Bureaunia Chronicles: Episode 18
Years after leaving Bureaunia, Aithorix unexpectedly finds himself inside the Prime Minister’s Office
Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. —Winston Churchill
The inside of the Prime Minister’s Office in the capital was just like any other government office. Similar desks and chairs and computers. Similar cars going in and out. Similar trees and flowers adorned the campus.
However, three things were absolutely different: security, people and decisions. The security was the highest in the country for obvious reasons. The people had the most difficult responsibilities to move a least developed country (LDC) forward, especially given the lackluster economic performance for decades. As far as the decisions from the Prime Minister’s Office were concerned, each of them had the potential to change the lives of millions.
It was certainly a privilege for me to be part of the Prime Minister’s Office team, but I was keenly aware of the heaviness of the responsibility. So, my bubble burst when, on the first day of my job, the senior most participant of my discussion group snapped at me and warned me what I was planning to do made no sense.
The truth is that I, Aithorix, hadn’t returned to Bureaunia after eighteen years of being away, to work with the government. I didn’t forget my personal horror story to get my passport eighteen years ago, or the other frightful stories of how the poor end up more and more marginalized while trying to receive public services.
I came back to the country to run a non-government organization focused on education. I joined hands with five other trustees to work on two things: 1) popularizing open source technologies over proprietary software with the firm belief that the former were more conducive to the development of developing countries; because they allowed freedom to choose and prevented vendor lock-in; 2) developing digital content for high school mathematics and science with demonstrated proof that such content improved the quality of education in countries with poorly trained teachers in those subjects.
In two years, we reached about a hundred schools, and a few thousand students, a remarkable achievement for a new, novice, small, meagerly-funded non-profit. However, I was not a small-scale person. The goal was to reach all hundred thousand schools and over forty million students. The problem was that my estimate pegged the completion timeframe at over two hundred years, even at accelerated execution.
We were patient, but not that patient! We needed a larger partner who had schools everywhere in Bureaunia.
Who other than the government, the necessary evil?
Just as I was searching for an entry into the government, a serendipitous event took place. The government of Bureaunia and an international development partner had joined hands to explore how digital technologies could improve public service delivery in all ministries, ranging from agriculture to education to healthcare to disaster management to social safety nets to law and order. A special digital transformation programme was to be launched at the Prime Minister’s Office, and I was being asked to lead it.
I was confused. Was it a case of “when it rains, it pours,” or “when it rains, it floods?”
I realized that this offer was to take responsibility for the digital transformation of the service delivery apparatus of the entire government: nearly 3,000 services across about 400 organizations. Was this my opportunity to help the government remove queues from the passport office, police stations, social services, hospitals, and many more service delivery organizations? And alleviate daily sufferings of millions of people?
“In line” to online? Could that happen in Bureaunia where less than 1% of people and less than 10 of the 3,000 services were online at that time? Where was the money going to come from in a country with just over 650 dollars per capita GDP? How would we build human capacity for both the supply and demand sides? Who would develop the technologies: the hardware, software and networks?
It seemed like a pipedream, certainly too much to take on. I’d wanted an entry into the Ministry of Education for scaling up my non-profit work, not the whole shebang of politics and bureaucracy that this role would entail. And, that also not only in the government of Bureaunia but also in the international development partner, which was the same necessary evil, if not worse. I would be helplessly sandwiched between the two known inefficient bureaucracies of the world.
But I was sufficiently intrigued. So, I signed up, as unexpected and bizarre as it sounded by all accounts, especially for someone who spent a lifetime hating bureaucracy and embracing only the private sector.
Bureaunia is imaginary, but the queues are real for every developing nation. Next: Episode 19: Fools Rush In…
Anir Chowdhury
#BureauniaChronicles #DigitalTransformation #DigitalPublicInfrastructure #DigitalInclusion
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