[Reader-list] Forbes India: Nilekani's new job is lining up a nation

[Taha Mehmood]

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/forbes-india-nilekanis-new-job-is-lining-up-a-nation/97186-7-single.html

Forbes India: Nilekani's new job is lining up a nation

Mitu Jayashankar & Rohin Dharmakumar / Forbes India

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.

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?

Past mistakes

Recent attempts to create a citizen database have failed. The National
Democratic Alliance government headed by AB Vajpayee launched the
Multipurpose National Identity Card (MNIC) project as a way to tackle
illegal immigration. It ignored citizen databases like the Election
Commission’s voter list (unreliable because politicians had got
illegal immigrants into the list as a quid pro quo for votes) and the
Census report (no photo proof). The MNIC project’s main objective was
to establish nationality.

The pilot project, in which only about 12 lakh cards were issued
against a target of 20 lakh, was wrapped up and nothing was heard
about MNIC after that. Ernst & Young (E&Y) was a consultant to the
project in which public sector entities like Bharat Electronics played
the main role.

Why was MNIC given a silent burial?

Not just because the government changed at the Centre. The blame, says
an expert who wishes to remain anonymous, lay with the MNIC’s focus on
just establishing nationality which went well with BJP’s politics. The
United Progressive Alliance government of Manmohan Singh did not want
to sustain that image of a police state ahead of the 2009 elections.
It is now driving the Unique Identity Project (UID), with a focus on
taking civic and business services to the under-served people.

Experts who track biometric card technology say MNIC was designed
badly. Initially, prints from only a few fingers of an applicant were
taken. This worked well when the numbers were small, but started
spouting duplicate results when more people were covered. The only way
a biometric project will work in India is to take prints of all 10
fingers. Adding other records such as iris scans could make it more
efficient.

Another problem is that most people in the villages as well as new
immigrants in the cities don’t have any primary documents. To pull
them out of this black hole presents its own challenges.

I’ve ID, therefore I am

An identity card project must be fool-proof. “The moment you give a
national ID card, it becomes the be-all and end-all for a citizen. And
if that doesn’t work, he is as good as dead,” says a partner at E&Y
specialising in government practice Guru Malladi.

Fingerprint-based recognition is the most widely-preferred solution
that is used to identify people, given that each human being is
thought to have unique fingerprints. But experts say there are
practical difficulties. For instance, hardworking labourers and
farmers lose some of their fingerprints. This means a mix of
identification techniques should be used.

The volume of hardware that would be required to keep an identity
system running across the country is enormous. The government has so
far failed to develop an ecosystem of technology providers, smart card
makers and equipment vendors to help make that happen. “We faced
hardware supply issues during the MNIC trials when the volume was just
20 lakh, so you can imagine what will happen when we scale that to 100
crore,” says Malladi.

The next challenge is to avoid duplication of efforts by the
government. The next census exercise is round the corner in 2011.
“Census data forms the foundation for most ID card projects. And given
that the Registrar General of India has already started the process of
collecting citizen information, why not align to their schedule?”
Malladi asks.

This will save money and reduce the probability of errors. Another
useful database will be the one with the public distribution system.

Obviously, bringing together various government departments to work
with a common goal is difficult. The prime minister may have chosen
just the right person for this task. “This job needs consensus
building, very high networking abilities and also heavy persuasion — a
sales job. All these are things that I had done at Infosys,” asserts
Nilekani.