A software mogul who was roped in by the government to count and tag every Indian for the world’s largest database. Nandan Nilekani proved that he was indeed unique and up to the task despite the humongous size of the project. A journey retold.
It was the summer of 2009 when Nandan Nilekani left Infosys, the Indian outsourcing company that he had co-founded nearly 30 years earlier. He had been invited by the government of India to launch and head the most ambitious project of tagging every Indian with a unique number which would all part of one database, a sort of social security ID like in the West. At the going away party Nilekani made a speech which was live streamed on the company’s internal network watched by more than a hundred thousand employees. Nandan said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had made him an offer which he could not refuse
He famously said, “My only identity in Infosys. I will be going to lead a programme to give identity to every Indian. But today I am losing my identity.”
Nandan left that day with a gift of a Toshiba laptop and his holding in the company amounting to 1.45 per cent which today is valued at about half a billion dollars. It was a big shift from the private to the public.
“It wasn’t fuzzy,” Nilekani said of the I.D. project. “Five years from the day I took it, you would be able to say I succeeded, if people got numbers, and you’d know I screwed up if people didn’t get numbers. So it was a zero or a one.”
After he left Infosys in July 2009,Nilekani began building a government department from scratch which was a huge dislocation from his comfort zone, having to zip between Bangalore and Delhi. The UIDAI had to look solid from the start or else there was the risk of political will slipping away. Soon he had a small team of civil servants and tech experts to establish much of the project’s architecture.
The main thrust of the project was to reduce the economic distance between the have and the have-nots. Designed to be the biggest social project on the planet, it was described to be a project of national transformation. The scheme came to be known as Aadhar which means foundation in Hindi. Its logo a red fingerprint, in the guise of a rising sun.
A national ID seemed to be the need of the hour. After all just thirty-three million Indians, out of 1.2 billion, pay income tax, and only sixty million have passports. Hundreds of millions of Indians are barely visible to the state: they have either no ID at all or a weak form of it, issued by local authorities. Consequently, they can’t easily open bank accounts or buy cell-phone SIM cards, and they can’t secure state services owed to them. Their official opacity hampers economic growth and emboldens bureaucrats who steal from welfare funds or harass citizens for bribes.
Nilekani, who has often called Aadhaar “humongous” in scale, managed to bring two clashing worlds together – Delhi’s world of bureaucracy and Bangalore’s information-technology entrepreneurship. Nilekani’s friends were quick to point out that if he succeeded in establishing an ID protocol — thereby helping to create an inclusive, low-corruption identity for India itself — it would be because he drew Delhi and Bangalore into an awkward embrace.
Nilekani has a round face as if reflected in the back of a spoon, and the wry, detached manner of someone so taken by visions of the future that the present seems too mundane to merit his full attention. Although he is often persuasive, he is not always eloquent; sentences often fall away to phrases like “the branding thingy.” He is known as a great salesman, but he sells softly, blithely, by making it seem almost an imposition to have to explain the benefits of his product.
Though many countries have long traditions of people-listing — in records connected to baptism, taxation, or conscription — India does not. Nilekani’s digital effort is what he calls “leapfrogging stuff.” If the project is successful, India would abruptly find itself at the forefront of citizen-identification technology, outperforming Social Security and other non-biometric, and not fully randomised, systems.
Nilekani’s closest equivalent in America could probably be Michael Bloomberg. His biggest challenge while executing the project was how to bring the best people from government and from the private sector into one place?
His company, Infosys, is worth nearly thirty billion dollars and makes its money by hiring young, technologically minded people, providing them with a comfortable workspace on one of the company’s 11 Indian campuses — vivid lawns, subsidised meals, gyms, and pools — and then selling their skills abroad. In the company’s core business, technicians write and support custom software that performs unglamorous tasks, such as inventory and payroll, for large overseas corporations. Clients have included Amazon, Apple, Ford, and Bank of America.
The company was founded in 1981 when Nilekani was a laconic 26-year-old. He hailed from an educated, middle-class, English-speaking family. His father was the manager of a Bangalore textile mill, a leftist and a socially conscious citizen. His mother, a college graduate, stayed home. When Nilekani was 12, and his older brother was at college, his father lost his job, and his parents moved away from Bangalore in search of work. Nilekani was sent to live with his uncle, in Dharwad, a town north of Bangalore. From there, in 1973, he won a place to study electrical engineering at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, or IIT, in Mumbai. He was an average student but a social leader, a wide-ranging reader, and a star of the college’s quiz team.
Upon graduating, Nilekani became a trainee at a Mumbai software-engineering firm. His interviewer was Narayana Murthy. Two and a half years later, Murthy left the firm to found Infosys and invited Nilekani and five others to come with him.
For most of the 1980s, Nilekani lived in the US. In 1993, he and his co-founders became rich when Infosys went public in India. By then, the government, which had long leant toward socialism, had begun to enact pro-business reforms. In 1999, Infosys became the first Indian company to be listed on a North American stock exchange. Three years later, Murthy stepped aside, and Nilekani became CEO. The company’s rate of annual growth accelerated, reaching 50 fifty per cent in 2005
Nilekani handed over his CEO position to a successor in 2007, but he stayed at the company as co-chairman, and began writing a book, “Imagining India,” a smart, social-democratic reading of the country, in which his anxiety about national shortcomings—education, inequality, urban infrastructure—was offset by confidence about the reforming potential of information technology, open markets, and a bulge in the segment of the population about to enter the workforce.“
“Imagining India” was published at the end of 2008. In the book, Nilekani made a case for unique I.D. numbers. As he noted, a right-of-center Indian government, which was in power from 1999 to 2004, began to introduce a national ID scheme, largely driven by anxiety about border security. Nilekani rethought the idea as a more liberal, and more economically oriented, one. Such a programme would remind citizens of their “rights, entitlements, and duties,” and would oblige the state to improve services. It would boost the national economy, by allowing hundreds of millions of Indians without bank accounts to open one, and it would cut government losses from corruption.
Nilekani’s book became a best-seller. In May 2009, India reelected the government that had been in power for five years: the United Progressive Alliance, a coalition dominated by the Indian National Congress, with Manmohan Singh again as Prime Minister. Nilekani was offered a place on the Planning Commission, a body that guides national social policy. This did not appeal to him. He put himself forward as a possible education minister, but the idea was rejected. So the conversation turned to ID. The rest is history.