Claims of having achieved inclusion by operationalizing the JAM trinity appear somewhat exaggerated.
JAM achieved equality in the digital space but it failed to empower Indians in which they are severely deprived.
What is JAM?
JAM, deriving from Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and Mobile, combines bank accounts for the poor.
Eliminating leakage in the transfer of benefits and enabling the poor to have bank accounts are worthy objectives of JAM.
Aadhaar is the pivot here, allowing the government to ensure that benefits reach the poor and enabling them to make payments through ordinary mobile phones.
JAM ensures seamless transfer of welfare payments and facilitates the making payments in real time.
It is believed that the JAM revolution can link all Indians into one common financial, economic, and digital space.
What are the issues with JAM?
JAM had worthy objectives, but fall well short of the social revolution.
The potential of the JAM trinity for bringing about either of these conditions for economic inclusion is limited.
JAM functions in the digital space while much of our life is lived in the brick and mortar world.
What are the areas needs improvement?
Economy - The latest GDP growth in the first quarter of the current financial year to be lower than the average for 2016-17.
There appears to be a mismatch between the government’s own assessment of its policies and the private sector’s valuation of their worth.
Banking -It is critical that a largely nationalised banking sector had done very little to extend banking services to the poor till recently.
A financial inclusion has almost been achieved but economic inclusion needs lots of efforts.
Ease of doing business - Economic reforms demands the firms to producer services ranging from water supply to waste management.
When private entities do provide these producers services they tend to be expensive, deterring their off-take.
Infrastructure -recent incidents of child deaths, meagre flood management in metros, and failure of waste management shows the poor governance and needs serious discourse.
The possibility of leveraging IT to transform the ecosystem of production for firms and the ecosystem of living for individuals is limited.
How the issues can be addressed?
Significant element in ensuring inclusion is to maintain, directly or indirectly, the level of demand in the economy.
The potential workers must be endowed with the capabilities to address the demands.
The public provision of producer services should be an essential part of public policy, and must be provided by the government.
Social revolution will arrive when all Indians are empowered through an equality of capabilities.
The society needs universal health and education infrastructure accessible to all.
Empowerment in the brick and mortar space would require public infrastructure on a gigantic scale.
This would require committing resources to building the requisite social and physical infrastructure and investing time to govern its functioning.
