17 OCT 2013 - 10:59AM
By Ron Sutton
Source World News Australia Radio
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(Transcript from World News Australia Radio)
Nandan Nilekani has become a billionaire through his success in India's IT, or information technology, industry.
But he has his eye on a much bigger prize that, he believes, can revolutionise his country.
(Click on audio tab above to listen to item)
It's a program called Aadhaar, or Foundation, and this week he's in Australia as a guest of the University of Melbourne's Australia India Institute to tell the story.
To paraphrase Nandan Nilekani, he knows Bill Gates and he is no Bill Gates.
But the billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist has indeed been praised as the Bill Gates of India, and the head of the Australia India Institute is not letting him off so easily.
Yes, says University of Melbourne professor Amitabh Mattoo, Bill Gates is Bill Gates and Nandan Nilekani is Nandan Nilekani.
But, he says, the digital identification project Mr Nilekani is engineering across the world's second most populous country ranks with modern man's biggest achievements.
When complete, the project is designed to give even the poorest, most invisible of India's 1.2 billion people a 12-digit ID linking them all into public services for the first time.
"Sending a man to the Moon required that kind of leap of faith and imagination -- and the kind of ambition that NASA had when it sent Neil Armstrong and his colleagues to the Moon. Or, within the context of India, trying to get rid of polio required immunisation on a huge scale, and that happened."
Nandan Nilekani, in Australia this week for a speech at the Australia India Institute, put the dream of unique digital IDs in writing in his 2008 book "Imagining India".
The book detailed his vision for renewing the nation.
But he gives credit to the Indian government, saying it too began working on the idea as early as 2006.
Professor Mattoo suggests the credit lies somewhere in between the two of them, but says it required someone with Nandan Nilekani's imagination and leadership to pull it off.
Before being named head of the government's new Unique Identification Authority of India to run the daunting project, Mr Nilekani had co-founded the IT services company Infosys.
With his IT and then philanthropy backgrounds, he looked at his country, home to one in three of the world's poor, and saw a land where everyone could help or get help.
Hence, the digital ID program, known as Aadhaar, or Foundation, that Mr Nilekani depicts, above all, as empowering.
"It is a huge project for social inclusion, because having a basic identity that you can use to verify who you are, wherever you are, is a very, very powerful and empowering idea. And there still are a large number of Indian residents who don't have any document about themselves, and giving them this basic identity which allows them to travel to work, et cetera, is a hugely empowering thing."
The ID number can become a key to accessing anything from welfare benefits, like cheap transport or rice and cooking fuel, to mobile phones and so-called micro-ATMs.
Workers known as business correspondents take the five-centimetre ATMs into villages, verify any requested money is in a person's account, then dispense it then and there.
At present, two in five rural Indians have no access to banking.
Mr Nilekani says more than 440 million people have received their ID numbers and the target is to reach half the population by the middle of next year.
At the Australia India Institute, Amitabh Mattoo says it all fits the philanthropist's idea that Internet technology has the potential to make the world a more level playing field.
"If you read The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's book 'The World Is Flat,' the title is taken from a conversation that he had with Nandan, where Nandan Nilekani talked with him about the IT revolution. It's really making the world much more flat, in the sense that those hierarchies are going away and you're much more equal."
Estimates suggest nearly one in two Indian babies born today has no birth certificate, just a hint at the obstacles facing the digital ID program.
But Mr Nilekani says, every day, the program's 25,000 enrolment stations are enrolling about a million people.
And he says the IDs can play a major role in reducing India's legendary corruption.
"Many of the databases which have beneficiaries, like a list of people who have scholarships, or a list of people who have pensions, or a list of people who have LPG gas connection, these lists often have what are called ghosts and duplicates. They have people who don't exist, or they have people who are on the list more than once, and the lack of a unique number essentially prevents you from identifying who are the beneficiaries and whether they're unique. And, therefore, what the Aadhaar system does, because it gives a unique ID to everyone, it automatically allows you to eliminate ghosts and duplicates from your database. And that itself reduces diversion of material, because now you can make sure that it goes only to genuine people. And, in many projects, the amount of such duplication and all that is up to 10, 20, 30 per cent."
The other side of such a project, of course, is whether the government is creating a tool that will let it intrude on its residents' privacy.
Critics say the project is dangerous, that the number, linked to a person's demographic and biometric information, could fall into the wrong hands or simply the wrong use.
India's Supreme Court recently ruled the government cannot make the digital ID mandatory for accessing public services and subsidies.
Nandan Nilekani insists it is neither the intent nor capability of the program to intrude on people's privacy and says what he calls the common man in India understands that very well.
"The intent is a very, very noble intent. It's not really meant to, you know, spy on people or something. It's really meant to make people's lives easier. We also have taken a lot of care to make the design of it as secure as possible -- we don't collect too much information, we only collect basic information for identity, we only use it for authentication, only a resident can authorise his details to be shared. So a lot of things were done in the design of this which make it a very, very secure system."
Mr Nilekani suggests the digital ID program is merely the beginning, that like the development of the internet and GPS, it can become the hub for a thriving IT industry in India.
He likes to say the GPS answers the question "Where am I?" while the ID program answers "Who am I?"
At the Australia India Institute, Amitabh Mattoo has no qualms about the worth of that program -- or about the common ground of Nandan Nilekani and Bill Gates.
"Bill Gates is Bill Gates, and Nandan Nilekani is Nandan Nilekani. They are two separate individuals who really are doing their share to make the world a better place."
