[Reader-list] Who’s Who in Nilekani’s UID Dream Team

[Jeebesh]

SEPTEMBER 29, 2010, 10:41 AM IST

Who’s Who in Nilekani’s UID Dream Team

AFP/Getty ImagesThe UID project is considered by many specialists the  
most technologically and logistically complex national identification  
effort ever attempted.

http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2010/09/29/whos-who-in-nilekanis-uid-dream-team/

Nandan Nilekani, chairman of India’s Unique Identification Authority,  
assembled an elite group of software engineers, tech-savvy bureaucrats  
and biometric experts to build a system that could issue unique 12- 
digit numbers to all the country’s 1.2 billion people, based on  
fingerprints and iris scans. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh officially  
launches that massive identification effort Wednesday.

Most of the tech gurus that designed the unique ID system were of  
Indian-origin, and volunteered to help the effort without pay. Here’s  
a look at some of the people on Nilekani’s Dream Team:



Srikanth Nadhamuni.

The E-Governor

Mr. Nadhamuni was tech employee #1 and became the host in Bangalore  
for the other engineers who designed the core technology behind the  
world’s most complex national ID program. After spending 16 years in  
Silicon Valley as a technologist and entrepreneur at companies  
including Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics and Intel, Mr. Nadhamuni  
came back to India to work on social-oriented tech projects. He formed  
the e-Governments Foundation in 2003 with Mr. Nilekani to push for  
improved municipal government services. Mr. Nadhamuni and the others  
rented an apartment to use as an office near his home in a gated  
Bangalore community called Adarsh Palm Retreat. He now heads the  
unique ID technology team.

Pramod Varma

The Transactions Expert

Shortly after Mr. Nilekani was tapped to lead the unique ID effort,  
Mr. Varma called him from the U.S and said he wanted to sign on. He  
had just been reading Mr. Nilekani’s book, “Imagining India,” a call  
to action for the country’s government to solve persistent development  
problems. Mr. Varma, an Infosys alumnus, had helped start a Boston- 
area company that specialized in complex inventory management systems  
for retailers like JC Penney and Target. His firm processes 25 million  
orders daily for Best Buy alone. “That’s the kind of inventory system  
we’re looking for at UID,” he says Mr. Nilekani told him. Mr. Varma  
was one of the first five at the Bangalore apartment.



R.S. Sharma

The Bureaucratic Brains

Mr. Nilekani knew the unique ID effort wasn’t all about technology. He  
would need someone with a deep knowledge of the Indian government to  
win over skeptics who wanted to protect their bureaucratic fiefdoms.  
Early on, he brought in Mr. Sharma, a 55-year old bureaucrat from  
Jharkhand state with background in sanitation and science, to serve as  
de facto CEO. Unusually tech-savvy for a government official, Mr.  
Sharma programmed the first version of the software where unique ID  
applicants’ demographic information gets entered. He was responsible  
for hiring and struck deals with various state government agencies and  
public sector banks to help with sign-up. He brought the post office  
on board to deliver 1.2 billion unique numbers to Indians via mail.  
“Technology is a very important part of this, but it’s essentially a  
governance project,” he says.



Wyly Wade

The Development Guru

Mr. Wade, a World Bank consultant who has been coming to India for 14  
years and lives in New Delhi now, agreed to advise Mr. Nilekani on the  
project’s intersections with India’s welfare programs. One major goal  
of issuing unique identity numbers is to root out corruption in the  
distribution of benefits ranging from food to health insurance.  
Falsified and fake identification papers help people siphon away  
billions of dollars of such aid every year from its intended  
beneficiaries. Mr. Wade says the program can give government great  
insight into how its development schemes are working in practice, but  
said India needs to be proactive about putting in place robust privacy  
protections. Though he isn’t a technologist, he worked closely with  
the team in Bangalore. “It was a Silicon Valley startup inside the  
Indian government. It might as well have been in someone’s garage,” he  
says.



Salil Prabhakar

The Fingerprints Specialist

Mr. Prabhakar literally wrote the book on biometrics – or at least a  
widely used one called the “Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition.” He  
took periodic leaves from his biometrics company beginning in the fall  
of 2009 to help the Bangalore team. He also scouted other major  
national ID and biometrics projects around the world, first at an  
industry conference in Tampa and then a workshop organized by the  
World Bank in New Delhi. He says the tight timeline Mr. Nilekani gave  
the group – issuing the first unique numbers by March 2011 – was a  
source of anxiety. “We wondered sometimes, can we pull it off? What’s  
the plan B?” he said. But in the end, what’s being put in place in  
villages across India now is pretty much what got launched in that  
Bangalore apartment. “We slept there. We worked there,” he says. “The  
first designs of the entire system were put together in that room.”