At Infosys, the World was his Oyster
By Ram Krishnaswamy & Vickram Crishna 
The Accidental Entrepreneur
Nandan Nilekani claims he is an accidental entrepreneur, in his book “Imagining India”, published by Penguin, which is full of ideas for the new century. I suppose, by accidental, he means it was all about being there, at the right place, at the right time.
Accidental or not, he has enjoyed great success. Infosys, the startup he co-founded, today boasts a five billion dollar empire, with over 100,000 employees the world over. He also co-founded NASSCOM (India's premier software industry association), TiE Bangalore (The Indus Entrepreneurs, a global Asian IT industry club), and has collected more awards than possibly he can remember, from Corporate Citizen of the Year (2004), the Joseph Schumpeter Prize (2005), to a Padma Bhushan (2006), Businessman of the year - Forbes Asia (2006), 100 Most Influential People in the World - Time Magazine (2006 & 2009).
Along the way, he also became an accidental billionaire, a status that none of the other co-founders of Infosys enjoy.
When one attains such status, and the world is in awe of you, one would believe there are no more wants and not much more to achieve in life. Most Westerners would buy an expensive yacht and sail away with a leading lady to Key Largo (Bertie Higgins).
An accidental question, such as, “If you can have such good roads on the Infosys Campus, why are the roads outside so terrible?” was answered by Nandan, with one word: “Politics”. It was countered by another question, “Why don’t people like you get into politics?”
This not only got Nandan thinking, but kindled an inner desire to get into politics for all the right reasons, “The upliftment of India”. His collection of thoughts and ideas form the backbone of Imagining India, published in 2008. Nandan dedicates the book to Nihar, Janhavi and Rohini Nilekani, for keeping him grounded.
In February 2009, Nandan Nilekani gave a most impressive and inspiring TED talk on “Nandan Nilekani's ideas for India's future”. He is passionate in sharing his thoughts on evolution of ideas; he believes ideas, when they take root, lead to ideologies, which become policies, that lead to action. He says there are four kinds of ideas that can impact India, ideas that have arrived, ideas in progress, ideas in conflict, and ideas in anticipation.
He says that in the 60’s and 70’s, we thought of people as a burden and people as a liability. Today, we talk of people as an asset, and as human capital. This choice of phrasing paints the ideologies of Nandan Nilekani, admired by the nation.
With this speech Nandan accidentally made clear his vision, and his mission, to enter Indian politics and contribute to society.
The Accidental Social Networker
After launching Imagining India in Dec 2008, Nandan took to Facebook, like a fish to water, to share his ideas as Facebook Pages, almost one article a day. His posts can be read “Nandan Nilekani: Imagining India”, a Facebook page. Nandan's prayers were answered. He had marketed his ideas so successfully through his book Imagining India and his TED speech, that the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh invited Nandan Nilekani with an offer he could not refuse; an appointment as the Chairman of UIDAI, with a Cabinet Minister's rank.
Nandan wrote, on 23rd July 2009, in his last post for the Imagining India Facebook Page, “As you may have heard, I’ve been appointed as the Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India. I’m grateful for all your congratulations and best wishes.
“In my new role, I can no longer comment on government policy. So this means the end of this blog. The blogging format was new to me, and I greatly enjoyed writing here and listening to your thoughts these past few months.
“Many people have asked me why I accepted this appointment. I have long been a champion of a reform approach that is inclusive of the poor, and in my book, I described unique identity as one of the key steps for achieving this goal. Giving every individual in India a unique identification number can go a long way in enabling direct benefits, and fixing weak public delivery systems, giving the poor access to better healthcare, education, and welfare safety nets. When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh offered me the opportunity to head the UIDAI, I saw it as a chance to help enable ideas I have supported for a long time.
“Since the UIDAI aims to enable a people-centric approach to governance, I will approach the rollout of the initiative in the same way. I’ve been overwhelmed in the last few weeks by offers of assistance and help from Indians around the world. The UIDAI will be setting up a website soon, which will chart out ways for people to volunteer and engage with the project. I hope that together, we will be able to make this initiative an enormous success.”
Teaching through Fables
A favourite teacher at school imparted knowledge in a unique manner. She made us remember what she taught us by linking it to a fable, or a Tolstoy, or a Shakespeare story or even verses from William Wordsworth.
There are two fables that seem pertinent in this context, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's needs and Nandan Nilekani's prayers.
UPA II had promised the poor in India financial inclusion, and is struggling to fix the leaky PDS and NREGA public welfare schemes. Added to this were the corruption charges against UPA II coalition ministers, who oversaw the 2G and CWG scandals, vast scams that tainted the coalition, whose origins lie in the structure of the UPA approach to politics, which is disgracefully similar to that of its major opponents (consequently, the latter are floundering). PM Manmohan Singh was looking for a fabric that would cover all the flaws of UPA II, like the emperor's new clothes.
A fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen about an emperor who pays a lot of money for some new magic clothes, which can only be seen by wise people. The clothes do not really exist, yet the emperor does not admit he cannot see them, because he does not want to seem stupid. Everyone else pretends to see the clothes too, until a child shouts, "The Emperor has no clothes on!"
The title is often used to describe a situation in which people are afraid to criticize something, because everyone else seems to think it is good, or important.
The Unique Identity Number, proposed by Nandan Nilekani, was indeed the special fabric that Indias PM was looking for. In our modern fairy tale, the PM makes Nandan Nilekani (tailor) a Cabinet Minister, and gives him a lot of taxpayer's money (gold), to weave Aadhaar (magic clothes), that can be only be seen by the UPA II sycophants (wise people) in India. The purported benefits of UID do not exist, yet every one pretends to see them, as in the fable. This magic fabric got rebranded as Aadhaar, meaning foundation, to drive home the importance of the idea of benefits that will flow to the common man in India. Given his special status, it now seems that every word he says shines like gold, and everything that he touches turns to gold.
A fable (story with a moral) from ancient Greece, it is about a rich king who is not satisfied with his wealth, and always wishes for more. His wish is granted, and everything he touches turns into gold. However, he can't even hug his beloved child, who is turned into a gold statue upon his touch, and he can't eat food, as it turns immediately into gold. The story is usually related with a tragic end, but sometimes, in the telling, the king begs for forgiveness and removal of the curse of having his prayers granted.
Digitally tagging people individually is the 'gold' that some persons think is the panacea for all of India's troubles. Unfortunately, imposing such tags implies that, without them, people have no identity. It also opens a backdoor, in the digital age, to personal and private information that can be used against them in the future, just as Adolf Hitler's tagging scheme, launched in Nationalist Germany in the 1930s, led to the filtering out of persons of certain origins, politics and even states of health. Initially sent to labor camps, which proved to be sub-optimally efficient, eventually, within the space of a year or two, such persons were systematically killed, a total of a staggering six million, by the time Nazi Germany was defeated in war and the killing could be stopped.
In India, we are very familiar with the dangers of systematic identification. Ordinary civil administration lists, maintained on paper, have been used since the time the country won its independence, to cull out and kill people, a twist to the tryst with destiny celebrated today. It has been used again and again, to disastrous effect, in different states across the country, the only weapon against it being the inefficiency of maintaining records, or on occasion, the strength of will of individuals in some departments of the Centre or of the States that prevented the lists from being illegally leaked.
Now, in 2011, we are faced with a global situation in which skilled computer experts combine their forces to attack so-called secure computer networks. They do this for fun and profit, and sometimes as a statement of political will. The networks of the Indian government have been systematically attacked for the last five years, apparently undetected by the administrators. No concerted responses have even been formulated.
It is in such an environment that a technocrat chooses to place the entire digital assets of the country's people online, in one place. Unfortunately, unlike some versions of King Midas' tale, no benevolent god will be able to retrieve these assets, once leaked, and restore the security of the country's people.
The End of Innocence
23rd July 2009 marked the end of Nandan Nilekani as we all knew him, a pleasant and happy man, opening his mind and heart out to strangers on Facebook. He will never be the same man again. We will never see the same smile again.
What has happened to Nandan Nilekani, since he took over as Chairman of UIDAI, is that he has been surrounded by wise men (Cabinet Ministers and Bureaucrats), who keep praising him for his wonderful ideas. He himself never seems to realize he has bitten off more than he can chew.
I sifted through the 30 odd responses to Nandan's final post, and found my (Ram) own comment, dated 14th August 2009. I wrote “Nandan, UID is a disaster in the making. Please think this through carefully. Citizens of USA, UK and Australia have blocked similar attempts for decades, as it invades peoples privacy. How a UID database is going to benefit the really needy... population of India is still an unanswered question. It is not your credibility or your capabilities but the very need for this UID, is a big question mark?
Don't the citizens of India have a say in this matter? Were the people of India ever asked before elections? Why is this being rushed through without any public debate, is the question?
Please take care
Ram, IIT Madras Alumnus
Don't the citizens of India have a say in this matter? Were the people of India ever asked before elections? Why is this being rushed through without any public debate, is the question?
Please take care
Ram, IIT Madras Alumnus
August 14, 2009 at 6:14pm
A Sad and Forlorn UID Chairman
This picture tells it all. Today, in August 2011, Nandan finds himself alone, and even looks highly stressed and forlorn. What has gone wrong is anybody’s guess.
It is commonly seen that when a young man from an average family becomes successful and rich, he loses most of his genuine friends and gets surrounded by new found friends, birds of the same feather, shall we say. People who hang around you, and wine and dine you when you have made it rich, are seldom long-lasting friends, or friends who will correct you when you are wrong.
It is all about society bashes, lavish dinner parties with caviar and champagne and throwing names to boast who knows who in the upper echelons of the business world and to see how best they can make use of your friendship.
Now that Nandan holds the rank of a cabinet minister, and has control of Rs 45,000 crores (an estimate: it may be three times higher, and there are documented reasons, chiefly the report of the UK's London School of Economics and Political Science on the UK identity cards scheme, that was promoted by UK's former Labour government, officially burning through Sterling 850 million pounds - the actual cost is bound to be higher - before being scrapped, to believe that even this ballpark figure is a vast underestimation) of taxpayer's funds to spend on the UID project, he is surrounded, and may even be hounded, by people who want to win a share of the UID budget.
It is unlike a cheerful, happy and positive Nandan Nilekani, not to meet with Mrs Sonia Gandhi and her National Advisory Committee, on 30th August 2010 as scheduled; because he is not the disrespectful kind.
Many IITians wanted a Q & A Session on UID at the PanIIT Conclave held at NOIDA between the 29th and 30th October 2010. Again, Nandan was not game to be questioned in Public on UID/Aadhaar, even by his own community of alumni.
On Friday the 7th January 2011, a group of students and activists staged a silent protest opposing the 12-digit Aadhaar number, as the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) chairman, Nandan Nilekani, delivered a lecture on Aadhaar’s role in the transformation of public service delivery
Students from the Indian Institute of Science, and activists, held placards and banners saying ‘Beware, Big Brother is watching you’ and ‘Secure electronic archive is a myth’ at the JRD Tata Auditorium of the National Institute of Advanced Studies. When questions got hot, apparently Nandan got flustered and had to be escorted out through the back door. Can this be the same Nandan Nilekani, who would have argued that politicians have a duty to answer questions from the concerned public?
Long after the launch of Aadhaar, the unique identity number, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) chief Nandan Nilekani continues to face political questioning and apprehension about the scheme.
Nilekani, together with Planning Commission secretary Sudha Pillai, appeared before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance, headed by senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha, where many members expressed their reservations.
While some members questioned even the need for such a programme, others asked Nilekani why the scheme was not made mandatory for all residents. Nilekani has promised to give a detailed power-point presentation of Aadhaar in his next appearance before the panel.
Here is the IT Czar of India and the proponent of the UID, unable to answer basic questions on UID raised by the Standing Committee members.
This is not the CEO of Infosys, as we knew Nandan.
This is a Nandan Nilekani who seems to be lost, lonely and forlorn, with no one to turn to for support, besides ‘Yes sir’ men, from the bureaucracy he has created.
Is the face an Index of the Mind ?
If this was not bad enough, we had multinational corporations, HP and IBM, claim that the UIDAI tender processes were unfair. It is interesting that UIDAI Chairman, Nandan Nilekani, did not attend this meeting either. To make things worse, an UIDAI official said, "We had meetings with both companies especially with HP, at least twice, to understand what went wrong. We don't undermine the repute of these large tech majors, but we award tenders on what is presented to us on the table," the official said. He added that the selection is done by an inter-ministerial group, and is not the prerogative of the authority alone.
It appears that as UIDAI Chairman, Nandan Nilekani may not even have the authority to award UIDAI contracts, and is to take instructions from an Inter Ministerial Group. Is this not precisely the defence strategy of A Raja in the 2G Scam and Suresh Kalmadi in the CWG Scam?
Is Nandan Nilekani in charge of UIDAI, or is he the show pony used for marketing and advertising by UPA II?
Has Nandan bitten off more than he can chew?
Is he stuck in quicksand with no bail-out options?
Is Nandan happy, now that his prayers to become a powerful politician have come true?
If he is unhappy, has he prayed for something without understanding the implications? Have Nandan's prayers turn out to be Midas’ Golden Touch?
"If I could have but one wish," said the King, "I would ask that everything I touch should turn to beautiful yellow gold".
"Your wish shall be granted," said the fairy. "At sunrise to-morrow morning your slightest touch will turn everything into gold. But I warn you that your gift will not make you happy."
"I will take the risk," said the King.
Nandan did not crave for more Gold, but wished for “Power”, and that is precisely what he has been blessed with, by UPA II.
Nilekani has been provided with the following multiple identities:
- He is head of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI)
- Head of Technology Advisory Group on Unique Projects (TAGUP)
- Head of Committee on Electronic Toll Collection (ETC)
- Head of an inter-ministerial task force to streamline PDS
- Head of government of India's IT Task Force for Power Sector.
- Member of National Knowledge Commission.
- Member of Review Committee of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission.
- Member of National Advisory Group on e-Governance.
- Member of Subcommittee of the Securities and Exchange Board of India
- Member of Reserve Bank of India's Advisory Group on Corporate Governance.
- Member of Prime Minister's National Council on Skill Development.
What if Nandan Nilekani now realises that his idea of Unique Identity is, in fact, an Idea in Conflict, that he so eloquently describes in his TED lecture, is unconstitutional and illegal, and has no parliamentary approval, violates human privacy, promises to be the magic bullet it is not in reality, and above all, will institutionalise poverty?
Nandan's golden touch (UIDAI Chairmanship) has burdened him with the responsibility of fixing anything he touches, or even thinks of, from the PDS, to NREGA, to Microfinance, to Cash Transfers, to Bank accounts, to Micro ATMS, to kirana shops, to school children, to health care…. Yes, the list is endless.
Let's end this with another reference to what Nandan Nilekani stated, in an article in Outlook titled “We have your Number” : "Opponents of the Aadhaar number have included advocates of privacy rights. The number however, is linked to limited personal information, with no profiling data included. Submitting a father’s name for example, is not required, allowing residents to adopt any name of their choosing and free themselves from caste identification."
Free themselves from caste identification?
Oh yes, we’d welcome that any day, if we could officially shed our caste and free ourselves from this burden of centuries. But this is definitely wishful thinking on Nandan’s part, and not the official UPA II policy.
Announcing the Cabinet decision, Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni told journalists, “This completely fulfils the assurance given by the government in Parliament to the Opposition parties to have a caste-based census along with the socio-economic profiling.” This was published in The Hindu, an article titled “Poverty, caste and religion to be simultaneously mapped”.
While the BPL data for urban and rural poor would be utilised for the 12th Plan, the targeted subsidy schemes as well as the Unique Identification programme (UID), the data on caste and religion would remain confidential, according to an article in Hindu Business line in an article titled “Cabinet approves caste and BPL census”.
Hello, how do people free themselves from caste identification ?
Had Nandan done his homework on ID Cards and had made the time to listen to his genuine friends and to honest people he now calls activists, he may not have published Imagining India, or ever entered politics.
Imagining India was published in Dec 2008, and it must have been a work in progress since 2006. The Real ID Act was enacted in 2005 in USA; the British ID Card Project gained ground in 2005; and so Nandan too believed it was also the best option for India.
There is nothing unique about UID - Nandan Nilekani was just piggybacking on developments in USA and UK. Unfortunately both countries have since abandoned their ID Card projects, yet UPA II is forcing his version on a population that lacks awareness and understanding of issues related to people's privacy.
And what of his new-found friends? Nothing is forever, as discovered in recent years by fervent proponents of intrusive government, the leaders of this movement in the West. Consider George Bush, the President of the United States of America, his party swept out in the polls by unlikely opponent Barack Obama. Consider Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of UK, his party swept out in the polls by the unlikely coalition of conservative and social democrat movements. Consider what unlikely happenstances may yet transform India's wrecked democracy. Could Anna Hazare become the next Prime Minister of India?
People of India are slow to react to UID, but when they do it could be the last nail in UPA II’s coffin, and Nandan Nilekani might seek asylum in a country with no identity cards, like the USA or UK.
Having realised that there was nothing unique about UID, considering many have used it since Hitler's Nazi Germany, Nandan quickly renamed UID as Aadhaar, which means Foundation. Had he done his homework properly, Nandan Nilekani would know that Al Qaeda also means Base i.e. Foundation.
God Save India!
