- Re-evaluate the worth of two major initiatives of the Narendra Modi government: demonetization and digitization.
- Demonetization forced us to think digital
- The importance of digitization in a pandemic cannot be exaggerated when we are repeatedly told to maintain social distance and work from home in order to avoid infection.
- Consider how nigh impossible it would be to avoid contact with retail cashiers and point-of-sale (PoS) terminals if we were to use credit cards and cash to pay for our daily necessities.
- Today, most bill payments have moved online, and barring older people, who may prefer to pay their electricity bills at physical counters, digitization is delivering in spades.
- But digitization is not just about payments and financial transactions.
- India’s judiciary has been resisting technology for as long as one can remember.
- Courts are beginning to use video-conferencing to conduct hearings.
- Witnesses do not have to drag themselves to court every day; they can video-record their statements in advance, and submit themselves to questioning through Skype or other such video- calling apps.
- When the entire case is recorded, the possibility of judges conducting trials in an unfair way gets substantially reduced, for those at the receiving end of judicial injustice can seek retrials based on video recordings.
- These recordings will also enable the higher judiciary to figure out who its good judges are, and who adopts dilatory tactics and frequent adjournments, delaying justice.
- Corruption is also likely to come down.
- Covid-19 crisis: doctors and nurses are putting themselves at huge risk.
- Those handling millions of samples of throat swabs that need to be analysed for the virus.
- Front-line doctors, who have to recommend patients for tests, are also at risk, and so are doctors who need to be physically close to their patients while operating.
- And let’s not forget, sick people sitting next to each other outside a consulting room are at infection risk themselves.
- Remote patient examinations, analysis of symptoms with the help of databases and algorithms, and even the basic task of taking down a new patient’s medical history can all be done remotely through a digital app or interface.
- The doctor will know even before he has met the patient what could be wrong, something she only has to confirm after interacting with the patient.
- Medical knowledge doubles every 75 days.
- India may be spending too much on training doctors at a cost of millions of rupees per head, when a lot of that money could have been spent on technology to deliver competent and lower-cost healthcare.
- It should make us think of how to convert the Covid-19 disruption into an agenda that brings us up to technological speed in various spheres of human activity.
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