What happens when Nandan Nilekani, darling corporate icon and wunderkind politician, meets his ideal constituency?
Grist Media By Puneeth Sukumar | Grist Media – Thu 10 Oct, 2013
At 6:45 pm, the day’s last light had slipped away. Bangalore’s Koramangala locality residents occupied the grid of plastic chairs arranged on the verandah of the 3rd Block park library, some even lining the verandah’s low walls while others stood on the sides. A large table sat at one end of the verandah, covered by a tablecloth and with a single microphone on it. The scent of burning mosquito coils rose through the air.
The audience had gathered there last Saturday, October 5th – young, middle-aged, elderly, fathers with their young sons – to hear their most famous neighbour, Nandan Nilekani, speak about the Unique Identity (UID) project, commonly known as Aadhaar. They didn’t have to wait – the meeting began right on time.
Standing behind the table, microphone in hand, Nilekani wore a checked blue half-sleeve shirt with a stiff collar close around the neck, while his wife Rohini, who sat nearby on the verandah wall, wore a purple kurta. Both were dressed in easy formals, as when you change out of your home clothes when you’re expecting friends for dinner.
“You know, I’m not on the Koramangala 3rd Block email list because I have enough email as it is, so I don’t want to add to that,” Nilekani said after being greeted with applause. “But I keep reading the email [in] Rohini’s [neighbourhood inbox] and I saw a lot of debate on this Aadhaar stuff, and saw there were conceptions and misconceptions that she has tried to correct also, and I felt that maybe we can have a session and I can explain what the hell we do and why it’s so important.”
The mailing list to which he referred had, in a way, facilitated the meeting: residents had debated the pros and cons of the Aadhaar project and its linkage to receiving LPG subsidies. The Supreme Court had passed an interim order in late September saying Aadhaar could not be made compulsory to receive social benefits like the subsidy on LPG cylinders. To address these and other concerns, the man who inspired Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat and was dubbed “the Bill Gates of Bangalore” assumed the role of friendly-neighbourhood-Aadhaar-man.
“They say that if you walk in Bangalore,” teased Jon Stewart in a 2009 interview with Nilekani on The Daily Show, “and you say, ‘I’m going to see Naan-daan’, the people know you are Naan-daan, like, Madonna.” An interview with The Guardian the same year had a brief curriculum vitae that ends: “Hobbies: Long walks in the park”.
Occasionally, residents do spot Nilekani strolling through this well-maintained Bangalore neighbourhood and in the 3rd Block park. The block, largely residential and mainly comprising sites measuring 80 x 120 feet, has been populated over the last decade with several enormous houses, the kind with high compound walls patrolled by security guards.
The Nilekanis themselves own three adjoining plots. But they aren’t the only recognizable faces on the block: among their neighbours they count Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishan; Microland founder Pradeep Kar; his wife and Bangalore Agenda Task Force member Kalpana Kar; eminent surgeon Ashley D’Cruz and Member of Parliament and media baron Rajeev Chandrasekhar.
If Nilekani is the chrome-and-glass embodiment of the ideal politician for a certain kind of middle-class Indian citizen, then his neighbours are the ideal voters in this ideal neighbourhood.
Koramangala’s 3rd Block residents take their duties as citizens seriously. With a successful waste segregation programme titled Wealth of Waste (WoW), dry waste is collected separately and dispatched for recycling. Volunteers go on clean-ups to tidy the neighbourhood and manage the park library, which comprises books donated by residents. They worry about stray dogs and suspicious strangers.
A programme called Silver Sparks provides support to senior citizens, organizing activities such as computer lessons for the elderly. Some celebrate Independence Days and Gandhi Jayantis together in the neighbourhood park. Many marched earnestly against corruption in support of the Anna Hazare movement and lit candles at the park’s gate in memory of ‘Nirbhaya’, the Delhi gang rape victim. When construction began in 2011 on an ill-advised underpass in Koramangala, 3rd Block residents were among the protesters who halted the disruptive work.
Rohini Nilekani, a published author and philanthropist, takes a keen interest in the Residents’ Welfare Association’s (RWA) activities and sometimes funds its expenditures.
Even so, turnout for regular neighbourhood events had rarely been as high as when Nilekani addressed the crowd at the park library. Latecomers had to stand beside the 50-odd people already seated on the high verandah, cloaked in darkness, disembodied voices trying to penetrate the conversation carrying on without them.
There’s a stark difference between the way Nilekani speaks on television and the way he speaks in person. His deep, polite voice in interviews enhances his practised lines, his measured smile. In person, he rushes through his sentences, words tumbling over the other only to trail off with an “or something…”, or a “whatever”, or “and all that”, never forgetting to make firm eye contact.
“In this mobile world, in this world where people are moving around, not having something to prove who you are becomes a huge problem,” he said. “Because, you know, you go somewhere and you can’t get a job or if the police stop you…you know, you can’t prove who you are. You catch a train, the ticket collector asks you for ID. You don’t have ID, you can’t enter an airport. So things that we actually take for granted are actually denied for (sic) a number of people.”
Touching lightly on such topics as the importance of having unique identification, Roosevelt’s New Deal, India’s rudimentary welfare state, and possible tie-ups with foreign embassies so that those with Aadhaar cards would get fast-track visas, Nilekani briskly marched through his speech.
“So, like, you go to America today, you land at JFK airport and they take your fingerprint and your [iris scan]…and they do some…funny thing with it. So they have looked at biometrics as a tool of surveillance and…and all that. In our case, we said, let us use this technology in a very different way. We’ll use this technology to give a unique identity to everyone. And that is what we do.”
Some of the points he made at the park library were familiar from previous interviews, such as the existential question of “Who am I?” that Aadhaar promises to solve. On listing its benefits, Nilekani cautioned that it was important to remember what Aadhaar is not. “It is not a citizenship card. All it allows you to do is verify that X is X. So Amar is Amar, Akbar is Akbar, Anthony is Anthony…whatever.”
Once he finished, he invited the audience to ask him questions. One of the first questions was from a man who asked what the rationale was behind prints being taken from all 10 fingers – wouldn’t this make the process longer?
“Once in your life you do it for 15 minutes, yaar, come on,” Nilekani replied as the audience tittered.
One man, elderly and persistent, asked what guarantee citizens had that crucial information about them would not be misused under the UID project. “Let me explain,” Nilekani said. “I would say, more than any other system in India, this is the most secure system […] All the data which is collected is encrypted at source, it is encrypted at storage, it can only be accessed through a bunch of KPIs. There’s a complete audit trail of what to accept from whom […] and we don’t share the information. The only time data is released is during the KYC, when you authorize the bank to use your KYC.”
Not one to give up easily, the elderly man persisted in his questioning about the issue of fraud.
“See, see, see, see, see, boss, we don’t share information unless you agree to it,” Nilekani said.
Rohini, who until now had largely been content to stare flatly at members of the audience, trilled in her high voice, “But do you understand what he’s saying, it’s not different from what is being misused just now.”
“No, no, no,” she said as the man tried to argue. “What he’s trying to explain is that Aadhaar will not share your data.”
“What is the guarantee?” he countered, to which Nilekani said, exasperated, “At the end of the day, if you’re worrying about this, I would seriously ask you to worry about other things.”
But data misuse proved to be a recurring theme that evening.
“Do you foresee the risk of identity theft?” asked a man in front, and then posed a second question about the backdoor entry some would get into the program through ‘biometric exceptions’ (exceptions made for people who cannot provide fingerprints or iris scans for a valid reason) that Nilekani had mentioned earlier. “I’ll answer the second question first,” Nilekani said, replying that there would be extra checks and greater attention paid to such exceptional candidates. He didn’t come back to the first question.
When a woman also asked what checks and balances there were to protect against fraudulent use of data, he said testily, “No, I’m not giving it to anyone, yaar. Please understand how it works.”
A young woman in the back had her hand up from the beginning of the Q&A for around 10 minutes, and her turn eventually came. She asked Nilekani why it was taking so long for Aadhaar to get legislative sanction. In 2011, a Parliamentary Standing Commission had rejected the National Identification Authority of India Bill 2010 on several counts.
“No, no. See, the legislative sanction is not for Aadhaar,” he said. “The government has ample legal opinion to say that they can do Aadhaar without legislative backing. The purpose of the law is to create a regulatory agency to manage the use of it and to manage penalties and fees […] It’s a common thing for the government to start an activity, and then pass a law because…Parliament and all that, so there’s nothing that prevents us from doing this, except that in the long run we want a regulatory status for autonomy purposes and to manage this whole thing. So the law will come.”
Five days later, on 10 October 2013, The Indian Express reported that the Cabinet had approved a Bill to give the Unique Identification Authority of India statutory status.
But in the park that day, there were questions still.
A small silver-haired man in a blue T-shirt standing near Nilekani sought to know, in longwinded sentences and amid several digressions, the exact link between Aadhaar and LPG fraud.
Nilekani, as was his wont, began to answer before the question was finished and reached out to retrieve the mike from the blue T-shirt. Shrinking away but not one to be cowed (or hurried along) by the crowd’s laughter at what nearly became a tug-of-war for the mike, the man protested, “Let me explain my question first.” The audience grew restive. Nilekani struggled to hide his annoyance and Rohini rose a few inches above her seat, swiping up and down furiously at the air to either shush the blue T-shirt or just catch his attention.
The lady who stood up now had close-cropped grey hair and had been taking notes through the evening. “Nandan, may I ask, what happens if a person dies? His UID is still there!”
“He takes it with him,” he replied with precise comic timing.
“No, no, no, no. His UID can be used,” she persisted. “There’s the card.”
“No, because you have to authenticate it,” he said. “If the person is dead, they take the number with them. If there is reincarnation, they get the number back.”
The audience laughed. “That’s not what I meant,” the women said, peeved. “See, you get a death certificate – is it linked?”
“How is Aadhaar used?” he said. “Aadhaar is firstly used as a method of online authentication where you come and prove yourself. If you’re dead, you can’t come and prove yourself, the authentication stops. The e-KYC authentication also stops. The only risk is that money keeps going into the fellow’s bank account.”
“That’s what I’m asking about, Nandan,” she said dryly, making sure he continued to explain.
After more queries, just when it seemed like the question uppermost on everyone’s minds — and perhaps the reason they were there in the first place — would never be addressed, a woman called out, “Are you entering politics?”
“Under consideration. If you vote for me, I’ll stand,” said Nilekani into the microphone in his hand, smiling once more as he leaned back in the chair he had taken towards the end of the Q&A.
“Don’t worry, all educated people will vote for you,” said an elderly member of the audience.
“If you join Congress, no one will vote for you” said the man in the blue T-shirt uncharitably, arms folded across his chest, evidently still stung by their little tussle.
“Contest as an independent,” said a voice from the crowd who had already stood up to leave.
“If you do stand for elections, you can count on all our votes,” added a tall man from the RWA during his vote of thanks. There were appreciative murmurs and applause from the audience, which then proceeded to trickle home. Perhaps one day they will tell their children and grandchildren that they heard Nandan Nilekani speak before he conquered politics.
Even as the Koramangala 3rd Block residents began to make their way out of the park in the darkness, a small group, including Nilekani’s friends, neighbours and a few of the young men, hung back, forming a circle around him waiting to pat his back and shake his hand.
On her way out, the grey-haired lady who’d asked about death and Aadhaar, said to a friend, upset and disappointed, “You know, it was a valid question…”
