Nilekani's New Identity
ining up a nation
The Man Nandan Nilekani
The Mission
To provide an identity card to each Indian
What’s the Big Deal?
It is the world’s largest biometric identity card project. The database will cover as many as 1.16 billion people. Project cost Rs. 20,000 crore.
Why We Need It
It will help take social security and banking services to the under-served population. It will also weed out illegal immigrants.
The Challenge
To scale up technology, devices and processes to develop it and keep it running
What Can He Do?
Nilekani’s networking skills and ability to build consensus on divisive issues will come in handy.
People to Watch
Tata Consultancy, Infosys, Wipro, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, HCL, 3i Infotech and IL&FS Technologies are likely to bid for the project
Budget Highlights
Pranab Mukherjee (“This project is very close to my heart.”) has set aside Rs. 120 crore for the project; promised to deliver the first cards in 12-18 months
He co-founded one of India’s most respected companies, Infosys. He first coined the phrase “the world is flat” that was adopted by author Tom Friedman as the title for his best-selling book. He wrote a 500-page tome linking India’s history to its future. And then, he quit his alma mater for a crack at governance.
|
|
|
Image: Pallava Bagla/ Corbis
|
|
UNWAVERING SPIRIT: Nilekani has kicked off his public career with one of the most difficult tasks of governance | |
|
Related stories
| |
Nandan Nilekani, 53, today stands before the greatest challenge of his life — of giving an identity card to each of the 1.16 billion people in the country. As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s hand-picked champion for the national identity card project, Nilekani has kicked off his public career with one of the most difficult tasks of governance where others have failed before. To succeed, he will have to marshal all that he learnt in his corporate career of three decades, primarily his networking skills and a noted ability to convert deadlocks into consensus.
“If I had to give up my career at Infosys for something, it had to be impactful like this,” Nilekani says as he prepares to draw a blueprint for the formidable project. “Obviously the massive transformational promise of a project of this kind is hard to resist, and while I have achieved success in other fields, this is a new area.”
The task seems simple enough: To give each citizen a card that can establish his or her identity at any place, any time. This will help to target social security schemes better, take business services to the remotest parts and weed out illegal immigrants. But given the size of the population and the fact that most people in villages don’t have any document to prove who they are, it is a task of nightmarish proportions.
As the head of the newly created Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), Nilekani will have to reconcile, if not integrate, the project’s ambitious goals with the reality that is Indian bureaucracy and politics. The sheer scale — it is the world’s largest identity card project — will render many assumptions invalid.
So, how can Nilekani pull it off?
Single Page View
