Nandan Nilekani's new world
Nandan Nilekani's new world is a musty government building in Delhi. Its quiet corridors are peopled by drowsy minions and its whitewashed rooms have file-laden desks, gaudy sofas and, if you are lucky, a thin swivel chair, the top of which is covered with a white towel. In anterooms, a retinue of men yawn, drink cups of tea, read newspapers, ferry photocopies from one place to another, take calls and yawn again. On their tables lie stacks of more dog-eared files; empty boxes of computers and printers lie heaped in a corner. Welcome to the government of India, Mr Nilekani.
The building housing India's Planning Commission - the name itself is a throwback to the days of the sleepy command economy - cannot be an easy place to work for a man who severed a near three-decade-long association with one of the world's top technology firms, Infosys, which he co-founded, to join the government of India. The dour trappings of public office must be a revelation for a man who, according to the Forbes rich men's list from last May, is worth $1.1bn.
Mr Nilekani helped run a $5bn company before his new job. As the head of the new Unique Identification Authority of India, which plans to crunch out identity numbers for more than a billion Indians, his budget for the first year is $26m. Then there is India's Kafkaesque bureaucracy and partisan politics to negotiate.
It is a daunting task, Mr Nilekani agrees, when I go to meet him in his austere new lair. His table has the regulation shiny pen stand and glass paperweights. The first day he joined work, he yanked the white towel off the top of his chair, as photographers clicked gleefully. He doesn't tell me whether it was a symbolic gesture or a spur of the moment reflex. Mr Nilekani says he has taken the job as a challenge, despite the fact that it is a tough one to be conducted under the unblinking gaze of an increasingly unforgiving public and media.
It is not easy to find out why he took the job: the unique identification number seems to have been his pet project for a long time. He gave it away on page 367 of his first book Imagining India, published last year. For the next eight pages, he waxes eloquent on his idea of a "single citizen ID".
Mr Nilekani talks about Indians grappling with multiple identities - one for a ration card, one for the passport, one for the tax payer and so on. A former election commissioner tells him that our database is in these disconnected silos. This also leads to, as Mr Nilekani says, "plenty of phantoms" or fake cards.
He believes a national smart ID could be transformational - even though only 2% of Indians subscribe, say, to the internet. It compels the state to improve the quality of services, gives citizens better access to welfare schemes, and creates deeper awareness of rights and entitlements. A national ID system, says Mr Nilekani, would plug leaks in the distribution system and make "redundant" our dependence on the "moral scruples of the bureaucrats".
I don't quite know whether the brief Mr Nilekani has been given matches up to his ideal national ID card outlined in his book. For one, the number will be given to all residents of India; and not all citizens. So it will possibly not help in detecting illegal immigrants, and will play little role in securing the country. Also it will not be a "benefit-linked smart card", as he writes in his book, but just a number.
But the spring in his step and the shine in his eyes hint at a job Mr Nilekani is looking forward to. "It's a complex governance challenge," he tells me, as we settle down in his sparse room. He is excited by the technological challenge of creating the largest biometric database in the world. "Technology on this level has never been done before. There will be lots of hurdles, setbacks, glitches. As a project this is the biggest and most complex project I have ever undertaken."
Doesn't he miss his old company? Mr Nilekani doesn't blink. "I had a terrific 29-year stint at Infosys. It was an emotional and gut-wrenching move to come out of it," he says. But working in big government cannot be easy for somebody like him? "Government is really a big and enormous difference. It has its challenges. Nothing I have encountered till now is something I had not expected. I am in this project for five years." Mr Nilekani is an astute diplomat.
It will be interesting to see how Mr Nilekani re-educates himself in the ways and workings of the government and real India. He famously inspired Thomas Friedman to write his best-selling The World Is Flat by telling him that the "global playing field was being levelled by technology." The man formerly known as the Bill Gates of Bangalore will possibly now be surprised to find that the digital divide is the latest addition to India's deepening inequalities.
© MMX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~28~RS~)
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First lets us start the project and we can make changes along the way.If you want a perfect start without any inequalities you will go nowhere.
Perfection is a disease.
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Lovely insight into Nandan Nilekani's new job, humanises it nicely. It will be, indeed, interesting to now see how he fares in his new job. Will he throw in the towel (pun intended) or will be fight on? Time will tell. It will also determine whether our corporate citizens are fit to hold public jobs and take on huge challenges, instead of making money for their companies and creating shareholder wealth. This is much, much bigger.
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Interesting about Nandan Nilekani, however while taking a dig at the bureaucracy in India ,I would still add its that very system which has allowed nearly a billion people to live in relative harmony. Inequalities abound everywhere and its time Mr Biswas that you were slightly less critical about anything to do with India.Self belief and a genuine aim for excellence now mark the modern Indian .
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Only a committed and an optimistic person like Nandan Nilenkani can take up a highly challenging assignment like this,leaving a highly paid ,secure,kushy job and making way into a maze of Indian bureaucracy knowing all the pitfalls and sandtraps.
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Thanks Soutik to let us know the new world of Nandan. One thing I should say.....not all Government employees or offices are same. I remember my father who is now retired, was a Govt. employee. I never saw him start late or come early from office or took a single day unauthorised or sick leave. Honestly believe me it is true. I know he is not alone. There are plenty of such people in Government organisations in India. So Nandan, I am sure you will be successful. The only thing you have to choose your team right and after 28 years in private sector, you are definitely ‘The Man’ with that skill. So go ahead and wish you all the best.
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In 1993 I wrote to the then CEC Mr T N Seshan offering many suggestions on national citizen and corporate database and smart card system. He acknowledged it with a typical one-liner. I would like to share these ideas with Mr Nilekani. Can I have his email address please? The search in the UIAI site does not have it.
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Good article!
My best wishes to Mr Nilekani. In India, we are not used to about the fact that one could be passionate about a cause and leave his worldly pleasures to pursue the same. I don't mean to say that such people don't exist, but only that we don't know many of them....
Hence I wish Mr Nilekani with all my heart as his success could bear much more than a mere indetification number (which itself is not a simple feat in itself!)
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Soutik:
I hope that Mr. Nandan Nilekani time in his new job will,
be productive....
~Dennis Junior~
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Interesting article, I must admit I was shocked to read that ration cards are used in India. It would be very educational (at least for me) if Mr Nilekani could enlarge on this topic.
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To me it seems like the only identification that is fool proof in India is a passport. The best way to implement it is to give incentives, make passport number compulsory for various activities, give incentives and make it free for poor. Eventually linking every document like driving license, pan number(Tax ID), ration card etc to the online data base with passport number. Later a persons history of offenses, biometric fingerprinting, property records, driving tickets, taxes, etc can all be gradually added to the same data base. It will greatly help government in identification, accessing ones history, getting fair tax revenues etc. I wonder what Mr Nandan think of this..............
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Sorry but I have negative feelings about this project. We already have the passport, PAN card or ration card. Why one more? How will a "national smart ID" "compel the state to improve the quality of services, give citizens better access to welfare schemes, and create deeper awareness of rights and entitlements"?
While we have pressing problems like rampant unemployment, poor healthcare, crumbling infrastructure and pollution issues to deal with, here is a technology icon trying to create a database at 30 million/yr, which will probably be used as another bureaucratic instrument. Don't get me wrong here. The man has been successful at Infosys, but I think Mr. Nilekani's technological jargon is getting a bit tiring. He's doing this project because its his "pet" and not because we need it. He can continue to hog the spot light for his own ego, until it is watered down and declared a success.
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This is a great job. Would request Mr Nandan to start it with vilagers who may not have any identity and will be in need of Govt support most. This will be certainly more difficult. But I am sure he will find out a way to do it.
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