[Reader-list] Why Nilekani needs a broader mandate- 134

[Taha Mehmood]

Dear All,

In his column in the Indian Express Sudheendra Kulkarni, a key aide of
LK Advani of the BJP  endorses the government of India's move to
appoint Nilekeni Saheb as the head of Unique Identification Authority
of India (UIDAI). The BJP is of course the chief 'opposition' party of
India.

Kulkarni Saheb rehmat-ullah-burkatahu tells us i.e. his readers that
the identity card project was in fact Advani jee's brainchild;  here,
one must bear in mind that with the strength of left parties and other
important sources of resistance greatly reduced in the present
parliament, one will perhaps not see any move by a major political
party or a group of parties to question the implementation of MNIC.

One wonders though how will the GOI be able to carryout a national
census and verification process and establish beyond reasonable doubt
that a billion or so people who inhabit the political boundaries of
India are in fact Indians in just three years when they could not
identify all voters of this country in the past seventeen years or all
the people living below the poverty line in the past ten years?

Last heard, they were distributing BPL cards in the name of Sania
Mirza in Andhra Pradesh.

Imagine that :)


The interesting point is 'While the  state (Andhra Pradesh's)
population is about 8.3 crore, the population figure, as per the
number of ration cards issued, crossed 9.8 crore.'  ( Please read the
story pasted below SK's article for more on Sania jee's BPL triumph)


Anyways...lets come back to Nandan Saheb rehmat-ullah-burkatahu .

Who is Nandan Nilekeni?

The Infosys website gives us this information on Nilekeni Saheb- 'In
January 2006, Nandan became one of the youngest entrepreneurs to join
20 global leaders on the prestigious World Economic Forum (WEF)
Foundation Board. He is listed as one of the 100 most influential
people in the world by Time Magazine, 2006.Nandan co-founded India's
National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) as
well as the Bangalore Chapter of The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE). Nandan
is a member of the National Knowledge Commission and also part of the
National Advisory Group on e-Governance. He is also a member of the
review committee of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal
Mission. He took over as the elected President of NCAER (the premier,
independent, applied economics research institute in India) in April
2008.Nandan has been involved in various initiatives of the central
and state governments. He was the Chairman of the Government of
India’s IT Task Force for power. Nandan has also served as a member of
the subcommittee of the Securities and Exchange Board of India that
dealt with issues related to Insider Trading, and as a member of the
Reserve Bank of India’s Advisory Group on corporate governance. Nandan
was on the Board of Reuters as a non-executive member from January
2007 till the merger of Reuters with Thomson in April 2008. He is the
Vice Chairman of The Conference Board, Inc., an international research
and business membership organization. He is on the Board of Directors
of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and is a member
of the Board of Governors of the Indian Council for Research on
International Economic Relations (ICRIER).
( http://www.infosys.com/about/management-profiles/nandan-nilekani.asp )

This guy seems to have covered an entire spectrum of interests and
lobby groups from big media to elite economic consultancy to education
to urban renewal he has done it all. However,I  still also do not
understand the logic of appointing a person like Nilekeni as head of
Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).

All the jobs he did at the national level seems like consultancy jobs
where he was acting as a member of advisory board or a member of
review committee  and so on. I do not know how does that makes him
eligible to head Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).
Could someone please ask him, what does one mean by personal identity?
After he joined the Government, people have been talking about his
'sacrifice'. How he had to 'resign' from Infosys and take the new
responsibility. All this he 'sacrificed' for the nation they say.

In 2008 Infosys, earned a revenue of US$ 4 billion or 20-25000 crore
rupees. Are we to believe that Nandan Saheb 'sacrificed' all this to
head an entity  which is worth SIX times the money he could have ever
managed at Infosys?

Then there are other nagging questions.

Why is he appointed? What are the requirements for this post? Is he
the only person in India who can fulfill those requirements? Is he
even eligible? Who does he represents? What experience does he have in
the business of census and human verification? What knowledge base
does he brings to the board which out matches that of a seasoned
bureaucrat belonging to the office of the Registrar General of India,
someone who will not only be experienced in carrying out large scale
census surveys but also be completely at ease with logistical,
procedural details???

I am truly fascinated  by the deafening silence of our TRP led and TRP
fed, mainstream electronic and print media to allow a blatant and
uncritical policy apparatus to first create a bland rhetoric of
'modernity' with its strange fixation for single alphabet prefixed
phrases in 'e-governance' and 'g-governance', whatever they mean and
then construct a seemingly rational argument for a proposed transfer
of 1.5 lakh crore rupees!!!

How easy is that?

Hey need monies...just talk of e-g and g-g and there you go....

 GOI will  appoint NN, the WEF guy, the TiE guy, the NASSCOM guy who
will give a lakh crore rupees while SK will say bravo bravo!!!

BTW could someone please do the math and tell us how many zeroes are
there in a lakh crore???

No one, it appears, wants to imagine what could 1.5 lakh crore rupees
could do to education, health, basic sanitation or rural roads in
India?

However I do think, people like me, miss the bigger picture...actually
it could look quite hip and sexy to see half a million of us Indians,
skimpily clad and carrying other people's shit on their heads in
porous cane baskets, employed in highly sought after jobs like manual
scavenging, sashaying down the streets with smart digitized tokens,
representing a triumph of 'e-governance' and 'g-governance' (which
accords them Indian citizenship), dangling around their necks.

Please read this brilliantly written congratulatory piece by Kulkarni
Saheb for more. This is where SK eloquently argues for a 'broader
mandate' for NN....

I think one can clearly read in Kulkarni's text that the BJP is giving
a strong message to the nation that not only it is unfit to rule India
it but with its un-critical approach to initiate a debate around
sarkaari policies like MNIC it appears as if the BJP is unfit to sit
in opposition too.

With warm regards

Taha

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/why-nilekani-needs-a-broader-mandate/482226/0

Why Nilekani needs a broader mandate

Dr Manmohan Singh’s government deserves kudos for appointing Nandan
Nilekani as the head of a super-ambitious national project—to
implement, within three years, a multi-purpose unique identity card
scheme covering all Indian citizens. He will be at the helm of the
Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which was set up
early this year and is attached to the Planning Commission. One of the
icons of the Indian IT industry, he is certainly the right choice for
the task. After contributing to the phenomenal success of Infosys
Technologies, which he co-founded with N.R. Narayana Murthy, he has
chosen to sacrifice his corporate position to take up a major
responsibility in government.

Nilekani’s transition to public life was presaged by the best-selling
book Imagining India, which he wrote last year to explore, what he
termed in its sub-title as ‘Ideas for the New Century’. Although the
unique identity card scheme was discussed at length in the book, the
idea itself is not new, nor can it be uniquely credited to the UPA
government. Its first spirited votary was L.K. Advani, who, as Home
Minister in the NDA government, made it one of his pet themes and even
launched it as a pilot scheme in select districts. Sadly, like many
pilot schemes in our country, it remained at the pilot stage for the
first five years of the UPA government. Now the Prime Minister has
done the right thing by rescuing it in time for the forthcoming 2011
census.

It is not often that governments scout outside talent to spearhead
important national programmes. Both our bureaucracy and the political
class have perfected the art of filling government bodies with their
own people, regardless of whether the appointee is the best person for
the job. For bureaucrats it is a way of hopping on to post-retirement
perches and for politicians it is a way of accommodating those who
cannot be made MLAs, MPs or ministers. It is high time our leaders
realised that the country is bigger than the politicians and
bureaucrats. There is no dearth of public-spirited, highly capable and
deeply committed professionals outside the government system who can,
and are willing to, shoulder challenging assignments. Sadly, very few
get the opportunity they deserve. Now that the Congress is back with a
bigger mandate, can we hope to see more Nilekanis being given
leadership positions in governmental programmes in education,
healthcare, housing, infrastructure development etc?

Measured in terms of its potential benefit and transformational
impact, the Unique Identity Card scheme can turn out to be historic.
However, the potential will reach its fullness only if the scheme is
integrated into the larger matrix of e-governance and g-governance (g
stands for good). And this is where the UPA government needs to view
the UIDAI not as a stand-alone body but as an important component of a
larger mission to achieve improved governance and better
socio-economic development using the revolutionary tools that IT
provides.

A major drawback in e-governance initiatives in India is that they are
not explicitly linked to, and measured by, the goals of g-governance.
Which is why, many government departments routinely reduce
e-governance to simply procuring more IT hardware and software.
Moreover, the departmental mentality is so deeply entrenched in
government that they rarely work in unison to achieve common and
inter-related objectives. Thus, their e-governance initiatives suffer
due to duplication, non-standardisation, non-scalability and poor
training, all resulting in wastage of resources and poor outcomes. The
UIDAI can catalyse a change in this pattern. For this, it needs to be
properly conceived with an enlarged mandate. If the government gives a
purely technical mandate to the UIDAI, it will not be difficult for
Nilekani and his team to issue a basic ID card to all citizens, just
as the Election Commission has done so in respect of the voter

ID card.

However, from the point of view of both the citizen and the
government, the full benefits of the unique ID card begin to flow only
when the multiple purposes for which it can be used can be seamlessly
integrated into it. This requires considerable re-engineering of the
functioning of various entities of government, right from the Centre
to the panchayat. For example, citizens will judge the success of the
unique ID scheme on the basis of whether it reduces corruption,
harassment and delays in their interface with government. Else, they
will view it as a needless encumbrance, meant more to advance the
none-too-transparent goals of babudom than to meet the felt needs of
citizens themselves.

My suggestion is that the Prime Minister should set up something like
a Good Governance Reforms Implementation Authority, chaired by him so
that he imparts to it the full weight of his office. The
Administrative Reforms Commission, set up by the previous UPA
government under the chairmanship of Veerappa Moily, has made a
comprehensive set of recommendations, almost all of which have an
E-governance component. And nearly all of them require the
implementation of the unique ID scheme. These recommendations
encompass the issues of national security, development,
corruption-free delivery of government services, and transparency,
efficiency and accountability in the functioning of various
institutions of democracy (including the judiciary). Hence, the UIDAI
should function as a subset of a larger mission for the promotion of
good governance. Moreover, the Centre should proactively make all
political parties, state governments and local self-government bodies
partners in achieving speedy progress of both the unique ID card
scheme as well as the broader mission for good governance reforms.

Nilekani’s is by no means an easy assignment. There are many thorny
issues that he will have to handle, above all a change-resistant
system of governance. He needs our good wishes.

sudheenkulkarni at gmail.com


http://www.tribuneindia.com/2009/20090614/main7.htm

Sania belongs to BPL family!

Hyderabad, June 13
Tennis star Sania Mirza may be a millionaire but her face appears on a
ration card belonging to a below poverty line (BPL) family in Andhra
Pradesh.

The white ration card, which makes a family eligible to get rice at a
highly-subsidised price of Rs 2-a-kg and social security benefits
health insurance and a permanent housing, has been issued to one Laxmi
of Vizianagaram district with a photograph of Sania.

The revelation of the case has invited the wrath of Chief Minister Y S
Rajasekhara Reddy who reviewed the social security schemes at a
high-level meeting here today, sources in the CMO said.

This only showed how blindly the ration cards were issued without any
proper verification, the Chief Minister reportedly fumed at officials
of the Civil Supplies Department. While the state population is about
8.3 crore, the population figure, as per the number of ration cards
issued, crossed 9.8 crore.

The Chief Minister himself revealed in the state Assembly three days
ago that there were as many as 2.15 crore white ration cards, making
those families eligible to draw subsidised rice and avail of other
welfare schemes. — PTI