Tag Archives: digitization

Digital Spring Cleaning Checklist!

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As our lives increasingly go digital, it is useful to periodically run a status check on our online assets and relationships. I recently did my annual online services (subscriptions) spring cleaning. It threw up multiple surprises & uncovered leakages.. sharing a quick checklist here

  • Unused Subs: Found 2 subscriptions I’m paying, but not using.. promptly killed!

  • Broken Subs: Found multiple sububscriptions that got broken by the RBI credit card issue took some time, but painstakingly resurrected each one!

  • Dual Billing Shocker: Turns out my Audible a/c was being billed both by Amazon India (in Rs) & Amazon USA (in $). So weird – emailed customer support, they acknowledged the problem & reversed the US dual billing. What a relief!

  • Android PlayStore Billing: Realized this has ballooned into a sizable, slippery list. Found one paid kids app I was unaware of. Seems like the handiwork of my 10yr old daughter… led to some family drama:)

  • Foreign news sites: Foreign news publication Economist, NYT, WSJ have HORRIBLE a/c settings. Confusing navigation, bad UX & findability. My WSJ account has no record of my invoices of 2yrs! Some of these services have been applauded for overcoming their print legacies and growing online subscriptions strongly… I’d guess that turnaround is largely confined to news consumption interfaces… they still have a long way to go on basic hygiene stuff.

  • Free Subs: But credit where its due – NYT has offered 8 months free subscription (Nov21-Jun22) due to RBI billing issue (in India). Thanks NYT. Guess every cloud has a silver lining… some good finally coming out of the RBI CC mess:)

  • Only Monthly Billing: Not sure why, but some services only have monthly billing (e.g YouTube premium). Hello.. its 2022, the Big G cant do quarterly or annual bills?

  • Unsubscribe Flow UX Dark Patterns: Came across UX dark patterns in unsubscribe flows of multiple services! Customer retention ninjas at work:)

  • Indian Subscriptions: Its heartening to see Indian startups catching up. I am paying for multiple Indian services now… this was zilch 2-3 years back!

Last but not least, replugging my old rant about the need for a meta news subscription service (instead of signing up individually with each). Hasn’t the world made any progress on this?

Recommend everyone does this spring cleaning once in a while… you’ll end up saving some $$, besides getting on top of things!

DigiLocker as the Govt’s “Khata” app: Bangalore’s land records pilot project is path-breaking!

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India’s technology ecosystem has been rife with excitement about “Khata” apps. We have a bevy of new age, funded tech startups building “khata” applications – these are simple accounting, book-keeping or transaction recording systems for India’s 65 million SMEs, kirana shops etc to replace the paper chits/slips (or “khatas”) that shopkeepers tuck under their counter seats to record customer ledgers.

In the government ecosystem, the term “khata” (while having similar connotations) takes on a different but far more important use case – land records. It has been a practice to issue “paper khata certificates” as proof of land ownership in diff parts of the country by the respective state/municipal govts (since land is a state subject). As one might imagine, this is at the root of much of the forgery, corruption, trickery, malpractices (remember Khosla ka Ghosla??) that happens with land and real estate in the country. While baseline digitization of land/property records has been undertaken at many places (see this example from the Jharkhand state govt), the “paper khata” is clearly one of the weakest links in the chain.

In a path-breaking digitization project, the Bangalore Municipal Corporation (Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike BBMP) is scrapping the paper khata issuing system and instead issuing its digital versions into DigiLocker! The erstwhile paper khatas have been declared null & void, and its digitally signed electronic equivalents containing “46 kinds of information, including photo of the property, photo of the owner, property identity number (PID), apart from registration information” will be made available in the citizens’ DigiLocker accounts. The project is currently being piloted in 3 wards of Bangalore, but will be extended to all 100 wards eventually in a phased manner. Details of the project (christened e-Aasthi) are available in these newspaper reports.
khata bangalore land records
From a DigiLocker standpoint as well, this is a break-through development. Here’s why – DigiLocker has enabled digitization and citizen access of over 4 billion records spanning tax (PAN), transport (DL/RC), identity (eAadhaar), education (school/college/univ certificates & degrees) et al, but land/property records have largely been a non-mover. Some states have previously issued property related leave & license agreements, sale deeds etc. but that’s few and far between. In general, enabling property/land records digitization and subsequent citizen access has been a REALLY tough nut to crack. If this Bangalore project succeeds and citizens get ready, on-demand mobile access to their (digitally signed from source!) authentic property ownership records, that’s a giant leap forward! Undoubtedly other states will follow soon and these “paper khata certificates” can be a thing of the past.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed to see how this unfolds!