaugural speaker was Dr. Alex Osterwalder, the well known author of the Business Model Canvas, who spoke about his latest book, The Invincible Company. The talk was followed by a fireside chat with two industry veterans, Rajan Anandan, MD of Sequoia, former VP of Google South East Asia, and a prolific angel investor, and Sanjay Behl, CEO India & Co-Founder Nextqore Private Limited, and Chairman of the CII National Committee on HR & Leadership.

Prof. Rishikesha Krishnan, Director of IIM Bangalore, gave the welcome address and said that he was a big fan of the Business Model Canvas and has given many copies of the book away. Alex started his talk by saying that no company is invincible. The only thing they can do is to constantly reinvent themselves. The most successful companies reinvent themselves when the going is good. In a crisis, it is often too late for a company to reinvent itself. Great companies compete on superior business models in which technology, services and innovation and price are embedded. Great companies are also able to transcend industry boundaries easily. An example of an innovative company that transcends industry boundaries is Tesla, which sells cars, batteries and data. Alex said that his favorite example is China’s Ping An, which transformed itself from an insurance company into a conglomerate. Ping An broke out of industry boundaries to build Ping An Good Doctor, which now has 300 million users. Alex said that the pharma companies of the world could have also made such a transition but they defined their industry boundaries too rigidly.

Note: The full video of the seminar and fireside chat embedded below

Alex said that companies need to be ambidextrous and be able to both exploit existing business models and explore new ones, but both these require very different skill sets.

Quoting Clayton Christensen, Alex said that there are three types of innovation:

Efficiency innovation: Using robots in warehouses would improve efficiency, but was not enough for survival.

Sustaining innovation: New car models, digital transformation etc are good examples

Transformative innovation: Completely new business models. For example Amazon started as a book seller but went on to become an infrastructure provider with Amazon Web Services.

He said that most companies were not doing enough of transformative innovation that created value for customers and organizations. He said that it was possible for a company to disrupt an industry with inferior technology. Sharing the example of Nintendo WII, he said that it was not based on proprietary technology, but off the shelf components including motion sensors, that appealed to an underserved market of casual gamers who did not worry much about graphics and technology.

He suggested that companies could build an Explore portfolio by investing a small amount of money in a large amount of ideas. You cannot pick the winners upfront but learn from the VC industry where typically 6 out of 10 ideas will fail, 3 out of 10 will make some money, and 4 out of 1000 will be home runs. The German engineering company, Bosch is exploring this model. It gave 200 teams 120,000 Euros each and gave them three months to test their ideas. Seventy percent of these teams were cancelled after six months. 60 teams get a follow-up investment of 300,000 Euros, and finally 15 got further investments and were moved to the Exploit phase. This is what companies like Amazon have been doing for a long time.

Rajan kicked off the fireside chat by saying that innovation is a leader’s job, and that titles like Chief Innovation Officer are dead-end jobs delegated to those who cannot run businesses. He pointed out the trillion dollar market cap companies that exist today are founder driven companies. Sharing the example of Google, he said that, in Google people get noticed for doing the Big New Thing, and not just for keeping the machine running. Rajan argued for purposeful, targeted innovation, and for making adjacent bets. He said that Google Payments was one of the bets that they made, which has paid off well. Another was the Internet Saathi, which was an idea brought to him by Google employee, Neha Barjatya, which made sense as an initiative that aimed to bring women online. His take was that one has to think like a VC and make selective calls. He felt that the approach of making 200 bets and seeing what would work, was not feasible and gave the example of Sequoia, which manages $5.5 billion dollars but has a portfolio of only 200 companies. He also argued that, when it comes to innovation, and chasing new areas, you have to put your best people on the job.

Sanjay, who has worked in large companies like Levers, Reliance, Nokia, and raymonds before going on to start his own IOT company, NextQore, said that most of our larger companies are built for efficiency and not innovation and disruption. These companies rewarded predictability, but the world is now unpredictable. They are vertical, matrix organizations in a world that is flat, and has moved to platforms. They were trained to manage scarcity, but we now live in a world of abundance. These organizations were trained to manage linear change, but change has now become exponential. He said that the immune system of large companies was trained to reject innovation, and they need to now look at replacing scalable efficiency with scalable learning.

Alex said that innovation is becoming a profession. Therefore, these frameworks will become essential since CEOs now want a process for innovation, and less of an ad-hoc process. Rajan seemed to be all for targeted innovation and big bets while Alex’s model was to take a lot of small bets, and scale them up. Which approach should CEOs go with? Can innovation be turned into a predictable process, or is it something that depends on the leadership driving it. Write to us with your comments and let us know what you think.

21/09/202021/09/2020

Open House Session #1 on iSPIRT’s Balloon Volunteering

We held an impromptu Open Session on Balloon Volunteering on 20th September 2020. Watch the recorded video and presentation below to learn if iSPIRT volunteering is right for you.

This session will cover some of the available volunteer opportunities and tell you how to engage with us.

Open House on iSPIRT Balloon Volunteering from ProductNation/iSPIRT

In case you want to explore Balloon Volunteering with iSPIRT, we request you to fill out the form here: bit.ly/iSPIRTForm

01/08/202014/08/2020

iSPIRT Second Open House on OCEN: Varied LSP Possibilities

On 31st July we hosted the second open house discussion on Open Credit Enablement Network (OCEN). This week’s session covered several potential Loan Service Provider (LSP) products and business cases, and answers to questions that came up following last week’s introductory presentation.

To recap, OCEN is a new paradigm for credit that seeks to provide a common language for lenders and marketplaces to build innovative, financial credit products at scale. OCEN seeks to reimagine the lending ecosystem so that any service provider that interfaces with consumers and MSMEs can become a Fintech-enabled credit marketplace, or more specifically, a Loan Service Provider.

The discussion this week centred around what kind of role LSPs could play in an OCEN-enabled cash flow lending value chain. OCEN APIs can enable lending products for both consumers and businesses, and for both capital and operating expenses. They are designed to allow for several different types of LSPs and financial products to flourish.

To build this new credit economy, we need to move from the ‘Lend and Forget’ mindset of traditional lenders to the holistic ‘Lend, Monitor and Collect’ model allowed by the myriad of service providers and marketplaces in our tech ecosystem. These platforms not only have insightful data into their user’s commercial activity but they have an ongoing interface and interaction with potential borrowers.

With OCEN standardisation, LSPs can improve and contribute to all the five aspects of lending i.e. acquisition, underwriting, ROI, collections and monitoring. Tailored credit products can be plugged in at every stage in a typical supply chain (from ‘Procurement to Pay’) to help ease liquidity concerns and ensure business continuity.

Our volunteers illustrated this with two examples:
1) A seller on the Government e-marketplace (GeM) obtaining invoice financing through the Sahay GeM LSP

2) A truck owner availing of Business-Vehicle Trip Financing through a logistics company performing the role of an LSP

OCEN is also enabling the creation of a new type of credit product that is digitally applied for and disbursed, where the end use of the loan is identified and paid for, and where repayment of the loan is enabled by the locking of incoming cash-flow.

Every participant in our fintech ecosystem is incentivised to take part in this new open credit economy enabled by OCEN. There is an opportunity here for lenders, service providers, aggregators and tech providers to all play their role in bridging India’s credit gap and giving our people and businesses the support they need.

The second session on OCEN covered the following topics broadly, and the entire webinar is also available on our official Youtube channel:

By Siddharth Shetty
- An introduction to iSPIRT and our values
By Ankit Singh
- Recap of what OCEN is, and how LSPs fit in to the framework
- Recap of Sahay, the reference app for OCEN (and the first LSP)
- Becoming an LSP (and the role of CredAll)
By Nipun Kohli
- Examples of different cash-flow-lending products enabled by OCEN
- Key differences between traditional lending and credit products on OCEN
- How LSPs can participate across the lending value chain
- ‘Procurement to Pay’ credit products
- Product example 1: GeM – Procurement to Pay
- Product example 2: Business-Vehicle Trip Financing
By Praveen Hari
- Building new credit products on OCEN
- The Type 4 loans

After the presentation our volunteers answered some questions from the community including:
– How is Sahay different from TReDS?
– How does the underwriting take place for LSP-enabled loans?
– How can risk be managed between the LSP and the lender?

We will be hosting weekly open house sessions to keep diving deeper into OCEN. The next such event will take place at 5 pm on 7 August 2020

Readers who wish to learn more about OCEN are encouraged to share this post and sign up now for the session below or click here.

As always, in order to successfully create a new credit ecosystem for Bharat it will take the collaborative effort of participants from every corner of our fintech ecosystem.

If you’re interested in participating as a:

Loan Service Provider
Lender
Technology Service Provider

please drop us an email at [email protected]

Readers may also submit any questions about the OCEN to the same email address. We shall do our best to answer these questions during next Friday’s open house discussion.

If you would like to know more about becoming an LSP, please check out www.credall.org (CredAll is a collective of lending ecosystem players to drive cash flow based lending)

About the Author: The post is authored by Rahul Sanghi

Recommended Reading:

Chapter 7 and 8 in RBI UK Sinha MSME committee report: https://www.rbi.org.in/Scripts/PublicationReportDetails.aspx?UrlPage=&ID=924

Introduction to India Stack’s fourth layer – Data Empowerment & Protection Architecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW__azI8_ow

23/06/202023/06/2020

Bending India’s COVID-19 Curve Through Science & Data-Led Models

Powered by data-led scientific rigor, the India COVID-19 SEIR Model delivers early infection trends for every district in India. The model is geared to help Indians from all walks of life plan life and work decisions around their region’s projected trends over the next 15-30 days. Hospitals can use the model to plan for a surge in demand for resources (beds, ICUs, ventilators); local and national level leaders across private and public sectors can use the model to decide how best to contain the spread of the disease and re-open safely. Epidemiologists can use the model to define how different behavioural and environmental factors affect disease transmission. We introduce 3 use cases in this blog post—the first in a series aimed at promoting scientific and modelling capability.

Wherever the Coronavirus curve has bent to our will, it has happened on the back of behaviour changes based on data-led insights. Everywhere, simple shifts in behavior—staying at home, wearing masks, sanitizing hands—have been informed by predictive models that showed us the mirror to a dystopian future if we didn’t edit our lifestyles. As a digital public good for a billion Indians, the value of the India COVID-19 SEIR Model lies in its reach and widespread use.

Until a vaccine is developed, we have to make sense of today’s numbers in the context of all our tomorrows. Individuals, policymakers—and everyone in between—can make smarter decisions if they know the evolving shape of the outbreak, and the India COVID-19 SEIR Model aims to do just that by enabling identification of potential trends and patterns in the next 15-30 days.

The approach taken by the model provides flexibility and utilisation from both a view of trends as core model adoption/enhancement.

We can all use it to bend India’s curve. That’s the ultimate use case, really — where the model tells us where it’s going and we, in turn, steer it in an entirely other direction. Models will change and that’s a good thing. It means we are responding. The power of models and data science in this particular moment is the ability to assist a very scientific approach to scenario planning during an ongoing pandemic.

We can turn the course of this pandemic and transform what this model tells us, every 24 hours. We are already watching the shape-shifting in real-time. It’s in your hands. Go on, try it.

Use Cases

User — Individuals & Businesses (PDF format)

User — Scientists (PDF format)

User — Policy-Makers (PDF format)

About the contributors: The blog post is co-authored by our volunteers Yashvi Jaju, Nikhila Natarajan and Srikar V Cintalagiri

18/06/202018/06/2020

Covid19 Crisis: Sharpen the Saw with Marginal Costing

When reality changes, it’s important for the firms to acknowledge and adjust to the new situation. This is the time to remember the mantra ‘Revenue is Vanity, Profit is Sanity, Cash is Reality’.

The Covid-19 crisis is much written about, debated and analyzed. If there is one thing everyone can agree about on the future, it is that there is no spoiler out there for this suspense. The fact is that no one knows the eventual shape of the business environment after the pandemic ends.

When revenue momentum slows down or even hits a wall as it is happening in the current scenario, costs take centre stage even as every dollar of revenue becomes even more valuable for the firms. So, enterprises need an arsenal of strategic weapons to operate and survive, maybe even thrive, in this period of dramatic uncertainty. The same old-same old, push-push methods will not move the needle of performance.

As an entrepreneur and CEO, I have always found the theory of Marginal Costing (MC) to be practically powerful over the years. Let me tell you why.

At the best of times, MC is a useful tool for strategic and transactional decision making. In a downturn or a crisis, it is vital for entrepreneurs and business leaders to look at their businesses through the MC filter to uncover actionable insights.

Using MC-based pricing, the firm can retain valuable clients, win new deals against the competition, increase market share in a shrinking market and enhance goodwill by demonstrating dynamism in downmarket.

As the firm continues to price its products based on MC, the idea is to continually attempt to increase the price to cover the fixed costs and get above the Break-Even Point (BEP) to profitability. However, this happens opportunistically and with an improving environment.

Pricing for outcomes is more critical during these times and playing around with your costing models can go a long way in determining the most optimal outcome-based pricing approaches.

Steps to Get the Best Out of MC:

1. Determine bare minimum Operating level

Estimate the bare minimum operating level or fixed costs you will need to bear to stay afloat and capitalize on revenue opportunities. This is the BEP of the business. This estimate can include:

Facilities, machines, materials, people and overheads.
All R&D expenses required to support product development
Necessary support staff for deployment and maintenance of products/services.

2. Ascertain the variable costs

Identify the incremental costs involved in delivering your business solutions to fulfil contractual and reputational expectations to both existing and new customers. These costs are the variable costs in your business model. Try to maximize capacity to flexibly hire, partner or rent variable costs as needed, based on incremental revenues.

3. Distinguish between fixed costs and transactional variable costs.

Take your fixed costs at your operating level as costs for a full P&L period. Let’s say, the fiscal year. Take your variable costs as what it takes to fulfil the Revenues that you can book. Make sure you only take the direct, variable costs. Note that if Revenues less Variable costs to fulfil the revenues is zero, then you are operating at MC.

4. Sweat the IP already created.

For every rupee or dollar you earn over and above the MC, you are now contributing to absorbing the fixed costs. Do bear in mind that all historical costs of building the IP are ‘sunk’, typically to be amortized over a reasonable period. Hence, it doesn’t figure in the current level of fixed costs. The idea now is to ‘sweat’ the IP already created.

5. Peg the base price at marginal cost.

Start at the level of marginal cost, not fully absorbed costs. Then, try and increase the price to absorb more and more of the fixed costs. The goal is to get to BEP and beyond during the full P&L period. At the deal level, be wary of pricing based on the fully-loaded costs (variable and fixed costs, direct and indirect).

6. Close the deal to maximize cash flows

Price your product at marginal cost + whatever the client or market will bear to get the maximum possible advance or time-linked payments. This is a simple exchange of cash for margins wherever possible and an effective way to maximize the cash flows. Many clients, especially the larger ones, worry more about budgets than cash flow.

Let’s look at a high-level illustration.

Assume a software product company providing a learning and development platform to the enterprise marketplace. Let’s call this company Elldee.

Elldee has a SaaS business model that works well in terms of annuity revenues, steady cash flows and scale. Clients prefer the pay-as-you-model representing OpEx rather than CapEx. Investors love the SaaS space and have funded the company based on the future expectations of rapid scale and profitability.

However, given the ongoing crisis condition, Elldee needs to take a good re-look at the licensing model. By applying MC filters, it may make more market and financial sense to maximize upfront cash by doing a longer-term `licensing’ deal for the software-as-a-service at even a deep discount, with back-ended increments in price. The variable costs of on-boarding a client are similar to a SaaS deal yet the revenue converts to contribution to absorb fixed costs quickly to help survival and longer runway for future growth. So the client pays lesser than what they would have for a three year SaaS deal but Elldee is able to sweat its IP while maximizing cash flows.

Elldee can even move its existing SaaS clients to this model to capture more revenues upfront by being aware of MC and figuring out the right pricing models to get to the BEP of the business or product. Outcome-based pricing can also be designed to deliver margins beyond the MC, contributing to the absorption of fixed costs more aggressively.

Elldee is now in a position to address different types of markets, clients and alliances. It can calibrate higher and higher margins as the environment improves and client relationships deepen. Over the next two years, Elldee would come out stronger with a more loyal client base, higher market share and a growth trajectory aligned with its pre-Covid19 business plans.

Yes, this is a simplified example but many variations to the theme can be crafted, based on a firm’s unique context.

Remember that a strong tide lifts all boats but a downturn separates the men from the boys. Marginal costing techniques, when customized for sector-specific operating models, delivers a competitive edge at a time from which will emerge stronger winners and weaker losers. Be a winner.

About the contributor: Sam Iyengar is a PE investor, mentor and advisor focused on Innovation and Impact. He can be reached at [email protected].

13/06/202026/06/2020

NHS Open House Discussion #4: Doctor Registry, Enrollment APIs And PHR

On 13th June, iSPIRT hosted the fourth open house discussion on the National Health Stack (NHS). For anybody unfamiliar with the NHS, here are some introductory blog posts and videos.

In the session, our volunteer Vikram Srinivasan deep dived into the Enrollment APIs of the electronic doctor registry. These APIs are called when a new doctor is being added to the registry, or when a doctor’s information is being uploaded.

Vikram also spoke about the attestation APIs, which come into play when an attesting institution (such as a state medical council, medical college, or hospital) confirms some data about a doctor. This is crucially important for building trust in the registry and preventing the proliferation of false profiles. With the release of these enrolment and attestation APIs, all the APIs pertaining to the electronic doctor registry are now available here.

After Vikram’s presentation, he and our other volunteer Siddharth Shetty answered some technical questions submitted by the community. Here are some of the questions they fielded:

Doctors have multiple identities (from different medical councils), how are these unique IDs handled by the electronic registry?
Can anybody access the doctor information in the registry, including phone numbers and photographs of doctors?
Who can healthcare companies partner with in the Health Stack Ecosystem?
How does the federated network architecture of the PHR system deal with downtimes, incorrect data, and other failure? Is this architecture scalable for a system with 1000s of participants?

As always, these were great questions. You can watch Sid and Vikram answer these questions and walk through their presentations below. Please keep the questions coming by sending them in through this form: https://bit.ly/NHS-QAForm.

If you would like to get involved with Health Stack, we encourage you to watch the recordings of the previous Health Stack open house discussions before reaching out.

Furthermore, if you are interested in the Health Stack and wish to build on top of it or contribute to the working groups being formed, you should reach out to [email protected]

Please note: The fifth open house on PHR Implementation was previously planned for 27th June. This has been postponed to 11:30 am on 4th July due to unavoidable circumstances.

To confirm your participation, continue to register on this form.

06/06/202012/06/2020

NHS Open House on PHR & Doctor Registry #3: Summary And Next Steps

On 6th June, we marked the third open house discussion of the National Health Stack (NHS). At the beginning of the session, iSPIRT volunteer Sharad Sharma offered a brief recap of the NHS and painted a roadmap for future developments in this initiative (including timelines, agendas, and future open house sessions). Sharad also discussed the content of the most recent open house session, in which Kiran Anandampillai explained the concept of the electronic registry system. After reiterating the vision for the NHS and the registry system, Sharad passed the floor to iSPIRT volunteer Vikram Srinivasan to dive into the registry APIs.

As a refresher, the electronic registry system is a mechanism for managing master data about different entities in the healthcare ecosystem. In today’ session, Vikram focused on the doctor registry. As the name suggests, the doctor registry will contain information about the doctors licensed to practice in India.

The doctor registry has the following design principles:

Self maintainability: Doctors should be able to enrol themselves and update their own data

Non-repudiable: The data in the registry should be digitally signed by a relevant attester (such as a State Medical Council) so that it can independently be verified by anybody

Layered access: There should be a clear demarcation between public and private data in the registry, with only consent-based access to private data (eg. a doctor’s name and registration status should be public, but mobile number and photo should be private)

Extensible schema: The data in the public registries should be as minimal as possible, allowing private players to build their own extensions around the core schema

Open APIs: The data in the registries should be available via open APIs

Incentive aligned: The registry must enable convenient use cases so that doctors have an incentive to keep it up to date (eg. doctors can use their registry profile to electronically sign prescriptions, insurance claims etc. or doctors can use their registry profile to streamline and digitize the process of renewing their medical licenses)

After discussing the design principles behind the registry, Vikram dived straight into the details of the doctor registry APIs, which can be broken into the following categories:

Enrollment APIs: These APIs allow doctors to enrol in the registry and update their data

Consented APIs: These APIs allow a doctor to authenticate themselves, share their data/profile, and electronically sign documents

Search APIs: These APIs are used to access the registry to query a doctor’s public data or search for any other publicly available information

After covering these topics at a high level, Vikram released the API specifications for the Consented APIs and the Search APIs. The Swagger documentation for the same can be found here. The enrollment APIs will be released during next week’s open house session.

Upon completing his walkthrough of the doctor registry APIs, Vikram handed the floor over to our volunteer Siddharth Shetty. In the beginning of his segment, Siddharth answered the community’s technical questions around the NHS. Here are the questions he answered:

Is it mandatory to use the Open Source Project Eka codebase that has been published for the Consent Manager, API Bridge, and Gateway?
In case of the Schema Standardization, during the 1st schema-less phase, are HIPs allowed to share data formats like JPEG, PDFs etc?
Can the consent manager give the health locker (as an HIU) a standing consent to keep pulling the user’s information from various HIPs on an ongoing basis i.e. bypass the consent manager for future requests
Can the API bridges be configured such that instead of just sending the links to the information based on a request from an HIU (health locker in this case), the information can be sent such that it can be copied into the health locker?
Will the consent artifacts be encrypted between parties using any asymmetric key mechanism which will be valid between the services?
Is there any defined/recommended timeout for the data transmission from HIU – Bridge – CM- HIP and then HIU – HIP?

These were all great questions, and hopefully Siddharth’s answers helped clarify any doubts. If anybody wishes to ask any other questions around the NHS, please send them in to [email protected] with the subject line “NHS Questions”. Siddharth will continue answering the community’s technical questions during next week’s session (business-related questions will be answered in subsequent sessions).

To close off the open house discussion, Siddharth laid out the different working groups in the NHS ecosystem. Since the NHS is an open, public ecosystem, it is crucial for industry players and interested citizens to contribute to its development and pitch in with their feedback, knowledge, and engagement. Here are the working groups that are currently being formed:

Technical Architecture Group: Responsible for working on open technical problems such as circuit breaker flows and time-out mechanisms. Also responsible for extensions and changes to the tech architecture

Data Dictionary Group: This working group deals with moving away from the current schema-less architecture towards a standardized data vocabulary (leveraging existing medical schema projects and also coming up with new ideas relevant to the Indian context)

Pilot Group: This group is comprised of people who have already started building on the NHS components (or would like to start building on the components).

Ecosystem Incentives Group: This group is looking at the incentive structures that power the NHS ecosystem (monetary and otherwise)

Any readers who are interested in learning more or joining these working groups are invited to reach out to [email protected]. A complete recording of the 6th June’s open house discussion can be found below

During next week’s session, we will be covering the Personal Health Records system (PHR), particularly as it relates to hospitals, and we will also be diving deeper into the Doctor Registry Enrollment APIs.

Readers are advised that next week’s NHS open house discussion will take place from 11:30 am – 12:30 pm on Saturday, June 13th.

The registration form for next week’s session can be found here.

24/05/202024/05/2020

iSPIRT Open House Sessions on NHS: Summary & Next Steps

Yesterday afternoon, we hosted our first Open House Session in partnership with Swasth Alliance on the National Health Stack (NHS). For those unfamiliar with this infrastructure, it is helpful to picture the NHS as a multi-layer cake designed to elevate the capacity of the Indian healthcare ecosystem.

At the base layer is a set of generic building blocks. These building blocks, which include bank accounts, digital identities, and mobile numbers, form the basic rails needed to identify, transact with, and communicate with individuals and businesses. Many components of IndiaStack – such as eSign and DigiLocker – leverage and augment these building blocks.

The next layer of the NHS is the ‘plumbing layer’. This layer contains fundamental pillars needed to enable simple, intelligent, and secure healthcare solutions. The three main pillars of the NHS plumbing layer are electronic registries, a personal health record framework, and a claims engine. A brief summary of these pillars is provided below:

Electronic Registries: these registries allow for efficient discovery and authentication of doctors, hospitals, and other healthcare providers
Personal Health Records System (PHR): a system that allows individuals to enjoy a longitudinal view of all their healthcare data and exercise granular control over how this data is stored and accessed
Claims Engine: a software engine that reduces the cost of processing insurance claims, enabling insurers to cover more kinds of healthcare procedures, such as preventive checkups, walk-in consultations, and other low-cost but high-value procedures that are currently excluded from Indian insurance policies

The third layer of the NHS is an augmentation layer which is intended to utilize the three pillars of the NHS to bring greater efficiency to the Indian healthcare ecosystem. The doctor: patient ratio in this country is relatively low, and cannot be changed overnight.

Having said that, increasing the efficiency of each doctor would have a similar effect to increasing this doctor: patient ratio. The augmentation layer of the NHS is designed to drive up doctor efficiency through the use of technology. Examples of this kind of technology could include a matching engine to pair patients with the most relevant doctor, or a system to help doctors securely and remotely monitor the bio-markers of their patients. Unlike the plumbing layer, the augmentation layer of the NHS is not close to completion, but we do envisage the augmentation layer playing an important role in the ascent of Indian healthcare quality. Both the plumbing layer and the augmentation layer are designed as open, standardized interfaces. These layers serve as digital public infrastructure accessible to public and private entities wishing to build atop them.

That brings us to the fourth and final layer of the NHS: the application layer. This layer comprises all the government and private sector applications that aim to serve the diverse needs of Indian patients. The first three layers of the NHS exist so that the innovators and change-makers of the fourth layer are optimally empowered to organize, access, and process the data that they need to deliver the best service to their users.

The first session on the NHS followed this schedule and published the entire webinar on our official Youtube channel:

An introduction to iSPIRT and our values
An overview of the NHS
A deep-dive into and demonstration of the PHR pillar of the plumbing layer
A question-answer session with the audience

The objective of the session was to drive awareness of the NHS components, objectives, timelines, and design philosophies. We want participants from all walks of healthcare to be engaged with the NHS and take part in building it.

In keeping with this objective, we will be hosting weekly open house sessions to keep diving deeper into the National Health Stack. The next such event will take place on Saturday (30th May) at 11:30 am. The focus of this second session will be on another pillar of the plumbing layer – the electronic registry system. More specifically, the session will focus upon the doctor registry.

Readers who wish to learn more about the NHS are encouraged to share this post and sign up now for the session below or click here.

Readers may also submit questions about the NHS to [email protected] We shall do our best to answer these questions during next Saturday’s open house discussion.

About the Author: The post is co-authored by our volunteers Aaryaman Vir, Siddharth Shetty and Karthik K S.

Further Reading

National Health Stack by NITI Aayog: https://niti.gov.in/writereaddata/files/document_publication/NHS-Strategy-and-Approach-Document-for-consultation.pdf
Holistic Health Leapfrog: https://pn.ispirt.in/towards-a-holistic-healthcare-ecosystem/
What does the Health Stack mean for you? https://pn.ispirt.in/what-does-the-health-stack-mean-for-you/
Federated Personal Health Records: https://pn.ispirt.in/5-what-is-the-federated-phr-component-of-the-health-stack/
Data Empowerment & Protection Architecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW__azI8_ow
Care Intermediaries: https://pn.ispirt.in/7-healthcare-leapfrog-but-where-is-the-problem/
Personal Health Record Specifications: https://projecteka.github.io/content/documentation.html
Open Health Services Network Specifications: https://developers.beckn.org/Healthcare

21/05/202022/05/2020

iSPIRT Open House Discussion on National Health Stack [Virtual]

The National Health Stack is a set of foundational building blocks that will be built as shared digital infrastructure, usable by both public sector and private sector players.

Healthcare delivery in India faces multiple challenges today. The doctor-patient ratio in the country is extremely poor, a problem that is exacerbated by the uneven distribution of doctors in certain states and districts. Insurance penetration in India remains low, leading to out-of-pocket expenses of over 80% (something that is being addressed by the Ayushman Bharat program). Additionally, the current view on healthcare amongst citizens as well as policymakers is largely around curative care.

Preventive care, which is equally important for the health of individuals, is generally overlooked. The leapfrog we envision is that of public, precision healthcare. This means that not only would every citizen have access to affordable healthcare, but the care delivered would be holistic (as opposed to symptomatic) and preventive (and not just curative) in nature. This will require a complete redesign of operations, regulations, and incentives – a transformation that, we believe, can be enabled by the Health Stack.

iSPIRT Foundation in partnership with Swasth Alliance is hosting an Open House Discussion on the following building blocks of the Health Stack

Doctor Registry
- The ability for doctors to digitally authenticate themselves and share their electronic credentials with a third-party application such as a telehealth provider
Personal Health Record (PHR) System
- The ability for every Indian to be empowered with control over their health data such that they can share it with trustworthy clinical providers to access a digital service
Open Health Services Network
- A unified health services network that comprises of a common set of protocols and APIs to allow health services to be delivered seamlessly across any set of health applications, doctors, and providers.

The virtual session will be from 11:30 AM to 1:00 PM on Saturday 23rd May.

To confirm your participation and receive the virtual link, please click here.

Recommended Reading

National Health Stack by NITI Aayog: https://niti.gov.in/writereaddata/files/document_publication/NHS-Strategy-and-Approach-Document-for-consultation.pdf
Holistic Health Leapfrog: https://pn.ispirt.in/towards-a-holistic-healthcare-ecosystem/
What does the Health Stack mean for you? https://pn.ispirt.in/what-does-the-health-stack-mean-for-you/
Federated Personal Health Records: https://pn.ispirt.in/5-what-is-the-federated-phr-component-of-the-health-stack/
Data Empowerment & Protection Architecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW__azI8_ow
Care Intermediaries: https://pn.ispirt.in/7-healthcare-leapfrog-but-where-is-the-problem/
Personal Health Record Specifications: https://projecteka.github.io/content/documentation.html
Open Health Services Network Specifications: https://developers.beckn.org/Healthcare

07/05/202013/12/2023

iSPIRT Playgrounds Coda

As you may have heard from us or read about in our publications, iSPIRT takes the long view on problems. We call ourselves 30 year architects for India’s hard problems. The critical insight to a 30-year journey of success is that it requires one to be able to work with and grow the ecosystem, rather than grow itself. An iSPIRT with more than 150 volunteers would collapse under its own weight. Instead we work tirelessly to build capacity in our partners and help them on their journeys. We remain committed to being in the background, taking pride in the success of our partners who are solving for India’s hard problems.

However, many people think we’re trying to square a circle here. Why would anybody, that too, folks in Tech jobs who get paid tremendously well, volunteer their time for the success of others?

The motivation for volunteering is hard to explain to those who have not experienced the joy volunteering brings. Our story is not unique. Most famously, when the Open source movement was taking root, Microsoft’s then CEO, Steve Ballmer, called Open Source “cancer”.

We have published all of our thinking on our model as and when it crystallised. However, we realised a compendium was needed to put our answers to the most commonly expressed doubts about iSPIRT in one place. This is that compendium for our volunteers, partners, donors and beyond.

1. What is iSPIRT?

a) iSPIRT is a not-for-profit think tank, staffed mostly by volunteers from the tech world, who dedicate their time, energy and expertise towards India’s hard problems.

b) iSPIRT believes that India’s hard problems are larger than the efforts of any one market player or any one public institution or even any one think-tank like ourselves. These societal problems require a whole-of-society effort. We do our part to find market players and government entities with the conviction in this approach and help everyone work together.

c) In practical terms, this means that the government builds the digital public infrastructure, and the market participants build businesses on top of it. We support both of them with our expertise. We have iterated this model and continue to improve and refine this model.

d) To play this role we use our mission to align with the Government partners, Market partners and our own volunteers. We believe those who have seen us work up close place their trust in us to work towards our mission. Our long-term survival depends on this trust. All our actions and processes are designed to maintain this trust, and so far if we have any success at all, it can only be seen as a validation of this trust.

2. What is our volunteering model?

a) Anyone can apply to be a balloon volunteer, and we work with them to see if there is a fit.

b) The ideal qualities of a volunteer are publicly available in our Volunteering Handbook, the latest one was published in December 2017.

c) We require every volunteer to declare their conflicts, and ask them to select a pledge level. This pledge level determines their access to policy teams and information that can lead to potential conflict of interest. For every confirmed volunteer, we make available this pledge level publicly on our website.

d) We are often asked what’s in it for our volunteers. We let all our volunteers know this is “No Greed, No Glory” work. Wikipedia is maintained by thousands of volunteers, none of them get individual author credits. What volunteers get is the joy of working on challenging problems a sense of pride in building something useful for society a community of like-minded individuals who are willing to work towards things larger than themselves

e) There are not too many people who would do this for no money, but it does not take a lot of people to do what we do. All of this is given in much greater detail in our Volunteer Handbook.

3. How does iSPIRT decide the initiatives it works on?

a) We have seen success due to the quality of our work and the commitment to our mission. We only take on challenges related to societal problems where technology can make a difference.

b) Even within those problems, our expertise and focus is in solving the subclass of problems where the hard task of coordination between State and Market, between public infra and private innovation is crucial to the task at hand.

4. How does it work with State and Market partners

a) On the hard problems we select in #3 above we assemble a team of volunteers. These volunteers outline a vision for the future. We begin by sharing this vision in multiple forums and creating excitement around them. Examples of these forums are:

2015: Whatsapp moment of India. Nandan Nilekani presentation on the future of finance and many articles written about it
2016: Startup India Launch – Jan 2016 13th. India Stack unveiled as part of official program of Digital India (Public event)
2017: Cash Flow Lending – DEPA launch 2017 August – Carnegie India Nandan Nilekani and Siddharth Shetty Presentation
Many different public appearances by Pramod Varma, Sharad Sharma, Sanjay Jain, Nikhil Kumar
2019: Siddharth Shetty explaining AA at an event at @WeWork Bangalore
2019 Sahamati Launch with a presentation by Nandan Nilekani and representatives from MeiTY, SEBI, multiple Bank CEOs, and AA entrepreneurs.

b) On market partners

i. We work with any market partner who shows conviction towards the idea, and are willing to commit their own resources to take the vision forward. Previous and current partners include banks, startups, tech product and service companies. These early adopter partners form part of our Wave 1 cohort.

ii. We dive deeper with this wave 1 cohort and iterate together to build on the “private innovation” side of the original vision with their feedback. This is developed with the mutual commitment to sharing our work in the public domain, for public use, once we have matured the idea. We work with them and iterate till we surface a MVP for wider review.

iii. At iSPIRT, we don’t like mission capture. There are no commercial arrangements between iSPIRT and any individual market participants.

iv. We never recommend specific vendors to any of our partners.

v. New infrastructure/ new frameworks often require the creation of a new type of entity. We engage with these through domain specific organizations such as Sahamati for Account aggregators, as an example.

vi. After Wave 1 partners co-create an MVP, we open up for wider public review and participation. We make public all of our learnings to help the creation of Wave 2 of market participants.

vii. The mental model you should have for iSPIRT Vision/Wave 1/ Wave 2 is those of Alpha/closed Beta/public Beta in the tech world.

c) On government partners

i. We work together with any government partners who show conviction towards the idea, and are willing to commit their own resources to take the vision forward. Previous partners have been RBI, NPCI, MeiTY, TRAI, etc.

ii. We dive deeper with these partners and iterate together to build on the “public infrastructure” side of the original vision with their feedback. As part of the government process, many authorities have their own process to finalize documents, etc. Many of these involve publishing drafts, APIs etc. for feedback, and potential improvement from market participants. We publish the work we do together and invite public comments. Examples: UPI Payment Protocol; MeITY Electronic Consent Artefact; ReBIT Account Aggregator specifications

iii. We only advise government partners on technology standards and related expertise.

iv. There are no commercial arrangements between iSPIRT and government partners, not even travel expenses.

v. We never recommend any specific market players for approval towards any licenses or permissions. Both iSPIRT and our partners would suffer greatly if this process was tarnished.

With UPI we did not recommend any individual PSPs for inclusion in the network. This was entirely RBI and NPCI prerogative.
Similarly for AA, RBI alone manages selection of AAs for approvals of licenses.

vi. We also respond to public comments wherever they are invited. The following are some examples of our transparent engagement on policy issues.

iSPIRT Public Comments & Submission to Srikrishna Privacy Bill
iSPIRT Public comments to TRAI Consultations
Support to RBI MSME Committee Report
Support to RBI Public Credit Registry Report

5. How does iSPIRT make money?

a) iSPIRT’s expenses includes a living wage for some of its full-time volunteers, travel expenses and other incidental expenses related to our events. This is still a relatively small footprint and we are able to sustain entirely on donations.

b) These donations come from both individuals and institutions who want to support iSPIRT’s long-term vision for India’s hard problems. Sometimes, donor institutions include our market partners who have seen our work up close.

c) Partnerships do not require donations. We engage with many more market partners who are NOT donors than donors who are market players.

6. How does iSPIRT protect against conflict of interest?

We see two avenues of conflict of interest, and have governance mechanisms to protect against both

a) First is Donor Capture. We try to structure donation amounts and partners such that we are not dependent on any one source of funds and can maintain independence

i. We maintain a similar separation of concerns as do many news organizations with their investors.

ii. Our volunteers may have a cursory knowledge of who our donors are. However, this knowledge makes no difference to their outcomes.

b) Second is Volunteer conflicts, where they may get unfair visibility or information to make personal gains.

i. We screen for this risk extensively in the balloon volunteering period.

ii. We have hard rules around this that are strictly enforced and constantly reminded to all our volunteers in all our meetings.

iii. For volunteers who need advice whether a potential interaction could constitute conflict we provide an easy avenue through our Volunteer Fellows Council. The council will advise on whether there is conflict and if yes, how to mitigate it.

iv. To prevent a “revolving door” situation, we require that volunteers from the policy team leaving to continue their careers in the industry undergo a “cooling-off” period.

To volunteer with us, visit: volunteers.ispirt.in

The post is authored by our core volunteers, Meghana Reddyreddy and Tanuj Bhojwani. They can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected]

17/04/202017/04/2020

The future of ‘civic’ technologies after COVID-19

In 1973, the British economist Ernst Schumacher wrote his manifesto “Small is Beautiful”, and changed the world. Schumacher’s prescription — to use technologies that were less resource-intensive, capable of generating employment, and “appropriate” to local circumstances — appealed to a Western audience that worried about feverish consumption by the ‘boomer’ generation. Silicon Valley soon seized the moment, presenting modern-day, personal computing as an alternative to the tyranny of IBM’s Big Machine. Meanwhile, in India too, the government asked citizens to embrace technologies suited to the country’s socio-economic life. Both had ulterior motives: the miniaturisation of computing was inevitable given revolutions in semiconductor technology during the sixties and seventies, and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley expertly harvested the anti-IBM mood to offer themselves as messiahs. The government in New Delhi too was struggling to mass-produce machines, and starved of funds, so asking Indians to “make do” with appropriate technology was as much a political message as it was a nod to environmentalism.

And thus, India turned its attention to mechanising bullock carts, producing fuel from bio-waste, trapping solar energy for micro-applications, and encouraging the use of hand pumps. These were, in many respects, India’s first “civic”, or socially relevant technologies.

The “appropriate technology” movement in India had two unfortunate consequences. The first has been a celebration of jugaad, or frugal innovation. Over decades, Indian universities, businesses and inventors have pursued low-cost technologies that are clearly not scaleable but valued culturally by peers and social networks. (Sample the press coverage every year of IIT students who build ‘sustainable’ but limited-use technologies, that generate fuel from plastic or trap solar energy for irrigation pumps.) Second, the “small is beautiful” philosophy also coloured our view of “civic technologies” as those that only mobilise the citizenry, out into farms or factory floors. Whether they took the form of a hand pump, solar stove or bullock cart, these technologies did little to augment the productivity of an individual. However, they preserved the larger status quo and did not disrupt social or industrial relations as technological revolutions have historically done.

Nevertheless, there has always been a latent demand in India for technologies that don’t just mobilise individuals but also act as “playgrounds”, creating and connecting livelihoods. When management guru Peter Drucker visited post-Emergency India in 1979, Prime Minister Morarji Desai sold him hard on “appropriate technology”. India, Drucker wrote, had switched overnight from championing big steel plants to small bullock carts. Steel created no new jobs outside the factory, and small technologies did not improve livelihoods. Instead, he argued, India ought to look at the automotive industry as an “efficient multiplier” of livelihoods: beyond the manufacturing plant, automobiles would create new sectors altogether in road building and maintenance, traffic control, dealerships, service stations and repair. Drucker also pointed to the transistor as another such technology. Above all, transistors and automobiles connected Indians to one another through information and travel. Drucker noted during his visit that the motor scooter and radio transistor were in great demand in even far-flung corners, a claim that is borne by statistics. These, then were the civic technologies that mattered, ones that created playgrounds in which many could forge their livelihoods.

The lionisation of jugaad is an attitudinal problem, and may not change immediately. But the task of creating a new generation of civic technologies that act as playgrounds can be addressed more readily. In fact, it is precisely during crises such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that India acutely requires such platforms.

Consider the post-lockdown task of economic reconstruction in India, which requires targeted policy interventions. Currently, the Indian government is blinkered to address only two categories of actors who need economic assistance: large corporations with their bottom lines at risk, and at the micro-level, individuals whose stand to lose livelihoods. India’s banks will bail out Big Business, while government agencies will train their digital public goods — Aadhaar, UPI, eKYC etc — to offer financial assistance to individuals. This formulaic approach misses out the vast category of SMEs who employ millions, account for nearly 40% of India’s exports, pull in informal businesses into the supply chain and provide critical products to the big industries.

To be sure, the data to identify SMEs (Income Tax Returns/ GSTN/ PAN) exists, as do the digital infrastructure to effect payments and micro-loans. The funds would come not only from government coffers but also through philanthropic efforts that have gained steam in the wake of the pandemic. However, the “playground” needs to be created — a single digital platform that can provide loans, grants or subsidies to SMEs based on specific needs, whether for salaries, utilities or other loan payments. A front-end application would provide any government official information about schemes applied for, and funds disbursed to a given SME.

Civic technologies in India have long been understood to mean small-scale technologies. This is a legacy of history and politics, which policymakers have to reckon with. The civic value of technology does not lie in the extent to which it is localised, but its ability to reach the most vulnerable sections of a stratified society like India’s. The Indian government, no matter how expansive its administrative machinery is, cannot do this on its own. It has to create “playgrounds” — involving banks, cooperative societies, regulators, software developers, startups, data fiduciaries and underwriting modellers — if it intends to make digital technologies meaningful and socially relevant.

Please Note: A version of this was first published on Business Standard on 17 April 2020

About the author: Arun Mohan Sukumar is a PhD candidate at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, and a volunteer with the non-profit think-tank, iSPIRT. He is currently based in San Francisco. His book, Midnight’s Machines: A Political History of Technology in India, was published by Penguin Random House in 2019

30/03/202031/03/2020

When one door closes…

An inspiring effort in response to COVID-19

Last Tuesday, for the first time in recorded history, India pulled the emergency brakes on all of the complex interactions that make up the economy and society of 1.3 Billion Indians.

We’re going to see a lot more cascading effects of bringing almost all economic activity to a sudden and near-complete stop. Some of those effects are already visible and others will reveal themselves over time. One thing that’s easy to predict is that this disaster, like most others, will affect Bharat more than it does India.

However, at iSPIRT, we remain impatient optimists for Bharat. It does not suffice for our volunteers to simply predict the future; we want to help create it. When the lockdown hit, we could immediately see that the country’s messy supply chains would be hard-pressed to disentangle essential services from non-essential ones. On the very first day of the lockdown itself, you may have seen videos or news about the police using their lathis on innocent essential service providers like doctors.

This is undeniably tragic, but at its heart is an information and social trust issue inherent in India. When you distil the problem, it comes down to how does the administration identify those travelling for essential-services vs those who are not. Consider this, Swiggy and Zomato alone – who only work on the last mile of one category of food – claim to have a fleet of close to 500,000. For the entire supply chain, even restricted to essential items only, will require authorisations for millions of people and another few million vehicles.

So today, we’re announcing the release of an open-source tool called, ePass. ePass is a tool to help the administration issue digital lockdown passes. These e-Passes are secure and can be verified when needed. iSPIRT got this solution going from zero to launch in less than 4 days. In the following interview, Tanuj Bhojwani speaks with Sudhanshu Shekhar, who led the effort to build the tool and Kamya Chandra, who helped liaison with the Karnataka administration.

Tanuj Bhojwani: Hey Sudhanshu, let’s start with what e-Pass is?

Sudhanshu Shekar: Sure, so the objective is to make sure that those who are on the road providing essential services or regular citizens seeking them can face minimal friction from the authorities.

We imagine a simple 4-step flow

Individuals, such as you or me, or businesses providing essential services, can apply for a pass.
The administration sees these requests digitally, and can authorise them from the backend, either manually or via automated rules.
People can download their digitally signed passes on their devices
The on-ground personnel, such as the police, can verify the curfew pass is valid by scanning it.

We’ve built tools for each part of that flow.

When we started working with the administration, they gave another great suggestion. If the beat officers could provide pre-authenticated “tokens” – like a gift-code, we could make this process even more convenient for some essential service providers. For example, they could distribute tokens to all the informal businesses in a mandi in one go, helping bring the supply-chain back online that much faster.

Tanuj Bhojwani: And you’ve made this open-source. How can a local administration use this?

Kamya Chandra: Everything is a configuration. The administration will have to decide who the approving authorities are. An admin dashboard allows bulk uploads, approvals, tracking statistics of issued passes, etc. It also allows them to configure timings, the validity of the pass, which identity fields are required, etc.

And finally, they have to instruct their beat officers to download the verification app and use it.

Tanuj Bhojwani: so the local government hosts this themselves?

Sudhanshu Shekar: Yes, the governments need to host this themselves, either directly or through a service provider. As iSPIRT, we have only provided the code and will not be providing any managed services. Even the code is open-sourced for others to use and remix as they see fit.

Tanuj Bhojwani: iSPIRT doesn’t work with the Karnataka administration normally, so how did this all happen? How did the team come together?

Sudhanshu Shekar: Sharad called me at 8 pm Tuesday or Wednesday? Maybe it was 8 in the morning. I’m no longer sure. What’s a day anyway? *laughs*

Kamya Chandra: I want to interrupt here and say I am super impressed by Sudhanshu and the rest of the team. No matter how little sleep they got, they didn’t let it affect their judgement or mood. Their decisions were always geared towards what’s the best that’s needed.

Sudhanshu Shekar: Thank you. We’re all just doing what we can.

But basically, on Monday, as Karnataka started enforcing curfew, we realised that people are going to need curfew passes. We started kicking around the idea on Monday, but there was no team. The next night the PM announced a nation-wide lockdown. We knew this was going to be a problem everywhere.

On Wednesday, the Karnataka administration also got in touch with Sharad asking for a similar solution, and they made it clear they need the solution in two days.

Sharad called and said, “I’m going to ask you about something, and you’re going to want to do it, but be really sure and think about it. This is a hard project and has very tight timelines. Everybody will understand if you say no”.

Sharad was right, I did want to do it, so I said yes and immediately got to work. I reached out to several friends and iSPIRT volunteers for help and a few – namely Mayank, Manish, Vibhav, Mohit and Ashok – agreed to help. It was easy to convince everybody, given the importance of fighting COVID. Manish has a few friends in China and was very aware about the seriousness of this situation. We quickly agreed on the basic product outline and started working. Wednesday was a flurry of activity and we got frequent reviews done with the Administration.

We realised we needed an admin console for the police to manage pass issuance. None of us was really an expert in building front-end applications and therefore, I started making calls trying to find an expert. Through referrals, I managed to reach Vishwajeet at 12 pm. I spoke to him about the project, its importance and the strict timelines. I told him we’d fail without him!

Tanuj Bhojwani: So you called a guy you’ve never met and asked him to deliver a complex task, on a ridiculous deadline for no pay nor any certificate or recognition. How did he respond?

Sudhanshu Shekar: He called his office to take a holiday. Vishwajeet sat down, worked for 15 hours straight, and delivered before time!

Kamya Chandra: *laughs* I want to add that this team, which did not know each other, did sleep shifts – including Vishwajeet, who became a volunteer that afternoon. I remember Sudhanshu taking turns with the devs to sleep at night in 2-hour batches just to keep the engine going. I’d run demos with the administration for feedback in the morning, while they all got a little shut-eye. From afternoon, they’d repeat another day and night of development.

Tanuj Bhojwani: Wow, that’s a lot of effort, and what sounds like very little sleep! What was happening on the police end, Kamya?

Kamya Chandra: Honestly, I went in with a negative impression of the police and administration – because all you see are videos of people being beaten. However, I was very impressed with the few people I was working with. They were very knowledgeable about the challenges they were going to face operationally. Also, it was obvious they were doing their best. The first call I got from them was at 11.45pm!

They made time for our demos, gave excellent, considered feedback on all of it that has definitely helped the product. For example, we added a quick and easy way to verify the ID alongside the QR, so that it can work even if the beat policeman verifying does not have a smartphone.

All of this was happening by a remote team in lockdown. I was in Delhi talking to officers in Karnataka. Other than Sudhanshu, I’ve never met any of the other volunteers! In every other organisation, this kind of a crisis response doesn’t happen as smoothly even if the team knows each other. Anywhere else, it would have been near impossible if the team didn’t know each other.

Tanuj Bhojwani: Oh! I assumed they were all from Bangalore?

Sudhanshu Shekar: No.

Mayank is in Bundi, a small town in Rajasthan. Kamya is in Delhi. I’m in Indiranagar, Bangalore. Ashok, our design guy, is in Koramangala and Mohit – I have no idea where he stays – I have never met him *everyone laughs*

Kamya Chandra: Knowing everyone’s location is harder, we still don’t know full names! One of the volunteers who helped us test the security of the product was Sasi Ganesan. I spelt his first and last name wrong in the first email I sent to him! He still helped though. On the 4th day of working together, I needed everyone’s last names, I still only knew Sudhanshu’s and Sasi’s!

Compared to the places I’ve worked before, I was surprised to see Pramod send an email with such savage truths. That’s a great example of how radical candour works, why it is in direct opposition to corporate culture.

Tanuj Bhojwani: *laughs* What were the “savage truths” in this email?

Kamya Chandra: To be fair to Pramod, it was more surprising than savage. Pramod said DO NOT GO LIVE (in bold and underline) until security and related aspects weren’t complete. The contents weren’t particularly shocking, but that he sent it to all of us – including people he barely knew. There was no secrecy or pretending to be bigger than we are. All our failures were also publicly available to a team we’ve never worked with before or met. It’s quite a unique experience.

Sudhanshu Shekar: Yeah, we were planning on going live on Friday, and we knew we needed to do security testing before we went live. Pramod’s email was a good one, and all fair asks about security, usability and data retention. He connected us to another iSPIRT volunteer, Sasi Ganesan for help. Ten hours before the scheduled launch, Sasi wrote back with a list of tasks we must do BEFORE we go live. This Thursday night email doubled our todo list. Thankfully, we were able to pull in Bharat, Sireesha and a few others from Thoughtworks to help close these tasks But at the time it felt brutal, we realised this was going to be a very hard few hours.

Kamya Chandra: Yeah, I think this is around the time Rohit started helping us enhance our UX. To me, this email was a clear indication of the high bar every iSPIRT volunteer must meet. Tight timelines or urgent needs are not enough to excuse sloppiness. I am glad we have senior volunteers such as Pramod to keep the bar high.

Tanuj Bhojwani: But I believe this story has a twist?

Kamya Chandra: Well, we did the demos in time, and everyone seemed very impressed. Unfortunately, the Karnataka administration decided to go with someone else. Their decision to go with someone else was disappointing for us.

However, they are policymakers making scale decisions. They probably had to keep many balls in the air and have redundancy. It’s good they have backup plans for backup plans.

They handled it with grace and were very kind about it. They sent a thank you and a commendation letter to each of our volunteers. One of the senior lady officers asked me – do you only take techies? I do not have a computer science degree, but I want to volunteer!

I told her I was an economist too and that she should definitely volunteer.

Sudhanshu Shekar: For me, the toughest part was when I heard the news that our work won’t be going live on Friday like I had promised all these guys. I was really sad. For about an hour, I tried to fight the decision, but then I realised that I would have to do the difficult thing and break the bad news to a bunch of volunteers who’ve slept less than 6 hours total in the last 72 hours.

What happened next is what surprised me the most about this whole thing.

All of them – every single one – took it so well! They all said something to the effect of working on a solution with other volunteers felt better than not working on one and worrying about the lockdown.

I thought this is the end of the line, but it was they who cheered me up and suggested we should open-source it. I was hoping to tell the volunteers to get some rest. Instead, these guys were so passionate that they worked for a couple more days to complete the documentation, which is why we were able to launch ePass today!

Tanuj Bhojwani: Wow. That’s quite a lot of team-spirit for a team that has never even met! So what happens now that this is open-source? How do you expect it will get traction?

Kamya Chandra: The decision to open-source paid off! Even though Karnataka didn’t take ePass, the officers messaged their batchmates and told them about what the volunteers did.

Sudhanshu Shekar: Now, we have demos scheduled with several other state governments as well as a few national ministries. We think this could be live in at least a couple of places soon.

Tanuj Bhojwani: That sounds like a fairy tale ending. Do you have any advice for anyone who is reading this and wants to volunteer?

Kamya Chandra: I used to work at the World Bank in DC, and we were trying to implement national-level digital systems in many countries. When we had technical challenges there, I was often told to get on a video call with iSPIRT volunteers for guidance and inputs. The more I interacted with them, the more I realised there is magic here to learn from. So I gave up my diplomatic passport and got on a plane to Bangalore!

So my advice is that you should try volunteering even if you’re many, many oceans away!

Sudhanshu Shekar: *laughs* I have a more straightforward test than Kamya’s for those who want to volunteer. These are also the three reasons I volunteer.

First, Societal Impact. You feel useful because you get to work on something that genuinely helps people.

Second, exposure to a wide variety of topics – such a different set of problems – you don’t exactly stick to your lane. Hence, you also meet people with very diverse backgrounds and work experiences. Because my peers are not age-bracketed with me, I feel like there are many lessons that I usually would’ve learned in ten years of my career, I’ve learned already at iSPIRT.

Third, you draw energy from others’ passion. It’s just amazing to go to work with people like this every day. I’ve realised iSPIRT is a self-selecting group – it’s only the people who seek to find it, find it. It is not easy to be a volunteer, because the environment is open and the volunteers are self-driven, people will clearly be able to see if you can walk the talk. When you have people respected in a system not for who they are, but what they do, it is magical for everyone.

Tanuj Bhojwani: That is very true. Thank you for the chat!

Like Sudhanshu says, Volunteering at iSPIRT is hard and definitely not for everyone. However, if one or more of these reasons resonate with you, you should read the volunteers handbook to learn more about balloon volunteering.

19/03/202019/03/2020

#BlackSwan: Has Corona turned your Vitamin into an Aspirin?

One lens I use to evaluate startup opportunities – and have written about in the past – is, are you offering an Aspirin or a Vitamin? My basic premise is that in order to do business with a startup, one has to overcome a lot of inertia – whether you are consuming and more so if you are a business. One way to overcome the inertia is to literally bribe the customer with an offer or cashback that makes it too good to be true. Another is to offer a zero-risk trial period. In most cases, however, savvy customers are simply asking the question – do I need this? Is it solving a pain point? Or is this a nice to have? In other words, is this an Aspirin (pain killer) or a Vitamin (nice to have).

In many cases, startups flounder because the pain isn’t as bad as founders imagine it to be – and the search of establishing Product Market Fit is really one of identifying which customer will deem my product to be an Aspirin. Hopefully, you find that early and if not you keep iterating until you identify that customer segment, the right positioning of the product, and of course getting the product right. At that point, from a VC funding perspective, the other unanswered questions remain, “is this a large enough customer segment – i.e. is the prize worth winning? Can you get to scale before an incumbent or a copycat can outrun you – in other words, is the pain so strong that nobody will look for alternatives? Is the product differentiated enough – and why will YOU win?

When BlackSwan events like Covid19/Coronavirus occur, entrepreneurs often panic and the first reaction is to slow-down everything, hunker down and wait for “normalcy” to return. While this is typically a prudent thing to do, it’s not always the smartest. BlackSwan events do things for us at 1000x the rate of change than one might’ve anticipated – and often lead to permanent behavioral change. This could mean that a product that seemed like a Vitamin before the event suddenly has become an Aspirin, and better still, is likely to remain an Aspirin for ever.

A few examples in the recent past – demonetization in India that ensured that everyone was made aware of digital payments was an opportunity that Paytm and later the UPI Ecosystem grabbed and India hasn’t looked back. While the cynical ones will point out that cash is back, the reality is that everyone from my milkman to my maid to my mother is now at least willing to accept payments digitally – and as I’ve Tweeted elsewhere my 83-year old #digimom is a PhonePe Aficionado! So people’s behaviors change because they have NO alternative.

Covid19/Coronavirus is an even bigger event than Demonetization because it’s global and has impacted EVERYONE – and its caused a change in behaviour that in many cases is likely to be permanent. Suddenly working from home doesn’t seem esoteric – and many founders I’m speaking with are also pleasantly surprised with the increase in productivity, the higher level of trust and creativity with their teams, the more focused execution, etc. Suddenly telling visitors to wash their hands when they meet you, to do namaste, to do contactless delivery no longer seems rude or inappropriate. Suddenly old economy companies are realizing the benefits of Video Conferencing and not insisting on vendors visiting them – rather they are almost insisting on people NOT visiting them. There are dozens of other changes happening in all facets of what we do and how we interact with others.

If you’re an entrepreneur, what do you do? Do you simply wait it out? Do you watch your competitors morph from the sidelines?

Or do you grab the bull by the horn and say “my time has come“!

Whatever you do, make sure you take time out to try and figure out if some dramatic non-linear change is happening, especially directly or in adjacency to your business – especially one that may do one of two things:

dramatically increase your market size
dramatically increase your rate of “adoption”

If you sense either opportunity, then you owe it to yourself to put a skunkworks team together and quickly validate that this is indeed the case and then figure out the fastest path to OWN that opportunity. Make sure that whatever you are doing is going to significantly improve life for a LARGE number of customers. My personal view is that if there are a compelling value proposition and an opportunity to permanently change customer behavior, focus on it and not over-optimize on the business model initially – but that’s a call dependent on your business.

In all cases, however, you may never get this golden opportunity to 1000x your business opportunity and rate of growth – step out of your box, out of your comfort zone and think hard, experiment quickly and make magic happen. That’s the life and luxury of being an entrepreneur! Because if you aren’t – perhaps your competitor is – and certainly some other startup is being born! Disrupt yourself – before someone else does!

A few founders I spoke to about this asked me, “This is a truly unfortunate time for the world – will we be seen as trying to take advantage of this situation”? The answer I give them is simply, “The world will reject whatever isn’t addressing a pain point – and addressing a pain point is not just grabbing the opportunity, it’s fulfilling a responsibility”.

This is an unusual time and certainly an unfortunate time – but make it count!

About the Author: Sanjay Swamy is Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Priven Advisors, advisory to Prime Venture Partners, a Seed-Stage VC Fund in Bangalore. Prime invests in Fintech, SaaS, HealthCare, Logistics & Education focused technology startups that are addressing real pain-points in the industry! Sanjay can be followed on Twitter @theswamy

Please note: The article was first published on Sanjay’s personal linkedin profile.