Digital in G20 – The Benjamin Button Effect

Families of the Armed Forces could be seen addressing the common man as "Civilians". Positioning oneself in the moral high ground compared to the societal system where one operates is also prevalent in Judicial circles. As a matter of fact, Judiciary derives its need and purpose from administrative lapses and hence the moral high ground of the Judiciary over the Administration.

If we consider District Judiciary in India as the first point of contact of the civilians with the Judiciary, National Judiciary DataGrid (NJDG) Statistics on District Judiciary could be representative of the % distribution of the Civil and Criminal litigation of the Judiciary.

District Judiciary is at 32,96,242 civil cases and 116,23,439 criminal cases per year pre-Pandemic and that leaves civil cases at 22%.

Civilians are confronted with varied civil cases and DAKSH Statistics suggest 66% of all civil cases in India are about Assets (Land/Property).

Reference - DAKSH Survey - Access to Justice

Whenever Digital adoption is questioned against status-quo, the best response is to assess the P&L impact of the Digital Technology. With this simple Maths it is obvious that Digitalization of Asset Registry (Land/Property records) could give a 66%x22% = 14.5% positive impact on Judiciary P&L YoY in India.

European Union Asset Registry

The cost allocated for the Feasibility study of an EU Verm?gensregister (European Union Asset Registry) is pegged at 400K EUR ?(Quelle - EU-Commission : FISMA/2021/OP/0001).

From a European context an EU Verm?gensregister might be an overkill in administration perspective as there are well established and functional systems already in place in Europe. EU Verm?gensregister could only be looked at as an attempt to understand money movement and financial stability of the EUR.

From an Indian Context an Asset Registry would be a leapfrog approach to a huge economic need for unlocking avenues for Entrepreneurship and job creation through OPC i.e., in addition to the 14.5% impact on Judiciary P&L.

The OPC Magic Bullet - RBI, NPA, ARC and MSME

With the RBI (Reserve Bank of India) tightening the belt on NPA (Non-performing Assets) reporting and making ARC (Asset Reconstruction Company) bankruptcy resolution processes gas-tight in preventing rebidding of repossessed assets by promoters of an NPA, Banks are very careful in lending. There is no more Easy INR money, Live with it!

MSME (Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises) Business in entrepreneurial stages is fraught with trust deficit in its USP and Product availability for the market. It is often said "It is super-hard to win the first Revenue yielding Customer for a Logo". If first customer acquisition is a pain, first strategic investment in MSME is a nightmare as India is a British colony by birth and Interest-on-Interest is not treated like Germany but as in Great Britain. INR investment needs Interest from day one and hence MSME run with their own capital for many years till they create value and scale.

The Magic bullet (Zauberkugel) by the Central Government of India to the MSME credit deadlock is OPC (One Person Company). OPC is the Taxation Framework by the Finance Ministry which enables human psychology and channelizes its natural intent towards economic growth. It is human intent to not let assets idle, for when there is no growth it definitely is de-growth. The existing Tax Framework of Sole Proprietorship puts all of the Personal Assets into the liability purview of the Business and completely works against human will to undertake any economic attempt.

OPC allows selective Asset build up under the OPC Entity and could aid in Collaterals to Bank credit.

The Benjamin Button Effect – State of Tamilnadu

State of Karnataka has too many Cloud instances for Digital Asset Registry, or at least has too many keys to access the Cloud instances. This is pretty evident from Kaveri Online Services of the State of Karnataka exhibiting too many keys to pull an Asset Register entry. It is an issue of either too many Cloud instances or too many keys or both. Too complicated to comprehend through English text. Set aside!

State of Tamilnadu is much advanced in Digital Asset Registry and is lot simpler in design and implementation. Let us look at our Lieblingsthema of SOD (Separation of Duties) of Land/Property Management through Registration Department and Revenue Department in the State of Tamilnadu specifically from the Cloud Instances of the 2 Departments in NIC (National Informatics Centre).

Cloud Functional Architecture and Cloud Deployment Architecture could be high-tech jargon, but it is common knowledge that any Cloud instance can only grow towards its stated purpose based on the funds injected by the Organization.

Now if Registration Department spends X Crores INR and Revenue Department spends Y Crores INR, the delta (X-Y) would be directly proportional to the Data Quality of the 2 Cloud instances.

Please do not bring in the Joint Venture between the Central Government and State Government in CSTAR with dedicated funding support for Revenue Department. It is a 50:50 JV with 2.5 Crores INR funding of which 2.3 Crores INR in Budget Category towards advanced survey equipment procurement. Not to be confused with Cloud instances and Digitalization of Asset Registry data records per se.

A 50:50 JV is usually about bottom-line only as per GAAP standards of Financial reporting. CSTAR is about operational efficiency of the Land survey mechanism. If you have experienced Bottom-line leadership you will know how different it is from Top-line leadership!

(X-Y) difference in funding of the 2 Cloud instances between Registration Department and Revenue Department is here to stay. To understand the repercussions of (X-Y) in funding, let us look closer at one sample Asset and its historical records (Deed, Parent Deed and Grandparent Deed) and its digital avatar in 2022.

It is clear that the Asset Records carry both data relevant to Registration Department (Survey Number, Village, District, Size of the Property, N-E-W-S Boundary details etc) and data relevant to Revenue Department (Title Number or Patta Number or Khatha Number in different regional languages). Those pre-historic times the paper documents used to mention Title Number of the property being transacted in the Sale Deed by the Registration Department to bring in the linking to the Revenue Department records. If one knows C-Programming and Linked-Lists here it is in papers.

With Digitalization, Registration Department digital records collect all Department relevant data & trash those bits of data absolutely required for the Revenue Department. ?Going by Madonna’s words “Your eyes can see only what you wanted to see” the INR Asset Registry has thrown the baby with the bathwater.

Evidence for this can be had from the lookup of Patta Number 325 in Tamilnadu Revenue Department Online which is NULL.

If one observes the Dates of the Grandparent document, Parent document and Deed document, it will be evident that INR Asset Registry (i.e Sum total of Registration & Revenue records) which was available in 1978, 1990 and 2003 is more-complete historically than in the Digitized Asset Registry of State of Tamilnadu in 2022.

Digitized Asset Registry is experiencing a data quality de-growth compared to paper records of the Bronze age. This is the Benjamin Button Effect where Brad Pitt grows from Adult to Infant as time passes in the Hollywood Movie “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”.

In Cloud Technology parlance this is roughly equal to “Data Asynchrony through regional or geo replication”.

API Republic – The Global Menace

A scrutiny of the Paper Asset Registry (Bronze Age) and the Digital Asset Registry would throw deep insights which reveal that Paper Asset Registry understood the need for amalgamation of Property Schedule & Property Title data in one place (The Sale Deed). The Digital Asset Registry on the other hand has laid a clear demarcation between Registration Data and Revenue Data. In this sense the Paper Asset Registry has been more centralized than the Digital Asset Registry in INR region.

Quite frankly this shows the shallow understanding of Economical Business needs and Judicial Domain knowledge in the Department of Information Technology which did the Data design for INR Asset Registry.

NIC (National Informatics Centre) Cloud is exhibiting the same weakness of GAIA-X Cloud outlined by Frau Angela Merkel in the DigitalGipfel 2021.

Digital API Wall has been created by the Software Engineering community between Registration Department and Revenue Department, which quite surprisingly resembles the pitfalls experienced by Germany. One could refer to the public out-pour of Frau Angela Merkel in the Düsseldorf DigitalGipfel 2021 about the Data abstraction nuisance under the API Republic mentality. (Reference : Handelsblatt Podcast - Schnittstellenrepublik und die Schleppende Digitalisierung der Verwaltung)

Rather than treating data available through INR Asset Digitalization as one Dataset for Data Mining, State of Tamilnadu and its Software Engineering Fraternity have fallen for the Kindergarten Lesson 1 – Object Orientation and Data Structures.

API Republic mentality exhibits the basic human psychology to confine oneself within borders when one is drawn as Organizational setup & not cooperate well with other Departments effectively. INR Asset Registry will continue to exhibit this fundamental flaw as long as High Schools and Universities teach Object Oriented Software Design and (for reasons unknown) treat Data Mining and Machine Learning from Datasets as specialty education for the elite few.

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Conclusion

Centralized Colonial Justice Delivery model of litigant-needs escalating upwards from Districts might have failed in India and the Judiciary might be quick & open to admit it towards shift to Regional Delivery model of ancient India (Quelle : Chief Justice of India – CJI NV Ramana – 18.Sep.2021).

Information Technology Department could chip in as geeks/nerds who understand all the design aspects of Cloud implementation and DevOps aspects of Cloud operations of NIC (National Informatics Centre) Cloud instances but will definitely miss domain knowledge, leave alone multi-department nuances and data-mining opportunities to mitigate Land/Property litigation.

The Onus is on the Judiciary to pro-actively alert data integrity and data asynchrony in Digital Administration than resort to Civil Case Pendency in District Courts and stealth Revenue to the State through court fees. If the Judiciary intends to perform more efficiently (Central or Regional Delivery Model as the case may be), it is advised to hire #AI experts who do #Data Mining. To quote a few examples, Google Lens, Microsoft Lens or AIKno ? by L&T Group could help in text recognition for Data mining from scanned documents.

For if the Judiciary were to lock the stable after the litigant horse has bolted into the courts, the Judiciary Cost Center would grow endlessly in reactive response to administrative digital lapses (caused by Digitalization-spending Asynchrony in a Multi-Department British Colonial Administrative Org-chart of India).

The age of Judges looking at submitted “paper documents” and calling out administrative lapses with hindsight from a moral high-ground is long gone!

In the Digital age it is about time Python and AI are taught in the law schools of India (figuratively speaking) as the issue with (X-Y) in Digital funding cannot be allowed to impact the OPC magic-bullet of economic growth.

(Views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the Author in private capacity)