V. Shoba & Uma Vishnu
10th October 2010
There’s a story that’s now old hat on the third floor of the Jeevan Bima building in Connaught Place, central Delhi. Of how, when Nandan Nilekani, the freshly-minted chairperson of the Unique Identity Authority of India and someone with the rank and status of a Cabinet minister, got his sarkari car, he took one look at it and asked for the lal batti on top to be removed. Here he was, talking of issuing every Indian resident an identity and doing away with that red, bulbous identity that Delhi’s power circles bask in.
“It’s a start-up, ya…,” says Nilekani, looking relaxed on a sofa in his room at the Delhi headquarters of the UIDAI. He is talking of his big switch, that “restart button” he pressed at 54 when he moved from being CEO of Infosys to heading a venture that still seems to most people an abstract idea—issuing a number to each one of India’s 1.2 billion people, a number that can potentially empower people. A year into the “start-up”, the idea has rolled out, taken the shape of a 12-digit number and got itself a name—Aadhaar, which in most Indian languages means ‘foundation’.
“It’s a start-up, ya…,” says Nilekani, looking relaxed on a sofa in his room at the Delhi headquarters of the UIDAI. He is talking of his big switch, that “restart button” he pressed at 54 when he moved from being CEO of Infosys to heading a venture that still seems to most people an abstract idea—issuing a number to each one of India’s 1.2 billion people, a number that can potentially empower people. A year into the “start-up”, the idea has rolled out, taken the shape of a 12-digit number and got itself a name—Aadhaar, which in most Indian languages means ‘foundation’.
On September 29, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi launched the first set of Aadhaar numbers in Thembli village in Maharashtra’s Nandurbar district. A couple of days later, on October 2, 40 homeless people were enrolled in Delhi.
“Now that you have this number, what do you do with it? That’s what we are looking at next—the application. At a fundamental level, the number is an application that offers identity, mobility and authentication. So there are two major areas where this can be applied—how can the number help you open a bank account, which is what financial inclusion is about, and how can it help get you a SIM card? We are looking at other such applications,” says Nilekani.
When he says that, the number assumes a practical air, an aadhaar that any democracy should have offered its people anyway, the ability to open a bank account, buy a cell phone, get the money you worked hard for or get your face on a ration card without having to fake your identity or pay a few hundreds of rupees to get one.
But for people who have been outside of the system for so long, a hint of any such ‘identity’ can be tantalising.
Ganga Kapavarapu, Deputy Director General (Finance), who was among the first few people to join Nilekani’s team, recalls an incident at the Delhi launch of Aadhaar for the homeless. “A man came up to us and asked if the number was his passport, if it meant that he could now get a ration card, a PAN card, a driving licence and a string of other cards he had only heard of. We don’t make any such claims but what do you do with such huge expectations, expectations that are valid because he has a right to them as much as any one of us does,” she says.
It turns out then that the number wasn’t just Nilekani’s restart button. If the idea works, that homeless person in the Delhi night shelter must have just found his.
An idea takes shape
Aadhaar has its origins in a discussion paper of the Planning Commission in 2006. Around the same time, Nilekani had come up with a similar idea in his book, Imagining India, describing unique identity as one of the key steps for getting the poor and the marginalised into the system. Three years later, in July 2009, the Unique Identification Authority of India was established with Nilekani as chairman. With Brand Nilekani at the helm and the romantic idea of a number, there were enough people willing to join the project but it was important to choose the right mix of talent and enterprise.
R S Sharma, a Jharkhand-cadre IAS officer from the 1978 batch, was the first to join. As district magistrate in Begusarai, Bihar, Sharma had developed a curious “hobby”—writing computer programmes. He wrote one that helped him track stolen firearms in the district and he solved 22 cases in a month. He took his hobby seriously enough to get a Masters in Computer Science—“at the age of 42”—from the University of California. After a stint in the Finance Ministry’s Department of Economic Affairs, Sharma joined UIDAI around the time Nilekani came in.
Today, around 150 people are at work on the number—people like Sharma, Kapavarapu and BB Nanawati (DDG, Technology) from within the government set-up, those on sabbatical from their organisations, volunteers who walked out on flourishing careers to be a part of the UID team, interns from universities across the world—all convinced about the transformational potential of the number.
UID’s Technology Centre on the Marathalli-Sarjapur Outer Ring Road in Bangalore is where the best IT brains, all inspired by Nilekani’s prodigious idea of a universal ID infrastructure, have made Aadhaar possible. Here, Srikanth Nadhamuni, the head of technology for UIDAI, emerges from a crowded conference room, the door shutting behind him to muffle what sounds like a heated discussion into a murmur. He says the biometry workshop he just left is tuning the next generation of biometrics for Aadhaar.
The tech centre looks and functions like a start-up, with a core team of 15-20 that works at blazing momentum, little organisational hierarchy, and a lot of whiteboards on which, over the last 12 months, the technical feasibility of the UID has been established.
Nadhamuni, a Silicon Valley veteran of 16 years who returned to Bangalore to form the e-Governance Foundation with Nilekani in 2003, joined in July 2009. “Some of the best people came to us as volunteers, others came on a sabbatical, and many brought with them over 20 years of experience in the industry. They didn’t care about the money they wouldn’t be making, this was a nation-building exercise they wanted to be part of. We took our pick of the best,” Nadhamuni says.
One of the first to join the core team in Bangalore and lead the biometrics arm, Raj Mashruwala, founder and mentor of several Silicon Valley start-ups, agreed to move from California, where his family lives, for three months; he stayed on for 13. Arriving in Bangalore with two suitcases, he met Nadhamuni at an appliance store to pick up a refrigerator and a microwave and move in to an apartment complex on Outer Ring Road, where, for the next three months, they would eke out the essentials of a project ten times the size of the US-VISIT biometric identification service. “When we started out in the apartment, we had two tables, whiteboards, six chairs and a shoerack that served as additional seating when corporates visited. The maid would bring us tea in a flask from my house. We didn’t need anything else at that time,” Nadhamuni says.
Today, the office hosts 60-70 employees from the three consortia of biometric service providers UIDAI has partnered with—led by Accenture and MindTree; Mahindra Satyam and Sagem Morpho Security; and Hewlett-Packard, L-1 Identity Solutions and 4G Identity Solutions. “Since the project went live on September 29, UIDs are being cranked out of our Central Identification Data Repository (CIDR) in Whitefield as we speak. The challenge now is to ensure that the biometrics have enough randomness so that no individual is mistaken for another—what is commonly known as de-duplication. At peak load, say, when a million people register in a day, it might mean matching billions of biometrics,” says Nadhamuni.
The sheer breadth of the exercise is unnerving, but it’s not something Pramod K. Varma, chief architect for the project, is worried about. A specialist in complex inventory management systems and former chief technology architect for Sterling Communications, who has built highly distributed computing systems for Walmart, JC Penney and Target that process millions of orders a day, Varma heard about the UID project in July last year, and within a week, was ready to imagine India a la Nilekani.
The project has drawn change-makers from across the world—from Sanjay Jain, who made the switch from being product manager for Google Maps and Google News to one for UIDAI; to Bala Parthasarathy, co-founder of the Web photo service company Snapfish, and many others.
Unlike other government set-ups that had the luxury of time, at the UID office, everything had to be done simultaneously—hiring and training staff, meetings and workshops with registrars and enrollment agencies, setting up the tech centre and the CIDR in Bangalore, and meetings and MoUs with state governments. Nilekani travelled extensively, to 23 states, and made PowerPoint presentations to 15 chief ministers. All this with an eye on the calendar—UIDAI’s commitment to the government was that the first set of numbers would be rolled out between August 2010 and February 2011.
The tech team is now working on the next set of biometric features—authentication services, address updates and registering children as and when they turn five—as well as prototypes of applications of UID in NREGA, PDS, banking, microfinance, micro-ATMs, education and healthcare.
As for the devices, four to five of each kind—iris scanners, fingerprint scanners, cameras—have been certified by the UIDAI, in accordance with its multi-vendor policy to encourage healthy competition. Along with a laptop, they fit neatly into a portable kit—one of the many open-source designs for a self-contained biometric unit—voluntarily designed by Michael Foley, who also designed the 2010 Commonwealth Games baton and Titan’s slimmest watches.
Back in Delhi, Kapavarapu, DDG (Finance), insists she is proof that it wasn’t just people in the private sector who have glamourous stories of chucking their jobs for the pure passion of working on an ‘idea’.
Kapavarapu, an ’81-batch officer of the Indian Audit and Accountant Service, was principal Accountant General of Himachal Pradesh before she joined UIDAI in October 2009. She opens her laptop to show a picture of her earlier workplace—the gorgeous British-era Gorton Castle in Shimla. “This is something I show people when they say you guys are with the government, you wouldn’t have had to give up anything to come here,” she jokes.
When Kapavarapu and Nanawati joined the project, they worked out of a small room in Yogana Bhawan, the Planning Commission office. “Three of us shared one room, a quarter the size of this room, one PC and one table. We took turns to work,” says Nanawati.
Though the project has raised concerns of profiling and of the state infringing on citizens’ privacy, Nilekani says the stress should be on the benefits that are “overwhelming, while looking at how the risks, if any, can be mitigated.”
Nilekani knows only too well that the expectations from him are huge, especially when anyone who recognises him—at airports and other public places—walks up and asks when he is getting his card. Nilekani has had to politely remind them that it’s not a ‘card’, but a ‘number’ that will give them an identity in a crowd of over a billion.
“Now that you have this number, what do you do with it? That’s what we are looking at next—the application. At a fundamental level, the number is an application that offers identity, mobility and authentication. So there are two major areas where this can be applied—how can the number help you open a bank account, which is what financial inclusion is about, and how can it help get you a SIM card? We are looking at other such applications,” says Nilekani.
When he says that, the number assumes a practical air, an aadhaar that any democracy should have offered its people anyway, the ability to open a bank account, buy a cell phone, get the money you worked hard for or get your face on a ration card without having to fake your identity or pay a few hundreds of rupees to get one.
But for people who have been outside of the system for so long, a hint of any such ‘identity’ can be tantalising.
Ganga Kapavarapu, Deputy Director General (Finance), who was among the first few people to join Nilekani’s team, recalls an incident at the Delhi launch of Aadhaar for the homeless. “A man came up to us and asked if the number was his passport, if it meant that he could now get a ration card, a PAN card, a driving licence and a string of other cards he had only heard of. We don’t make any such claims but what do you do with such huge expectations, expectations that are valid because he has a right to them as much as any one of us does,” she says.
It turns out then that the number wasn’t just Nilekani’s restart button. If the idea works, that homeless person in the Delhi night shelter must have just found his.
An idea takes shape
Aadhaar has its origins in a discussion paper of the Planning Commission in 2006. Around the same time, Nilekani had come up with a similar idea in his book, Imagining India, describing unique identity as one of the key steps for getting the poor and the marginalised into the system. Three years later, in July 2009, the Unique Identification Authority of India was established with Nilekani as chairman. With Brand Nilekani at the helm and the romantic idea of a number, there were enough people willing to join the project but it was important to choose the right mix of talent and enterprise.
R S Sharma, a Jharkhand-cadre IAS officer from the 1978 batch, was the first to join. As district magistrate in Begusarai, Bihar, Sharma had developed a curious “hobby”—writing computer programmes. He wrote one that helped him track stolen firearms in the district and he solved 22 cases in a month. He took his hobby seriously enough to get a Masters in Computer Science—“at the age of 42”—from the University of California. After a stint in the Finance Ministry’s Department of Economic Affairs, Sharma joined UIDAI around the time Nilekani came in.
Today, around 150 people are at work on the number—people like Sharma, Kapavarapu and BB Nanawati (DDG, Technology) from within the government set-up, those on sabbatical from their organisations, volunteers who walked out on flourishing careers to be a part of the UID team, interns from universities across the world—all convinced about the transformational potential of the number.
UID’s Technology Centre on the Marathalli-Sarjapur Outer Ring Road in Bangalore is where the best IT brains, all inspired by Nilekani’s prodigious idea of a universal ID infrastructure, have made Aadhaar possible. Here, Srikanth Nadhamuni, the head of technology for UIDAI, emerges from a crowded conference room, the door shutting behind him to muffle what sounds like a heated discussion into a murmur. He says the biometry workshop he just left is tuning the next generation of biometrics for Aadhaar.
The tech centre looks and functions like a start-up, with a core team of 15-20 that works at blazing momentum, little organisational hierarchy, and a lot of whiteboards on which, over the last 12 months, the technical feasibility of the UID has been established.
Nadhamuni, a Silicon Valley veteran of 16 years who returned to Bangalore to form the e-Governance Foundation with Nilekani in 2003, joined in July 2009. “Some of the best people came to us as volunteers, others came on a sabbatical, and many brought with them over 20 years of experience in the industry. They didn’t care about the money they wouldn’t be making, this was a nation-building exercise they wanted to be part of. We took our pick of the best,” Nadhamuni says.
One of the first to join the core team in Bangalore and lead the biometrics arm, Raj Mashruwala, founder and mentor of several Silicon Valley start-ups, agreed to move from California, where his family lives, for three months; he stayed on for 13. Arriving in Bangalore with two suitcases, he met Nadhamuni at an appliance store to pick up a refrigerator and a microwave and move in to an apartment complex on Outer Ring Road, where, for the next three months, they would eke out the essentials of a project ten times the size of the US-VISIT biometric identification service. “When we started out in the apartment, we had two tables, whiteboards, six chairs and a shoerack that served as additional seating when corporates visited. The maid would bring us tea in a flask from my house. We didn’t need anything else at that time,” Nadhamuni says.
Today, the office hosts 60-70 employees from the three consortia of biometric service providers UIDAI has partnered with—led by Accenture and MindTree; Mahindra Satyam and Sagem Morpho Security; and Hewlett-Packard, L-1 Identity Solutions and 4G Identity Solutions. “Since the project went live on September 29, UIDs are being cranked out of our Central Identification Data Repository (CIDR) in Whitefield as we speak. The challenge now is to ensure that the biometrics have enough randomness so that no individual is mistaken for another—what is commonly known as de-duplication. At peak load, say, when a million people register in a day, it might mean matching billions of biometrics,” says Nadhamuni.
The sheer breadth of the exercise is unnerving, but it’s not something Pramod K. Varma, chief architect for the project, is worried about. A specialist in complex inventory management systems and former chief technology architect for Sterling Communications, who has built highly distributed computing systems for Walmart, JC Penney and Target that process millions of orders a day, Varma heard about the UID project in July last year, and within a week, was ready to imagine India a la Nilekani.
The project has drawn change-makers from across the world—from Sanjay Jain, who made the switch from being product manager for Google Maps and Google News to one for UIDAI; to Bala Parthasarathy, co-founder of the Web photo service company Snapfish, and many others.
Unlike other government set-ups that had the luxury of time, at the UID office, everything had to be done simultaneously—hiring and training staff, meetings and workshops with registrars and enrollment agencies, setting up the tech centre and the CIDR in Bangalore, and meetings and MoUs with state governments. Nilekani travelled extensively, to 23 states, and made PowerPoint presentations to 15 chief ministers. All this with an eye on the calendar—UIDAI’s commitment to the government was that the first set of numbers would be rolled out between August 2010 and February 2011.
The tech team is now working on the next set of biometric features—authentication services, address updates and registering children as and when they turn five—as well as prototypes of applications of UID in NREGA, PDS, banking, microfinance, micro-ATMs, education and healthcare.
As for the devices, four to five of each kind—iris scanners, fingerprint scanners, cameras—have been certified by the UIDAI, in accordance with its multi-vendor policy to encourage healthy competition. Along with a laptop, they fit neatly into a portable kit—one of the many open-source designs for a self-contained biometric unit—voluntarily designed by Michael Foley, who also designed the 2010 Commonwealth Games baton and Titan’s slimmest watches.
Back in Delhi, Kapavarapu, DDG (Finance), insists she is proof that it wasn’t just people in the private sector who have glamourous stories of chucking their jobs for the pure passion of working on an ‘idea’.
Kapavarapu, an ’81-batch officer of the Indian Audit and Accountant Service, was principal Accountant General of Himachal Pradesh before she joined UIDAI in October 2009. She opens her laptop to show a picture of her earlier workplace—the gorgeous British-era Gorton Castle in Shimla. “This is something I show people when they say you guys are with the government, you wouldn’t have had to give up anything to come here,” she jokes.
When Kapavarapu and Nanawati joined the project, they worked out of a small room in Yogana Bhawan, the Planning Commission office. “Three of us shared one room, a quarter the size of this room, one PC and one table. We took turns to work,” says Nanawati.
Though the project has raised concerns of profiling and of the state infringing on citizens’ privacy, Nilekani says the stress should be on the benefits that are “overwhelming, while looking at how the risks, if any, can be mitigated.”
Nilekani knows only too well that the expectations from him are huge, especially when anyone who recognises him—at airports and other public places—walks up and asks when he is getting his card. Nilekani has had to politely remind them that it’s not a ‘card’, but a ‘number’ that will give them an identity in a crowd of over a billion.
