Indian Jones

The rest of India

December 12, 2010
Incredible India! That was the sign at the tourist office in LA for India. Turns out it is. I am in Ranchi, Jharkhand in India. It’s the wild west of India supposedly.. Very heavy into minerals and coal. There is a ton of smog everywhere in India and the backwoods are no different. Delhi was worse than here, but it’s still pretty bad. Today we left Delhi and flew to Ranchi. When we got here we tried to stick three people in one room. 15 minutes later the front desk called us back and told us we couldn’t do that. It’s breaking the law. Unless you are married, men and women cannot sleep in the same room. After we went to this festival in the town center where UIDAI has a booth at the local fair. We met up with Arbind and he took us there. I didn’t really know what was going on so when we got to the fair I thought we were going to just play at the fair. Unfortunately we had to do some work. At the booth, they took my eye scan and my fingerprints. It’s a pretty cool system they have going on and I am really excited we get to be watching these things. We walked around for an hour after and saw the other booths including a weaving machine, which was surprisingly neat. Also they had a very dramatic play going on. We didn’t understand exactly what was going on, but it looked pretty entertaining. Tomorrow we are driving three hours further into the middle of nowhere to see the rollout of this thing. So a three hour drive to take a two hour flight to get back to Delhi, then 22 hours to get Los Angeles after that. So the absolute minimum without any layovers to get home would be 27 hours. That’s pretty far removed from home. Saturday we went to the Taj Mahal. Breathtaking. It was about a 5 hour drive from Delhi. We went with Raj, a friend of Priya’s. We bargained with locals to find us a shorter line to get in the door, but in the end just ended up waiting, but the wait was only 20 minutes. Everything is a negotiation here. It makes the simplest exercises interesting and a challenge. We had a great time. Between the four of us we must have taken over 1,000 pictures. It’s a pretty photogenic place. We got some strange stares from these two guys. I feared that they were going to come and rob us, but I think they were just awestruck with Jack and I. We got home pretty late and came home and crashed.






December 14, 2010




Yesterday we went to Hazeribag to check out the roll out of UID. It was pretty amazing. It took us three hours to get there and we met up with Sudakar. He brought us flowers. We loved it. The first time I have ever received flowers. Thank you good sir. We then followed him out to the outskirts of Hazeribag. When we got to the site, we saw over 50 people lined up in an orderly fashion to get to this house where the enrollments were taking place. Whatever thoughts we had about this being a demand problem seem to be misled. People seem to want this. People were pretty excited about being there. I’ve got some pretty good pictures of the women lined up in there colorful saris. Also there was a crazy guy that followed us around. Very kind, but still crazy. We took pictures and video of the enrollment process. It felt a little like CTU because it was in a dark room with a couple of neon green and blue lights.





We then went to a couple of schools where they were enrolling children. On the website they said how this was voluntary, but really it’s pretty forced. They take the kids school information and link them to their parents, but this is without the parents’ consent. I don’t think that is really an issue, but it really is misleading to say it is voluntary. By March, if they want a mobile phone they are going to need a UID. The guy said that this would become their mobile phone number. Government benefits, bank accounts, mobile phones and one other thing, I can’t remember all require a UID.



Priya brought up a good point. Why do they need the $100 bank account if they are already incentivized through identity factor? It would probably be a waste of money. We only saw one data point, so maybe that is not a good enough sample size, but people have been pretty excited about it. What does the $100 dollar bank account bring? 1. Incentive for the people. 2. Incentive for the banks. However, the banks are doing this because it takes there acquisition costs down from $5 per customer to about 5 cents where all they have to do is link the UID to the bank account. We saw the bank accounts being set up right behind the UID. So everyone that was getting an ID got a bank account. I don’t think the people completely understood that. So there is a risk of a lot of those bank accounts going unused. I don’t know if that is a big deal, but the idea is to get these bank accounts up and then running. If the $100 bank account is just a welfare payment, do we want to have universal coverage? Why would we give the rich or middle-class $100 dollars. It probably is not enough of an incentive to them to get this identification and the money may be spent better elsewhere. Something to consider.



We also spoke with Saira from ICICI bank. She gave us a good perspective from the banking side. She said that the point is to be able to serve these bank accounts so they, as a bank, will do their part and get enough POS systems and Micro ATMs. Also they will be having BCs serving all these towns so if there are accounts, they will serve them. She said that the transaction costs are going to be zero to the customers and they have this free account. I asked how the banks are going to make these accounts profitable and she said that this was just a pilot. We will see if this makes any sense (cents) haha in the future.
After that we went and had lunch at a hotel in Hazeribag. It was really great. We were a little hesitant, just because we have did not have a good experience at the hotel in Ranchi and we didn’t want to offend our hosts if we did not like it. This was 10x better than the hotel where we have been staying at in Ranchi.

Ranchi is not the booming metropolis of Delhi, nor the tourist destination of Agra. Most of citizens of Ranchi have not seen Americans. When they get comfortable with us they start talking to us and want their picture with us. Jack is also 6’4” so they are going to have a very skewed perception of Americans. They are all going to think all Americans are giants.

We head back on Thursday to Delhi and meet up with Lena. She has been having such a rough time getting here. Getting her visa was a disaster because she only had one page left on her passport. Miraculously, she got it and then got on the next flight out. She was delayed in Los Angeles, so missed her connection in Chicago. Stayed a night there. Sheesh. Bad luck.

It has been great to have the contact of Rajesh. He is one of the higher ups and has been helping us put these visits together. I hope we are not just getting the show to the Americans but that we are seeing the typical site. We need to push to see more sites just so that we are more certain that that is the case.

The agency that we observed doing the rollouts is from south India. We talked at lunch about great things coming out of South India, which included the guy at Bloom Energy. I told him I went to their manufacturing plant. Their agency seems pretty competent in getting what they had promised.

December 14, 2010
Today started out poorly but redeemed itself in the end. First, Priya didn’t get her job at Bridgestone. So she was pretty upset about that. Second, We heard that Lena was having a lot of trouble getting here. She missed another flight on and is somehow in New Jersey. They flew her to Newark where she was supposed to catch a direct flight to Delhi, but the agent screwed up her reservation and Lena watched the plane take off. Our driver was late so we only had time to go speak with Arbind. Chowdry warned us about not getting too stressed about packing a lot into each day because there will be delays. We haven’t had to deal with it too much yet until today. After we went to an enrollment site in a rural area. We waited around for the guy to lead us to the site and then ended up driving with a guy that is bidding on doing enrollments in another area.


That site visit has been one of my favorite things so far. It was really interesting to talk to him about what they took into account when they made their bids. I think the going rate is about 25-35 rupees per head in these areas. That’s about 55-75 cents per head. They get 50 enrollments per day, so they would only be making roughly $20 per day in revenue per station. I don’t think any American companies are going to come out and bid at those prices. It was the first time that we got fresh air in India, which in itself made this place beautiful. We filmed a little bit more. Some of our best pictures were taken in this area. The rollout itself was very chaotic. There was no clear process and they had people smashed up against the gates trying to get their application for their UID. They had several stations, but very few of them were being utilized at any given time. After filming a little bit, Jack and I went out and played volleyball with the locals. After we drove back, we went to Domino’s (hey, give us a break). Crossing the street was our near death experience for the trip…so far. That is not meant in a bad way, it was kind of fun. Like high-stakes frogger. Came home and watched movies. We were told that being out late in Ranchi was not a good idea. I am now watching Taken.

December 16 2010
Yesterday was pretty uneventful. However, we met up with the guy that is in charge of rural development. He told us how UID is enabling them to quickly reduce the cost of their banking model in the rural areas. He showed us the current steps and how long it takes. It generally takes 8-10 steps to get a check out to a person in a rural area and one to two months. UID enabled accounts will make it three steps and their goal is to bring it down to one week. That would be a huge difference. They said that they have not done a cost benefit analysis of this, but I can imagine that it is huge. Sometimes we like to bring everything down to dollars. However it doesn’t always make sense to do that. He said that they haven’t quantified everything in dollars because some of the savings is in time and convenience and nobody has a good grasp on the money value of time.

We were boring tonight. We got dominoes pizza again. I don’t know. Being in Ranchi though has been educational, but I don’t think I plan on living here any time soon.

December 20, 2010





We are no longer boring. This weekend was freaking crazy. We came back from jharkand on Thursday and found Lena at the hotel. We are staying at the Ramada plaza which is a real five star. Thursday night we went to Olive and then went to Urban Pind. It’s a club that has expat night every Thursday night. We get there and the guy at the front door asks… “Are you here with Fashion TV?” “Yes, Yes we are”. I love it. We got some good photos. There were a lot of Russian models there. Lena tries to introduce me to them. I talked to them, but it was just really awkward. They didn’t really have much to say, I didn’t have much to say. Friday night we get into this party at this hotel that is a Bollywood star party. We met a bunch of stars and one of them hung out with us for most of the night. I don’t really have the energy to tell the story, but there are pictures that do a better job.

Saturday morning we went to Jaipur. I didn’t have high expectations, so I would be happy with whatever, but this place is amazing. It was fun to hang out with the whole team in a much more relaxed setting. We drove back Sunday morning. Jack left Sunday night. Team FAB has downsized to three. Jack, you will be missed.

Today we went and spoke with Rajesh at UID again. He is really great. He has lined us up with all these really great appointments. We had some great Indian food for lunch and then went to meet with a bank. I was surprised about how great the meeting went. We came back and I took a couple of laps around the pool. It’s outside, so every breath was of brown pollution.

December 23, 2010
It’s Thursday afternoon and we just had an interview with FINO. Unfortunately I didn’t hit the record button so we missed a lot of the information that we got. Bummer. However, we took some notes and discussed it and recorded our conversation in the taxi ride after. On the ride back our taxi driver hit another car. The driver from the other guy came out of his car and started hitting our driver. It was a really uncomfortable experience. We didn’t really know what we were supposed to do. After het hit him a couple of times he walked away. We then went to some Italian restaurant where they kicked us out yesterday. They were about to kick us out again because it was after 3:00 or not kick us out but not serve us food because the kitchen was closed, but then they saw that we were the same people that they kicked us out yesterday so they served us. It was pretty good. It was the first time I had beef in a while. Too much, too soon. It’s just Lena and me now. Our trio is down to two.

Yesterday we spent the day flying to Bombay. Our original flight was for 6:20. We were sitting at lunch around 2:00 and I looked at our ticket information and it said that our flight had been changed to 4:20. So we book it to the hotel and then we book it to the airport. Just to make it a little more stressful. We ended up making it with plenty of time and the plane was delayed anyway. It turns out this Lena traveling curse may have some merit behind it. ☺

Tuesday night we met with the BCG team and we met with some of the other UID folks. We had a great 2 hour discussion and asked them what they thought the benefit of FAB would be. Viral of UIDAI had some really interesting points. We have it all recorded. Half way through the discussion one of them said something like, “This is off the record, right?” Well, actually, we have been recording the whole thing. They were surprised. We assured them that it was for internal use only and they would have absolute editing power in the end. I think that assuaged their fears. We met with EKO earlier Tuesday and had a great meeting with them. They have an interesting model where all the banking is done through mobile phones. Monday we met with Ashok and we met with Panjab National Bank. All have been pretty productive.

December 24, 2010


Christmas Eve 2010. We are in Mumbai, India. We finished our three interviews today. We spoke with two people at ICICI bank. I am really glad that we stayed and talked to them. It was in a pretty nice part of Mumbai, it felt like Irvine. Just business parks. We were only have the two bank meetings but then we also met Praveen for lunch today at the Cricket club. Pretty fancy. We got some great audio recorded. In the afternoon we went downtown to meet with State Bank of India. We were a half hour late because we stayed and talked to Praveen for too long, but SBI seemed to not mind. SBI was in a great part of downtown, but I was surprised by their operation. It was quite different than ICICI. So now it is Christmas Eve. What to do. Avi is sick so we might not go to his white Christmas party he was planning on. We are in the catholic portion of the city so I could probably find some catholic mass to go to. Last night we went to Olive, some chic club in Mumbai, and stayed there way too late. I think we got home at 3:00 am. I’m not going to lie, it was much more fun than I expected. Lena is taking off tonight to go to the airport and I leave tomorrow night. Our journey is coming to an end.




December 26, 2010 (revisited)


Longest day of the year for me. I took off at 4:20 am and landed around 23 hours later at 2:00 pm in Los Angeles. I waited around the airport and then flew to Salt Lake to be with the fam. What made it even longer is I did not sleep very well and my tv screen on the plane stopped working after 8 hours so I had another 10 hours of no-tv flying. By the I was on mhy flight to Salt Lake I was feeling pretty bad. Christmas consisted of waking up on the floor of Avi’s tile floor and waking up Priya so she could go home. Watching some movie and then going to Breakfast/lunch at Thai restaurant. We then went to some fancy hotel on the beach. We met up with Priya and her friends including some chick from England that had such a great accent. We then went and bought “souvenirs to take home for Christmas, though there wasn’t any place like Delhi’s tourist destinations. Oops. I should have done all the shopping there. We then went over to Priya’s house and had pizza, played games and watched Spiderman 3. We played soccer on her balcony and I got all sweaty which was dumb because I wouldn’t be able to take a shower until I got home to Utah. Needless to say, the people sitting next to me on the plane probably hated my guts. I went to the airport around 1:00 in the morning and just hung around there for a while until the plane took off. I got a massage at the Mumbai airport which was the first professional massage I ever got. I forgot to tell her that my shoulder is in pain and she beat the crap out of it. I was crying on the inside.