At the Express Adda held in Mumbai last week, Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India, Nandan Nilekani, spoke about Aadhaar, the challenges in implementing it and how working with the government is a new ball game for him
At the latest edition of Express Adda, presented by Reid & Taylor and in association with Visa, India Infoline Finance Limited (IIFL) and Olive Bar & Kitchen, held in Mumbai last week, UIDAI Chairman Nandan Nilekani spoke extensively about Aadhaar and how it works. During a conversation with a select audience, moderated by Shekhar Gupta, Editor-in-Chief, The Express Group, and Adil Zainulbhai, Chairman, McKinsey & Company, India, Nilekani spoke about the challenges in implementing Aadhaar, the support he has got from the government and how he will see it through till the end. Excerpts from the conversation:
The Aadhaar Way
The idea of Aadhaar has oscillated from being a security-driven product to a development-led idea to improve public services. Suddenly, people realised that the underlying basis for distributing these benefits, the identity itself, was suspect — that's how the project began in 2006. After I came into the scene, we built a solution that's open, one that would have cash transfers as just the first application. So thinking of it as a platform was our contribution. Secondly, our aim was to create an ecosystem as opposed to creating a monolithic, large organisation. There are less than 300 people in our group but we have, maybe, one lakh people in our ecosystem.
The Positives
The most positive thing was to find real, passionate people in the government who really want changes to happen and often the circumstances don't allow them to do that. I was able to assemble that team, so that my team works very passionately. For me, making this Aadhaar project has been a very important strategic activity. The irreversibility will come when at least half a billion Indians have an Aadhaar number and there are major applications like cash transfers delivering benefits to millions of people.
Government Support
Fundamentally, you cannot do a project of this scale, which has the potential for so much disruptive change, without unstinted political endorsement. All the key people in the government have given that unstinted endorsement and that is to their credit.
State Involvement
In the 14 months during which we were developing the platform, I personally went to every state and met the Chief Ministers and bureaucrats with a complete presentation on what's going to come. Creating that bind across all the states and parties played a big role in getting everybody on board.
The Challenges
The biggest learning experience — what happens to most who go from private sector to the government — is the sheer complexity of stakeholders. This is a far wider and complex space because you have the political system, the Cabinet, the Parliament, the auditors and civil society activists who have strong views and access to media. Suddenly, you have a world of many more players who are not necessarily on the same page in terms of ideology or goals. You navigate in that milieu and carve out a road that allows you to get there without any of them tripping you up, which makes it much more complicated than in the private sector.
Business vs Politics
A business CEO is accountable to his employees, his board, management team, his shareholders, investors and customers, which is a relatively smaller universe as compared to a billion people of very different ambitions, aspirations and ideologies. In business, at the end of the day, you all have the same goal. So the balance sheet is the same document that everybody uses to measure performance. Here, there is no measure of performance. If I define performance as giving everybody an ID and opening a bank account and somebody else thinks that it is the wrong thing to do, then no matter how efficiently I do my job, they will still say I am doing the wrong thing.
Going Places
We have got visitors from Australia, the UK,
Middle-East, Africa and Latin America to see how Aadhaar works. This is because our ID is a platform where you can have multiple applications. That's a revolutionary concept. We had visitors from Egypt, where there's a new government run by the Muslim Brotherhood and they've realised that their subsidy spending is huge, so they want a system for subsidies. Another request has come from Afghanistan, asking if we can build an ID system before the next presidential election.
The Power of Aadhaar
The passport and the driver's licence will continue to be there. But for proof of identity and address, Aadhaar will be the default ID. It's the world's first real identity system that offers scale. For people who don't have any ID, Aadhaar acts as an empowerment. Our biggest demand is not from the urban middle class but from the people who work for them. The day people can go to a device in the village, place a finger and get their money, their attitude changes. For instance, somebody said, "I can travel around the country and nobody can harass me".
Risk-taker
There are a whole set of issues about how to make sure it's private and secure. How do you design it for disaster recovery, business continuity and multiple locations. Working on that is part of the job. The benefits are huge and the risks are worth taking — the only thing is how do we contain the risks.
Business of Aadhaar
The business community is on board with us. Our biggest partners are public sector and private sector banks. We are working with some 40-50 banks, who are using our technology. Visa has just launched an instant bank account called Saral with five banks. So we expect to see a wave of innovation where private sector companies, small-tech entrepreneurs and others will create apps that we don't even visualise. Just like GPS (Global Positioning System) helps you answer the question, "Where am I?", Aadhaar answers the question, "Who am I?"
Additional Benefits
With Aadhaar, we are expanding the toolbox of possible solutions in the system. In fact, another one that is happening under the leadership of the Finance Minister is to set up the backbone company for GST. Once you create this company and standardise the way you file tax returns and pay taxes, you can create this back office of tax processing, which has a very simple customer interface. This will help you increase revenues and at the same time reduce harassment because it is system-driven. Another area which is ripe for consideration is expenditure. You can build a complete platform for real-time expenditure across the system. You can build a system where everybody does procurement through standardised approach. You can build a standard platform for auctions so that when any resource has been auctioned, you have a template. You can build a system which will help judicial system reduce pendency by improving work flow.
Life after Infosys
Letting go is one part of the challenge. But the other part is moving out of your comfort zone. In retrospect, I sometimes wonder how I had the guts to do this. I got into it without actually realising how complex the game was going to be.
Understanding Education
We need some huge expansion of education. That is the only sustainable solution. A number of people running the system are from St Stephen's and Hindu College. The good thing which is happening is that because of shortage of higher education in India, the number of young people going abroad for higher education has gone up dramatically. And most of them are doing liberal arts.
The Internet Boon
This could not have been done five years back. The reason we are able to do Aadhaar is because technological progression has enabled the ability to create databases that can accommodate a billion people today. Thanks to the rise of companies called Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple, they have built a database of a billion people. So they have stretched the system to create scale.
Driving Force
What keeps me going are new challenges, getting into new uncharted areas. I did that in business, I have done that while writing a book and I am doing it now. I need something that challenges me all the time. I am a junkie for challenges, at the same time I need to do something that is temperamentally suited for me too. I like to be a problem solver; I like to make changes happen.
Going Strong
There have been times when I have felt it's a bumpy ride. There has been great stress, but I never felt like quitting. When you take up something, you got to see it through. If I fail, then I let down thousand others who want to do what I do. So it is important that I demonstrate success and prove that there is value in getting people from the outside. Hence, I have a larger responsibility than my personal one.
