Transcript: India’s digital transformation

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘India’s digital transformation’

Marc Filippino
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Wednesday, December 20th, and this is your FT News Briefing.

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The prices of a lot of metals have taken a beating this year, except for one. And our defence and security correspondent tells us about his experience in a Hamas tunnel.

John Paul Rathbone
It was hot and clammy and quite oppressive.

Marc Filippino
Plus, India has transformed a lot under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Our bureau chief there takes a look at how tech is changing the country. I’m Marc Filippino. And here’s the news you need to start your day.

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Copper has been red hot this year. It’s up 2.5 per cent in 2023. It’s coming in at $8,600 per tonne and that puts it on track to finish this year as the top-performing industrial metal. So, why the surge in copper? Well, disruptions in production created a supply squeeze. There were mining problems in Latin America which downgraded production forecasts. But copper is an outlier in what was a tough year for metals overall. They’ve been getting slammed by high interest rates, which is pushing up the dollar, making those commodities more expensive for importers.

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The tunnels running underneath Gaza are a real problem for Israel. The underground network provides shelter for Hamas fighters from Israeli aerial attacks. And the tunnels are massive. The network is the size of the London Underground. Recently, our defence correspondent John Paul Rathbone had a chance to see one of those tunnels. He went with the Israel Defense Forces and he joins me now to talk about what he saw. Hi, JP.

John Paul Rathbone
Hello, Marc.

Marc Filippino
So tell me a little bit about the tunnel that you were in, JP. What was it like?

John Paul Rathbone
So the tunnel, it was about 400 metres inside the Gaza border with Israel. It was, according to the IDF, the biggest tunnel that they found so far. It was big enough to drive a car through. It was made of reinforced concrete. It had electric cables running down one side and clearly a ventilation system. We only went about 100 metres deep into it and it was hot and clammy and quite oppressive. According to the IDF, it drops down and is kind of a trunk tunnel which links up via other smaller tunnels to a maze of the subterranean domain that Hamas has dug into the sandstone underneath Gaza.

Marc Filippino
And what did the IDF have to say about this tunnel you visited? How was it built and how important is the project?

John Paul Rathbone
Yes, we were shown a video purportedly of Mohammed Sinwar, who’s the brother of Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s chief in Gaza. And the project was so big that he was put in charge of it. And the IDF line is that Hamas diverted funds that could have been used to build hospitals and other facilities for civilians, but instead devoted the resources to building what really is an impressive piece of engineering work.

Marc Filippino
Now, what sort of role have tunnels like this one played in the larger military conflict between the IDF and Hamas?

John Paul Rathbone
So this is Hamas’s response to Israel’s technological superiority, and in the tunnels, air power has no effect. Technology has very limited effects. And it’s a real quandary because the Hamas leaders can hide in it, their fighters can hide in it. They can come out from behind IDF lines. And how to deal with it sort of goes to the heart in military terms of where we are now. You can either bomb to smithereens everything around it and seal the tunnels that way, but that way you destroy all of Gaza and you end up with the massive civilian casualties, which is what we’re seeing now. Or you find them using ground forces and picking your way through buildings bit by bit, but that exposes the IDF ground forces to attack. So that’s the quandary.

Marc Filippino
And this experience, JP — embedding with the IDF and going inside the tunnel — how has it changed your perspective of the war?

John Paul Rathbone
I think one of the things that I learned has nothing to do with the tunnel, but really to do with the environment around it. And in the distance you can always hear this constant thunder of shelling. And when you leave Gaza, when you’re back in Israel proper, Gaza doesn’t really exist in anyone’s mind. The casualties aren’t really covered in the TV shows. So it’s out of sight and out of mind. And I spoke to one Israeli reservist, a young woman who’d been a civilian who’d been called up. She told me how upset and tormented, in fact, she was by the civilian death rate in Gaza. But that is very much a minority opinion.

Marc Filippino
John Paul Rathbone is the FT’s defence and security correspondent. Thanks, JP.

John Paul Rathbone
Thank you.

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Marc Filippino
India is one of the world’s fastest-growing big economies. This is thanks in part to the rapid technological progress promoted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his predecessors. Nearly all of India’s adult population, well over a billion people, are connected to the internet, and IT is one of the country’s most successful exports. But critics point out many Indians live in extreme poverty and they lack basic services. In the first of a three-part series, the FT’s John Reed visits the north-east part of India, and he sees how the country is grappling with this combination of high tech and low tech.

John Reed voice clip
It’s a typical early evening in Varanasi, India’s holy city on the river Ganges. This is a major pilgrimage site. People are chopping wood for funeral pyres, which are wafting out pungent smoke. Bodies in shrouds are being carried on stretchers through the alleys as people chant the name of the Hindu deity, Lord Ram. (Devotees chanting) Above the cremation steps, shops are selling the wood that’s used to burn the corpses. Devout Hindus believe that if you’re cremated in Varanasi, you can escape the endless cycle of rebirth. But if you look closely enough, signs of the new India intrude. (Devotees singing)

At the steps that lead down to the river, the merchants selling items needed for cremation are taking cashless payments, with the exchange of a phone number or the scanning of a QR code. (Faint beep) One of the merchants here tells my colleague Jyotsna Singh that most of his customers now use their phones to make payments. (Merchant speaking in local language)

What makes this possible is that everyone in India has an ID linked to biometrics, such as fingerprints or retina scans. These are part of India’s digital backbone, what the Modi government calls the India Stack. A short distance from the holy river, about two dozen people are sitting in front of large data monitors, with a panoramic photo of the Ganges at sunset in the background. This is the control room for Varanasi’s Smart City project. It’s one part of Modi’s tech vision for a connected and networked India. (PA system announcement)

At the front of the room, a large video monitor takes up an entire wall. It has CCTV footage from all over the city, including the steps by the river, information on traffic patterns, and the city’s current number of Covid cases.

Deivasigamani Vasudevan voice clip
The command control centre came into existence in February 2019, but did become fully functional in August 2020.

John Reed voice clip
That’s Deivasigamani Vasudevan, head of information systems.

Deivasigamani Vasudevan voice clip
And this was converted to a Covid war room where we could appraise each and every patient, hospitals, the shelter homes, the distribution of essentials, medicine management, ambulance management, bed allocation. Everything used to happen from here.

John Reed voice clip
India has rooms like these in about 100 cities. With more people than ever moving into urban centres, the Smart Cities project is about improving life there and preventing crime. Mr Vasudevan points to a smart map that monitors traffic violations. The system, powered by multiple cameras, has facial recognition capability. It features a logo that nicely blends the old and the new — a saffron-coloured circle representing Hinduism, a trident, a face at the top and the third eye of the god Shiva.

Deivasigamani Vasudevan voice clip
So all of the projects are focused on preserving the heritage. Even our wireless cameras and surveillance cameras, CCTV cameras, you find it, they are very nicely camouflaged under a heritage lamppost. You won’t even see it. And one of the important thing is we laid down our own optical fibre network of 400km around the city. We have state-of-the art data centre to process the data.

John Reed voice clip
India championed its digital inclusion model during its G20 presidency this year, but there’s a dark side to Digital India. Some worry about increasing surveillance and Aadhaar, the digital ID system, has fallen prey to several hacks in which the data of hundreds of millions of people leaked online. Modi critics also say the India Stack is one more way of distracting attention from the low-tech problems plaguing the country, around things like infrastructure, clean water, decent schools and public health. Vishwambhar Nath Mishra is one of these. He’s a Hindu priest and engineering professor at Banaras University. He says the sewage system in Varanasi is no longer fit for purpose, and the river Ganges is heavily polluted.

Vishwambhar Nath Mishra voice clip
Day by day, the quantum of discharge of raw sewage into the river is still rising. So it may look beautiful, but the real thing is that the patient is dying and you are just giving good clothes and good appearance. So that is not going to work.

John Reed voice clip
Back at the cremation sites on the Ganges, another vendor cuts through all the techno high.

Ajit Jha voice clip
(Speaking in local language)

John Reed voice clip
Ajit Jha tells us that while digital Indian mobile payments are fine, Varanasi lacks basic facilities, and the renovations politicians have been promising just aren’t happening. Varanasi is Modi’s constituency. When he was campaigning for his first term in office in 2014, he promised to modernise the city and make it the spiritual capital of the world. His vision for India and for Varanasi will be put to the test for the voters in early 2024 when he seeks a third term.

For the FT News Briefing, this is John Reed. Special thanks to Jyotsna Singh, who helped report and produce this piece.

Marc Filippino
Up next in our series on India, we’ll head to the southern part of the country. We’ll look at how India is trying to find jobs for its massive population.

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You can read more on all of these stories at FT.com for free when you click the links in our show notes. This has been your daily FT news briefing. Make sure you check back tomorrow for the latest business news.

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