norberthaering | Microsoft’s Bill Gates is one of the richest and
most influential people on earth. He announced in 2015 that his Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation was aiming at achieving full
digitalization of the payment systems of India and other populous
developing countries by 2018. This “financial
inclusion” program for India dates back to well before Narendra Modi
came to power. It was elevated to official US policy by Executive Order
in 2012, because the President saw vital US security interests are at
stake.
Speaking for the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation at the “Financial Inclusion Forum” in Washington, organized
by the Treasury Department and USAID on December 1, 2015, Bill Gates said (min 17):
“Full digitalization
of the economy may happen in developing countries faster than anywhere
else. It is certainly our goal to make it happen in the next three years
in the large developing countries. We have very significant efforts in
Nigeria, Pakistan and India, (and) a dozen other countries, where we
work with the central banks to make sure that the right kind of
transaction switch is available…(min 20)…We worked directly with the central bank
there (India) over the last three years and they created a new type of
authorization called the payments bank, and those customers will be able
to use their mobile phones to perform basic financial transactions. And
11 entities applied, including all the mobile phone providers, and were
granted that payment bank status.”
“Financial Inclusion is a buzz word for bringing people into the system.”
The cooperation of the Gates foundation and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is and has been a very tight one. Nachiket Mor, a “Yale World Fellow”, is head of the Gates Foundation India. He is also a board member of the RBI, with responsibility for financial supervision. He
chaired the RBI Committee on the Licensing of Payment Banks and a
financial inclusion committee that the RBI convened in 2013.
+++Note: Since this text puts forward a conspiracy theory, I want to let the actors and their documents speak for themselves as much as possible.
Where my own judgement and additional information figure in
significantly, as in the following lines, it will be in italics and
clearly marked. If you are skeptical, you may want to jump over
those sections in italics in a first round, to not be unduly influenced
in your interpretation of the quotes from the main actors and their
documents.
If the cooperation of Gates Foundation and RBI
had been ongoing already for three years in early December 2015, this
implies a start in late 2012 or early 2013. This would be more than a
year before Narendra Modi became Prime Minister of India. It would also
have been almost two years, before Modi visited Barack Obama, told him
about his plans to do something for financial inclusion and receive the
happy message that the US was willing to help. It would have started
three years before the partnership of USAID and the Indian Finance
Ministry on financial inclusion was officially announced at that
same forum and five years before the RBI and Narendra Modi performed the
great and brutal experiment of starving the whole of India of cash for
months. All this time, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was
quietly working closely and directly with the RBI towards Gates’
declared goal of making the Indian payment system totally cashless by
the end of 2018. He did so with backing and involvement of the
US-government and with help of allies such as the World Economic
Forum.+++
Gates' quotes stood in a context where he stressed
that a government’s assistance to the poor and needy should not be
delivered by the “incredibly inefficient” method of providing cash or
grain to the recipient. “Digitalization helps targeting”, he said, if
payments are done via mobile banking. He praised Mexico (min 18), whose Finance Minister, Luis Videgaray Caso, was present, announcing:
“We are going to use government income support programs as financial inclusion tools”,
as tools to bring everybody into the system. The
idea endorsed by Gates and the financial inclusion “community” at the
forum was to steer poor people into participating in the digital payment
system by making it a condition for receiving any or certain forms of
support.
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