IN the middle of November 2016, when Modi’s Demonetisation was drawing flak from all quarters and when the people of India were still in a state of shock and awe, Bill Gates --the world’s richest person who considers himself the best friend of the global poor -- was in Delhi, all praise for the ‘bold move’.

On November 16, Gates was at Niti Aayog, lecturing India’s PM, FM, HM and others on “Transforming India” through technology -- including gene editing, artificial intelligence, and of course, digitalization. Demonetisation will speed up digitalization and, given the scale of the operation in such a big country, it will have a great impact on the rest of the world, he asserted, visibly glad.

In a meeting with the Minister of Information Technology, Law and Justice Ravi Shankar Prasad, the world’s most well-connected and powerful philanthropist was requested to be part of the digitizing process. The latter readily agreed, and quipped, “It’s a very exciting time in India and some of these digital platform opportunities are really quite amazing”.

Flash back to December 2015. As the most eminent speaker at the Financial Inclusion Forum organized by the US Treasury Department and USAID in Washington, Bill Gates had said: “Full digitalization of the economy may happen in developing countries faster than anywhere else”, largely because there are much less restrictions from legal mandates to protect people’s privacy and data. “It is certainly our goal”, he added, “to make it happen in the next three years in the large developing countries. …We worked directly with the central bank there [India] over the last three years [since 2012, that is] and they created a new type of authorization called the payments bank …”

In his speech Gates had stressed that a government’s assistance to the poor and needy should not be delivered by the “incredibly inefficient” method of providing cash or grain to the recipient. “Digitalization helps targeting”, he said, if payments are done via mobile banking. In this connection he went euphoric about Aadhaar:
“It is a wonderful thing to go in and create a broad identification system. Again India is an interesting example of this. There, the

Aadhaar system …is becoming pervasive throughout the country. This will be the foundation for how we bring that switch to every mobile phone in India.”

So was it not natural for Gates to be so excited during his latest trip to India? His India Office (in operation since 2002) had been persuading the RBI for three years, i.e., since UPA days, for speeding up digitalization and now the unexpected big push – the massive Demonetisation -- was at hand!