Technofiddle

As I have said in my previous article that there is only one way out to eliminate corruption. Remove this paper money out of our lives and start transacting in a electronically.  We could make it as easy as the currency notes way if we wish to. To give you a fair idea how we could do this I am detailing it below.

In this system we would have a central authority like RBI at present time who would control the whole system. This central authority will keep the final transaction records of all the citizens or outsource its work for some of its citizens if they wish to do so to some financial institution like banks to handle for it. Banks will also co-own the money of its customers like they do at the present time to lend it further to other people. All the banks and the central authority will issue a e-wallet to its users like they do issue a debit card today to spend and receive money. The main difference between the debit card and an e-wallet would be that debit card is only designed to give money to other but the e-wallet would be designed to receive money too from anyone.

When ever somebody needs to give some money to anybody body the giving person will touch the receiver person ewallet with his own ewallet, chose the amount of money that he want to give and press the button and bingo the money will be transferred from the giver person account to the receiver person account at the blink of an eye. Isn’t it cool. Now see what will happen underneath.

1. The giver person e-wallet while being in contact with the receiver’s person ewallet takes his identification credentials by RFID identification. This is the same technology that is being used in Delhi metro for travelling tokens or in superstores as security tags for their items.
2. After receiving the identification credentials the donor ewallet will send this information along with his own identification credential and the amount to be paid to his bank through cellular network.
3. The bank will debit the amount from the donor’s account and send this information to the central authority.
4. The central authority will record this transaction in its database and send this information to the receiver’s bank.
5. The receiver bank will credit this amount to the receiver account and send this information to the receiver’s ewallet.
6. Receiver will see on his ewallet that the amount the donor has sent has came to his account.
7. The whole transaction would be handled by supercomputers and travel on high-speed 3G type data network so it will be done in the fraction of seconds.

Now you could ask me few question. Some of which I would like to answer by myself.

Q1. Is this technology credible and safe enough to handle this kind of transactions.
Ans1. If you see this whole system, it work in three parts. 1) Data gathering by RFID technology 2) Sending data over mobile networks 3) Handling the transaction by banks and central authority. Let’s come one by one.

1. Data gathering by RFID: This technology is around for quite a long time now and it has revolutionized many fields. Some of them are transport industry, Tracking of shipments and animals and many more. In fact American express launched its blue credit card sometime ago which bags the award for its innovative design uses the same technology. Please go to this link to read more about its areas of applications right now.
2. Sending data over mobile networks: Mobile network is every where. In recent report of COAI over 525,888,822 (Almost Half the population of India) had a mobile phone in Nov, 2010 and around 85% of the Indian territory is in network coverage. All the mobile networks are now high speed internet enabled and can send and receive data over internet.
3. Transaction between the banks and the central authority: This is also become a old thing now. Almost everybody who has a internet banking account which is being provided by almost every bank in India could send and receive money from the users of other’s bank on internet. So we have now enough expertise to handle this kind of transactions. If you are still doubtful I should give you an example. To show a single page on a social networking site like Facebook it takes 1000 times more complex calculations than sending money from one bank to another but still Facebook is doing it for 500 millions user each day with blazing fast speed. Do you still have doubt about it.

Tonight I want to throw an idea to you people. This idea is so huge to hit the life of people that actually I am scared to even speak about it. I thought about it days and night and came to this conclusion that the idea which I am going to propose is the only solution to almost all the problems we have these days.Please bear with me but I am not joking. In my previous two articles in the series I have given evidences that all the problems that we have these days right from a small corruption in the government offices to the large scandal at national level or the huge poverty , illiteracy are all related to covert nature of paper money. Corruption at any level is also not a localized event. It gradually creeps into every body life and make everybody lives hell. When something become a regular thing in society, it only grows further until to a point when everything get destroyed and people who get left start everything fresh. This is nature’s way of cleaning things up. Its harsh but it’s true and in some case necessary. But are we really in position to throw everything up and get ready to start everything from stone age.

Before I propose my idea I would like to make you think about a situation where we are living in a world or atleast in a country where there is no existence of paper money or currency notes. Please think about it. what that situation would be? You will ask me a simple yet important question that then how we all would get paid for our work at the end of the month ? How we will pay our bills? And lot more questions like this. Well, found interesting? Think more about it.

I am not saying to eliminate the existence of money at all. Well that’s not possible. I am only saying to remove the way of transacting in the form of currency notes. What’s the other way? We need some way which is as easy as to transact by currency notes otherwise the life could be very tough. But why we would ever want to remove currency notes at all? What’s the advantage we could ever get by throwing them all? I know its not as easy as it could be but if you look on the things that are on stake you could probably agree with me.

The other alternative forms of transaction like credit cards, debit cards, net banking are all around the corner for quite a few times now and they have proved their worth and ability as a successful transaction medium. They are more secure and brought lot of other conveniences. Who could ever thought 20 years ago that you would be able to pay your bill or purchase train or plane tickets right from sitting in your home. No one, but now we are doing it on daily basis and rather than being a fancy stuff today they have become a necessary part of our lives. The only thing where the currency notes beat all other alternative medium is the great convenience by which we can transact with it. How we could buy our tickets in the bus or buy a burger from a subway shop or give some money to roadside beggar without having currency notes or coins? We cannot give them a credit card or transfer them money through wire transfer. We need to get these things done instantly and at any place. If you would ask me that if these problems could ever be solved!! then I would say that these problems are very much solvable and technology have solved many more complex problems that this earlier. If you still have doubts I will come on that in large detail in the next article but for the time being I would like you to assume that these problems get solved and you are living in this kind of paper money free society. Now feel it.

In this society, all the transaction you are doing it is getting done electronically. Electronic transactions has a very great advantage over paper money which has not got its fame till now that every record of each transaction could be kept for a very long time and with no effort. The route to money to a specific person could be traced by some very simplest softwares you could ever imagine and on the blink of the eye. Now think what its implication could be? Unlike electronic transactions, the route of money to a specific person through paper money is almost impossible to trace. If I have a 1 lakh worth of paper money I could give it to any person and no body could trace it that where it’s gone. I could give this money to a government official as a bribe or give this money to a criminal to shoot somebody or any other nasty thing I ever want to wish and the great part is that no body could effectively trace that from where I could get this money and where its gone. No body could ever know that a government official has taken a bribe from me or anybody else or even taken at all. Why these politicians are always successful in doing these scandals and no body could ever get a clue about them. Its just because of this paper money. Its not a rocket science to understand this thing. 99.9% of the crimes and 100% of corruption happens due to money and its keeps on getting undetected because we are not been able to find from where the money is coming and to where its gone. If you could ever be able to trace the path of the money you would always get your criminal.

To elaborate the things further let’s consider a situation where there is no existence of paper money and every transaction is getting done electronically. Now we have a government official about which we know that he should have only one source of money, that is his monthly salary. If he is a corrupt one he must be getting lot of money entries regularly in his account. To tackle these situations even a college guy could write a program to trigger an alert to the concerned officials that his income source entry is exceeding from a permissible level and there is something wrong about it. That guy could be immediately interrogated by the officials with all the solid proofs in their hand and that guy could be nabbed in no time.

Why do you think that corruption is getting increased day by day in our country or any where else around the globe. Because its easy to be corrupt and no body could get a hand on you if you are clever enough. These people are making corruption as todays fashion. When other people watch these guys successfully doing corruption they feel left behind and to catchup they also get corrupt. Paper money is playing a huge role in protecting these guys and increasing this race further. Just think of a situation when everybody get corrupt then what will happen? It scares a hell lot of me to even think of a situation like this. In this situation there would be no certainty of anything, there would be no rule of law and it would be a complete jungle. The situation now is also not better and its deteriorating fast . If you don’t believe me just try visiting some government office.

What we have right now is the opportunity that we could possibly revert this race. Imagine a situation where nobody is allowed to be corrupt. A huge software keep inspecting the accounts of everybody and alerting officials about the possible corruption scenarios so that it could be examined and checked. When no body would be allowed to be corrupt the human race would try to find an other way for life. Let me remind you that humans not live their lives just for food and reproduce. They always wanted to be in fashion what others are following or always want an addiction to live with. When corruption would not be the choice what could possibly be. I see a huge possibility for good things to happen because I feel that good things are equally addictive as bad things and they are also numerous in numbers. When good things will come in fashion and people start following it, it would be the golden period for the human kind and we would have all our problems fixed easily and will get a better lives than never before.

In the next article I would be writing solely about the way and architecture through which the electronic payment system could be made as easy as the paper money or even better for transaction in day to day lives. In fact I am devoting a full website which I just registered and started working on it. The address of the website would be www.nopapermoney.com.

What I am trying to do is to stimulate your brain cells to think about this option, discuss among yourselves and If possible help us with your knowledge and expertise. Whatever your work or expertise are, we need everybody. We want writers, actors, filmmakers, economists, scientists, doctors, engineers, journalists, a simple ordinary man on the street, everybody. Because this thing is going to affect the lives of everybody. We want opinion of all. May be, we would not be here to see the fruits of our labour in our lifetime but is this really matters? More to simple technical and usability barriers there is one more very big barrier which this option has to face would be the resistance of corrupt people. They are very powerful people right now and they would never allow this thing to happen in anyway.  What we are trying to do, is to do a steady awareness about our views and try to innovate different ways to pave the path of paper money thorough our different expertise. This is going to be a very long process and demands very huge patience but I am hopeful because human race had done this charisma lot of time in the past and could do lot of times in the future too.

The methods and purpose of getting corrupt has also been changed over the period of time. In the primitive age it was primarily for sex. Primitive humans used to fake their strength and capability by showing different tricks to seduce their potential mates. After that when societies formed and mates getting given by institutionalized marriages in which the mates where given to a person through society rules and not through individual tricks, this form of corruption get reduced. I don’t know who started it but it was the remarkable milestone in the history of human kind. After that all went well in human lives for quite a long time and humans attained huge physical and spiritual development. We also know this period as Vedic Age in Hindu Scriptures.

After that time the serpent in the Adam-Eve story found a new way to corrupt humans. It keeps motivating humans to acquired as much land as he could so that he could do what ever he want and with who ever. So after that, the race of being corrupt started with getting as much land and as much humans in your control. This trend also continued for quite a long time in the history of human kind and this earth saw bloodshed of millions of her sons and daughters for the greed of few power greedy people. Countless people either got killed for the wars with which they don’t have to do anything and another countless people being made slaves to make the few people feel like gods. This trend also ended with the huge direct efforts of few great people who made them realized or reprogrammed the whole mankind that this path is wrong and you are not going to get anything out of it except destruction. If I have to name a few then I would name Buddha, Jesus Christ, Gandhi, Martin L. King, Vivekananda and many more others.

But the peace that would have came due to the effort of the above great people never actually came. The serpent became more wise this time and before the fall of its great trick of physical power it invented a newer one and its new weapon was this time was money. It showed human kind that to control other’s territory and people you need not to actually acquire it by power all the time and even if you have to do that it could be legitimate. The great invention of humankind to share the outcome of their efforts and excel in one particular thing and still able to enjoy all the benefit of other things suddenly become the favorite weapon of the serpent.

Let’s see what makes this weapon so deadly. Initially it was thought that this money would be given to a person in equal proportion to their effort but there was a inherent flaw in the design of the whole process. There was no process to actually validate that its actually being distributed in accordance to their efforts or not. This thing placed enough room for the humankind to acquire this money illegally and corrupt those person also who tried to question them by giving the same money. So it become the chain reaction. Now the serpent don’t have to waste its efforts to corrupt all the humankind. It have to corrupt only few and give him the weapon of money to corrupt others too. Isn’t it brilliant.

If you see in the present times everybody has the feeling that acquiring money by what so ever meaning is not bad. What else if it gives you the great skill to fake yourself as strongest person and act like god. As the great thinkers of all time Chanakya told long back ago that when some huge pillars of corruption appears in the society and remain their for long time all the other people too tries to mimic them and fuel this race. After trends like this appears in the society it became very difficult for the defenders to uproot it.

Lets talk something else other than coding, algorithm and all these stuffs today. Life is much more than that. Today I wanna gather my thoughts to think about the meaning of being corrupt. And why something became corrupt. If you ask me as a software professional I would say that a program become corrupt when it start to behave someway differently than what is intended and more in a destructive way. If I think of we humans I feel that this definition apply to us also. We became corrupt when we started behaving in a destructive way for ourselves and for the society. Hmm.. that’s interesting why we would ever do that. Why a person would try to harm himself or to the society when it gives him only pain. Believe me even a butcher feels pain when he try to slaughter his chickens but still he do that. He do that to feed his family and himself. Think of a drug-addict person even if he know that this drug is gonna kill him very soon but he still takes this drug to free himself from the present addictive pain. So you can also conclude that being corrupt is like an addiction. Even if he know that this is bad he cannot stop it because it gives him different types of momentary ‘happiness’ that he could not get it in a simple way. Lets face it, being truthfully happy is a tough job so people take a shortcut by being corrupt.

Human kind knew it from the very beginning that happiness is just a hormone game and you can make your body secrete this happiness hormone through other shortcuts also. Remember the Adam, Eve and the serpent story. Its a wonderful story and one of my bedtime favorites in my childhood and I guess today’s too. If anybody still interested to read that story to get more clarity, here is the link. This story is a beautiful illustration of what we are made for, how we may become corrupt and finally what happens when we become corrupt. But the story never ends here. That serpent was always present around us, which will keep making us corrupt in the times to come and the human kind will keep getting cursed by the god to keep living in our own hells.