Chinki Sinha,Chinki Sinha
Posted: Nov 29, 2011 at 0000 hrs IST
New Delhi The Harvard graduate has left. So has the executive who had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and left a “lucrative banking career” to serve the nation. One will join a startup, the other will start a business. Many others have left for other jobs or for studies abroad, leveraging their UIDAI experience.
The Unique Identification Authority of India, under the chairmanship of Nandan Nilekani, was marked by the first-ever attempt at a setup where the private and public sectors would work together on its project to give every Indian an identity, an Aadhar number. The idea was to combine the “efficiency” of the private sector with government officials’ “knowledge of the system”.
Now, the bulk of those in the non-salaried groups — volunteers and sabbatical workers — have left, as data from the UIDAI show (see box). Officials say many of them left because their term had ended. Not many volunteers or sabbatical staff have since joined, but officials say some more have joined in the salaried category.
Among volunteers who have left is Nilekani’s senior at IIT Bombay, Raj Mashruwala, who had sent him a congratulatory note offering to help him. Only a handful have extended their terms, including Govindraj Ethiraj, a journalist and TV anchor who is a sabbatical worker and writing a book on UIDAI.
The model
“The model was flawed as nobody will work for too long without being paid,” a UIDAI official said. “Goodwill and the temptation of having UIDAI on their resumes brought in a lot of private sector people but they didn’t understand the system. They saw it as a means to enter the government laterally.”
At the PMU (project management unit), private sector employees are hired with salary by the National Institute of Smart Government with which the UIDAI has an agreement.
Several new people have been hired, UIDAI deputy director general Kumar Alok said. “They come and go. We receive many applications as the project has great visibility in terms of being the largest national identity project ever implemented,” he said.
‘Too many controls’
One sabbatical worker said he travelled often to make presentations on Aadhaar and interact with communities to understand their needs. He had wanted to give back to the community, he said, but over the last few months, the energy that he had felt in the organisation began to ebb because of too many controls. Many things, he said, got mired in the bureaucratic processes.
Reimbursements were delayed, travel plans were stalled because of numerous permissions to be sought on paper, not just by emails. Government officials’ response was that they had to keep accounts.
The system
Over the past few months, the government has introduced new guidelines specifying the term of the contract has to be a minimum one year for volunteers and sabbatical resources, said Awadhesh Kumar Pandey, assistant director general.
Initially, there was friction between government and private sector members who couldn’t reconcile with the government’s way of working, its hierarchies and its formal setup. “We introduced brainstorming sessions and made them work together on issues like RTI queries so they could iron out their issues,” Pandey said.
“It is a government project and the two sides needed to understand each other,” Pandey said. Director general R S Sharma too said it is a government project and “government shall exercise control.”
One official said travel bills started mounting. The UIDAI, which apparently hadn’t made it clear that only Air India flights’ fares would be reimbursed, refused to pay outstanding fares on other airlines.
“Suddenly, we saw people were travelling too much. They would have breakfast in Jaipur, dinner in Udaipur, and the next morning they would be Bangalore. These were mostly private sector people,” an official said.
Many from the private sector said they liked being part of a national project under Nilekani but a few said they were unable to work the way they would have liked. The UIDAI says the initial issues have been resolved and the project is on target.
Leverage
“Those who left had come with a purpose. They pumped up their resumes with the UIDAI experience of working on a complex data management system, and then left when an opportunity came their way. We have recruited others,” the government official said. “They discovered they couldn’t have everything their way and there was a system in place they had to follow, and they left.”