10278 - Aadhaar: Will it improve your health?- Live Mint

Wed, Jul 27 2016. 04 41 AM IST

Aadhaar: Will it improve your health?

Aadhaar has the potential to improve health outcomes, reduce medical errors, and save people both time and money

Bill Gates once said this about the computer: “Never before in history has innovation offered the promise of so much to so many in so short a time.” There is no better place to find this promise than right here in India, and no better example than Aadhaar, the country’s unique identity system, an identity database over which an authentication platform has been built.

India’s unique identity scheme has enrolled almost a billion members already, having covered almost 50% of the population just a year ago. By the end of this year, the tally will stand close to 100% of all residents in India. With the scope of the project enlarged from what was originally envisaged as a proof of identity and proof of residence project, Aadhaar now also serves as the financial address for its residents. 

Armed with this system, India has been able to revolutionize its financial systems, rethink the nature of its welfare state, cutting back on benefits in-kind and market-distorting subsidies, and turning to direct cash transfers paid into the Jan Dhan accounts of the neediest. But what about health?

In his book Rebooting India, Nandan Nilekani has provided a first cut on how Aadhaar can be used to overhaul the healthcare sector when he discussed data for public health surveillance in quickly identifying patterns of emergent epidemics, and understanding our rapidly changing burden of chronic diseases compared to patterns in Western Europe.

This seems to be the tip of a very big iceberg. In our everyday world, a unique identifier means better medical records for the individual and family, and links connecting the patient experience regardless of doctor or facility, something desperately needed in our mobile and migratory social context.

Perhaps the biggest win that Aadhaar can bring about is that it can accelerate the process of “interoperability” in healthcare. Interoperability is the seamless exchange of data across the patient care continuum, not just between the internal systems of the provider network, but also an outside laboratory and pharmacy, and their connection with the insurance company’s claims department. When systems are interoperable, patients and their families and doctors can access patient information. This translates into no longer having to lug stacks of charts, lab and x-ray results, and other documentation from doctor to doctor.

When systems are interoperable, if you need care on a business trip to Hyderabad or Bengaluru, again, the provider will connect with your provider network in New Delhi, or wherever you reside. That saves you and your family time and money, not to mention you receive appropriate care more quickly. 

Yes, Aadhaar has the potential to improve health outcomes, reduce medical errors, and save you both time and money. That improves health, productivity and satisfaction. At a system level, it can save precious funds. In the US, interoperability has the potential to lower health costs by $30 billion annually. Currently, there is $36 billion in addressable waste within the US healthcare system of which 97% is attributed to lack of interoperability.

New ideas and initiatives are taking hold as leaders discover its possible applications. One simple example is an initiative in Krishna district in Andhra Pradesh, where doctors and nurses are tracked for absenteeism using biometric markers. This has improved attendance and access by patients.

Fast forward: Links with longer-term health sector reforms?

India is struggling with the way forward in terms of health reforms. Recently, the government has looked to state nodal agencies as loci for moving to a social insurance model as in Canada, to improve financial protection while improving quality. Could Aadhaar be linked to bank accounts for automatic premium payment by above poverty line (APL) groups?

In the villages of Rajasthan, for example, under a recent public-private partnership, over 40,000 service centres provide electronic payment of utilities and other services. Many of these villages lack water and sanitation, yet monetary transactions are electronic and just a click away. Primary care centres are now starting to use Aadhaar for linking individuals and their medical records.

But is Aadhaar enough for cementing all these innovations? International experience suggests caution. Doctors and nurses may manipulate tracking systems. Consumers may evade premiums, not seeing coverage as a good investment, just as has occurred in nearby Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. More may be needed such as high-quality services, and subsidies of premiums for the near poor and informal sectors, and education for accessing entitled services. While Rajasthan villages have electronic service centres, the primary care centre down the road often still has no drugs or the doctor is absent. Building a “demand side” with no access to quality services will not work.

Where next?

It may be argued that Aadhaar is necessary for big sectoral reforms, but it is certainly not sufficient. It can be a building block for the medium term. The supply side asks, however, remain. The central government must play a key role in setting data standards and regulations, and perhaps incentivizing the development of the network for health. At the same time, it will need to protect data regarding patient privacy and confidentiality of records.

Aadhaar’s benefits can clearly extend to our individual health, on to a healthier system for all. The prime minister has remarked that India is becoming the fascination of the world—the potential of the Aadhaar-health connection is just one fascinating aspect that leaders are watching from around the world.

Jack Langenbrunner is senior program officer, Comparative Health Systems in Integrated Delivery Team, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Comments are welcome at theirview@livemint.com

Jack Langenbrunner

9860 - The Technocratic Visions of Nandan Nilekani: What an Aadhaar-Enabled Future May Look Like - The Wire

The Technocratic Visions of Nandan Nilekani: What an Aadhaar-Enabled Future May Look Like

The Aadhaar ecosystem is best thought of as a birthday cake: the cherry, the icing and the cake itself. Credit: Australia India Institute

If there’s one person that’s smiling after last Friday, when the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill was given an overwhelming stamp of approval by the Lok Sabha, it’s Nandan Nilekani.

Although the origins of the UID project can be traced back to the first NDA government, it is mostly due to the efforts of the Infosys co-founder and Congress party member that the Aadhaar initiative was given shape and pushed through the largely dysfunctional second UPA government.

With the national identification project now receiving statutory backing, what lies in store for India’s citizens? What else can it be used for; what feats of technological efficiency can be achieved? Or in other words, what sort of house can be built upon the Aadhaar system?

Fortunately for us, Nilekani’s latest book, Rebooting India, released late last year, comes with a number of examples. Nilekani and his co-author, Viral Shah, think almost exclusively in terms of networks, databases and centralisation; the very same centralisation that many people fear can be exploited without the proper privacy and security safeguards that India currently lacks.

At the beginning of Rebooting India, Nilekani illustrates his argument with a diagram of a “class of applications”, that includes ‘social security schemes, subsidies, government services, e-KYC, voting/administration’. This classification, however, is a little messy. It doesn’t adequately explain how Aadhaar could impact our society, both from a positive and negative perspective.    

It’s far better to think of an Aadhaar card and its application ecosystem as a birthday cake that consists of three parts: the cake, the icing and the cherry on top. All of the examples given below, divided into three categories, are potential use-cases that have been laid out by Nilekani and Shah in their book.

Part 3 – The cherry

The cherry is what the Aadhaar card is capable of in the future. It’s what can be built upon the UID system and is simultaneously exciting and a little frightening.

Voting 2.0: The Death of Fraud:  In early 2015, Chief Election Commissioner H S Brahma announced that the voter ID and Aadhaar number systems would be linked in order to help stamp out voter fraud.

A person with unique biometric data obviously cannot vote twice and as Nilekani and Shah write, “creating a fake voter profile would become so complicated that no would-be election rigger would bother trying.”

This, however, is only the beginning. While the Aadhaar system can obviously be used to speed up our sluggish voter enrolment process, the real advantages come when the voting system becomes electronic. Once our Aadhaar cards allow us to identify ourselves, smartphone applications “can allow every aspect of the voting process – voter registration, address changes, polling booth information, perhaps even casting one’s ballot – to be available to us on our smartphones”.

In the short-term, the government could potentially boost enrolment by algorithmically nudging its citizens once the voter ID and Aadhaar databases are linked ( a suggestion that the book says was made by former CEC N Gopalaswami). Since Aadhaar cards are issued to all Indian residents from birth onwards, the system can “automatically flag those Aadhar card holders who turn 18 in a given year, making them eligible to vote”. Once these potential voters are identified, they can be prompted to start the voter registration process, thus hopefully reducing a barrier for lethargic voters.

The National Health Information Network (NHIN):  Imagine an electronic medical record system (EMRS) used by multiple health service providers. “For example, a pharmacist can pull up a prescription, doctors can pull up diagnostic test results from labs online and insurance companies can provide customised quotes based on prior history,” the authors write in their chapter on ‘Towards a Healthy India’.

As with everything else, the Aadhaar number serves as a basis for this as a “natural patient identifier”. Although the construction of a database will require some level of information sharing, once that is allowed by the user in question, the sky’s the limit. In the same way the government distributes subsidies to Aadhaar-linked bank accounts, health-related payments through government-backed insurance schemes can also be carried out.

Patients can walk to different hospitals with their data and after being identified, their health status follows them everywhere. But again, this is only the start. Nilekani & Shah believe that the Aadhaar-backed EMRS will be a “treasure trove of ‘big data’ that can be mined using analytics to identify public health trends, collect statistical data and detect epidemic outbreaks.”

Education, Exams and Jobs: From the problems of implementing the RTE act to the issue of fake resumes, the Aadhaar system has a possible role to play in the future.

The idea is simple: The RTE Act demands that private schools set aside 25% of their enrolment capacity for students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. 

Instead of setting aside money only for government schools, some part of that funding that can be used to create ‘school vouchers’ that can be used by needy students to “pay for their education at a school of their choice”. “Aadhaar”, the authors write, “can be used in the creation of a central registry and voucher-issuance platform for schools and students”. “Students can be registered in the system using their Aadhaar numbers.” Once these vouchers are issued, matched against the correct Aadhaar number, parents can enrol their children at a school of their choice.

Changing track a little bit, the Aadhaar card system can also go a long way in cracking down on fake resumes (the authors quote statistics that show that one in five resumes in the IT industry are falsified). Prime Minister Narendra Modi already encourages the “de-materialization” of our educational degrees through his Digital Locker initiative. Once combined with an Aadhaar-based identification, a person’s educational qualifications can be guaranteed, “increasing trust between jobseekers and potential employers”.

Other low-hanging fruit can also be tackled. Entrance examination fraud, the most prominent example of which is the long-running Vyapam scam, can be eliminated to a great extent if students are authenticated using Aadhaar before entering the exam hall.

Part 2 – The icing

If the cherry is what can finally be built upon the Aadhaar number system, the icing is how Aadhaar is being sold by the current and past governments; how it is represented in mainstream debate; how it will eventually be funded.

It is here that there has been the greatest discussion. Nilekani and Shah’s outline here is simple and echoes the Modi government’s logic: Aadhar-backed bank accounts and micro-ATM systems will eventually result in a cashless India. But in the meantime, it can be used to mend India’s social safety nets, fix our leaking subsidy system and bring order to the country’s somewhat chaotic identification system.

A number of legal and academic critics counter the above arguments by pointing out how the Aadhaar can be used as a method of exclusion, how its technology is flawed, and how it could work against the very beneficiaries it should be helping. Citing Edward Snowden’s revelations, they argue mass surveillance will likely result, even if they don’t properly expand on how exactly the Aadhaar database will result in constant surveillance.

Part 1 – The cake

The cake is what the Aadhaar card actually is, when stripped down to its core: An identification number that can be used to identify a person electronically. In popular, mainstream debate this definition is taken for granted and is often overlooked when critics express their worries.

In the opening chapters of the book, the authors state very eloquently the difference between the Aadhaar project and any other system of identification, whether it’s your debit card or driver’s licence.

“To use an ATM to withdraw money you need a debit card (‘what you have’) and  a PIN (‘what you know’). Strong authentication can be provided by the UIDAI the biometrics (‘who you are’) combined with the one-time password sent to the mobile phone (‘what you have’),” they write.

There are two key phrases in the above paragraphs: ‘who you are’ and ‘identifying a person electronically’.

The latter is why the Aadhaar card is so powerful: theoretically, barring any lemon juice or Boroplus mistakes, it allows a system to authenticate your identity electronically in a single attempt. Other methods of electronic identification could require up to two or three different ways of doing so. But because Aadhaar is capable of doing so, it allows you to build upon it a variety of different applications.

On the other hand it is the ‘who you are’ part that concerns critics of the Aadhaar project. If there’s a system that can identify who you are in one step, it only stands to reason that the privacy and security of its users should be protected. It’s not enough that the system itself is secure, but that the legal apparatus around it is also in place. And yet much of the pro-Aadhaar rhetoric ignores this.

For instance, when the Attorney-General argued before the Supreme Court late last year on this issue, he pointed out if the poor wished to continue receiving benefits, they needed to be prepared to surrender their right of privacy.

In other similar arguments, the “oh, but the benefits outweigh the risks” approach also crops up very often. While this appears to be a seemingly pragmatic stance, it ignores the fact that we can have the cake and eat it as well. It’s completely possible to have an identification system that is used to transfer subsidies and a piece of national privacy legislation that protects the rights of India’s citizens. To argue otherwise, or to bring up ‘benefits outweigh the risks’ is to behave like a child; to want something right now simply because you want it.The governments of the last five years had ample time to pass a privacy law. They just never got around to doing it.

§

When we step back and look at the three layers of the Aadhaar cake, there are two different arguments against the project when it comes to issues of privacy and security. The first concerns the Aadhaar project’s database security and privacy: who else will have access to the database, under which conditions, and what will happen in the case of data breaches? 

This is extremely important – but this concern also applies to nearly every other centralised government database of citizen data. It makes more sense to have broad privacy legislation and a specific data regulator address these concerns, rather than have each database come with a specific piece of vaguely-worded legislation (the way Aadhaar has with its Section 33).

The larger argument against Aadhaar has more to do with the cherry and less to do with the icing. The Aadhaar database today is useful for transferring subsidies and other payments  but isn’t as exciting to private companies as the ecosystem that can be built on top of Aadhaar. The examples laid out by Nilekani in his book have started being built albeit in much simpler forms: an Aadhaar hackathon held at Khosla Labs in Bangalore earlier this year saw college students come up with ways to innovate on digital identity using the Aadhaar system.

Scroll reported today (PTI had an earlier piece on the same company last December before the Aadhar system was given statutory backing) on a company that uses a smartphone application and Aadhaar verification to verify the background details of semi-professional workers such as drivers and maids. And yet, there doesn’t seem to be anything too wrong with this because this is exactly how the Aadhaar API is supposed to work!  As YourStory points out, “the basic authentication that they [UID] allow third party apps as of now is to verify an entry in the Aadhaar database by means of querying any of the data points they capture.” Whether the Supreme Court allows this and whether the Aadhaar Bill legitimises these third-party applications, however, is yet another question.

The larger problem, therefore, is the question of government centralisation. The Aadhaar card system is almost techno-deterministic in nature; its existence demands that it be linked to other databases, to constantly extract value from its user data, and to carry out a process of algorithmic regulation in the name of efficiency.  The value of the Aadhaar database, to bureaucrats, policy-makers and politicians lies in how often it can be triangulated with other sources of data.

While this may be valuable to administration and instrumental in mitigating natural disasters, it could also backfire without proper safeguards. For instance: linking the Aadhaar database to the voter ID system could possibly allow governments to nudge new voters into enrolling. But what if this is done only in swing states, in swing constituencies and in areas that favour one political party over the other?

The death of privacy in autocracies allows repressive governments to target their citizens. In democracies like India, however, the lack of privacy legislation is seen by officials, such as our Attorney-General, as a method of providing services and benefits to citizens. This confused and even shocking logic – in which the defenders of the UID system respond not by allaying privacy concerns but by insisting citizens have no privacy rights – seems characteristic of our Aadhaar-enabled future.

9489 - Domesday 2.0 - Economist

Domesday 2.0

A technological blueprint for better government

Mar 12th 2016 | From the print edition

Your turn now

Rebooting India: Realising a Billion Aspirations. By Nandan Nilekani and Viral Shah. Allen Lane; 337 pages; £20.

IN A month or so, India will have registered a billion residents—the latest stage in the creation of a complete identity database of what will soon be the world’s most populous country. Aadhaar, which means “foundation” in Hindi, matches names with fingerprints and iris scans on a scale that has never been seen before. Reimagining government with such technology at its core will be key to meeting the mounting aspirations of India’s citizens, according to two of the scheme’s architects, Nandan Nilekani and Viral Shah.

If the Domesday Book, an 11th-century survey of England, was commissioned to raise funds for government, Aadhaar’s most useful purpose is to help their disbursement. Making sure each farmer gets one dose of subsidised fertiliser and all poor families their share of rice is fiendish without knowing who they are. Many of those who are entitled to government handouts live in one of the 600,000 Indian villages with no banking facilities.

Serving the citizenry in a country where 59% of births are not registered, and many people can’t read, is a task that has been a costly failure. Rajiv Gandhi, a former prime minister, once claimed that just 17% of subsidies reached the right people: not so much a leaky bucket as a sieve. A patchwork of rival ID schemes, from driving licences to ration cards, electoral rolls and tax-registration numbers, did not serve the purpose of making each and every citizen visible to the state.

Much debate about public policy is about the principles behind it: which citizens should pay how much tax, for example. “Rebooting India” is a welcome detour to the often-overlooked realities of how these principles translate into reality. A government benefit which requires days of trekking to receive, and then a bribe to unlock, may not feel like much of a benefit at all. Women who can access a subsidy without the involvement of their husbands or brothers are in quite a different position than those who cannot.

Aadhaar is transforming the way many citizens interact with the state. It allows the government to pay benefits directly to over 200m bank accounts linked to its database, so cutting out layers of corrupt and inept middlemen. That will feel much more tangible, to the average Indian, than a tax break here or a new subsidy there. 

“Rebooting India” is at its best when it delves into the veritable sausage-making that is large-scale government IT projects. (Mr Nilekani, one of the authors, knows more than most about what it takes to deliver these, having co-founded and then run Infosys, an Indian IT giant.) How do you coax a reluctant bureaucracy to adopt a new technology that might erode its privileges? How do you resist those who want to turn it into something more comprehensive than just an ID scheme—and therefore make it more likely to fail? Given Aadhaar’s relatively smooth implementation, civil servants across the world would do well to seek inspiration from it.

Its potential is vast but mostly unknown. It is described as a “platform” in which an “ecosystem” can thrive, much like the iPhone is a platform for apps. Beyond subsidy payments, a few such applications for Aadhaar already exist: one allows citizens to track in real time which bureaucrats are physically at their desk. If that is not helpful, other uses that have not yet been thought of undoubtedly will be.

There is the occasional whiff of naivety. The book’s title alone suggests that India’s governing apparatus could be improved if it could just be turned off and on again. And how can a government that is so inept as to need recasting be trusted to avoid the Orwellian possibilities of a billion-strong database? Police have already nagged to get access to its fingerprints and have been rebuffed—for now.

If Aadhaar is indeed as revolutionary as the personal computer, it is frustrating that the second half of the book veers into other ways IT can help deliver government services. The authors’ suggestions on how road tolls or India’s court system could be better run with added tech savvy are correct, but their solutions to other problems, such as managing health records, lack Aadhaar’s elegance.

It is a credit to Aadhaar that the book, while fascinating, feels like primary material for a weightier tome. The high politics of the scheme are glossed over, particularly the election of Narendra Modi halfway through its implementation (Mr Nilekani stood unsuccessfully as an MP for the rival Congress party). The chronicles of a revolution, if indeed this is one, are best not written by the perpetrators.

From the print edition: Books and arts

9342 - UIDAI to take consent from users for sharing data

UIDAI to take consent from users for sharing data

To address the issue about privacy and personal data, the Unique Identification Authority of India is working on a consent mechanism that would allow Aadhaar users to share their information with prospective service providers, according to its former chairman.

By: FE Bureau | New Delhi | February 11, 2016 1:43 AM

To address the issue about privacy and personal data, the Unique Identification Authority of India is working on a consent mechanism that would allow Aadhaar users to share their information with prospective service providers, according to its former chairman.

The move will “put the user in charge of his own data”, Nandan Nilekani said while speaking at the India Digital Summit, hosted by the Internet and Mobile Association of India, in New Delhi.

The development assumes significance after some citizens and activists had petitioned the Supreme Court on the privacy of their personal data given to Aadhaar, and the court last year asking the government to address the concerns. The petitioners apprehend that the data given for the unique identity number could be misused for commercial reasons.

9319 - Financial Times 'Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations', by Nandan Nilekani and Viral Shah

Financial Times 'Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations', by Nandan Nilekani and Viral Shah Financial Times There was a moment after Modi's triumph when it looked as if the new government might spitefully dump the “Aadhaar” (a Hindi word meaning ...

9238 - Rebooting India - Free Press Journal

Rebooting India

— By T R Ramachandran | Jan 03, 2016 12:42 pm 

Based on learnings from the Aadhaar project, Nilekani and Shah propose a series of high-tech initiatives that can deliver low-cost solutions to India’s grand challenges.

Having gained valuable insight in developing the unique identity card for a billion people in five years, Nandan Nilekeni, founding Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIAI) and Viral Shah, who worked at the intersection of policy and technology leading the design of the government’s payments and subsidy platforms using Aadhaar. They have proposed some big ideas that can redesign existing systems and save the government a mind boggling estimated Rs One trillion annually. This saving equivalent to one per cent of the country’s GDP is enough for two Golden Quadrilateral road systems across the country or send 200 Mangalyan missions to the Mars annually.  It is also sufficient to provide minimal health insurance to every family in the country for three years. It is entirely technology driven.

This might well be one of the solutions that Prime Minister Narendra Modi might want to consider seriously to get his much touted “sab ke saath, sab ka vikas” off the ground having remained dormant over the last 18 months since he assumed the high office on the majestic Raisina Hill on May 26 last year.

Today, an increasing number of businesses and industries are run on software delivered as online services – from movies, to agriculture to national defence. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technological companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. 

India now boasts of the world’s third largest internet user base with over 190 million users, many of whom are on smartphones to get online and buy things; as much as 40 per cent of all e-commerce transactions in India are now conducted via mobile phones, bypassing computers altogether.

“India is sitting on demographic dividend and is expected to become the world’s youngest country by 2020, with 64 per cent of its population, roughly 800 million people of working age. That is 800 million knocks on the ceiling with a list of demands that include education, employment, good health, better infrastructure, efficient governance and a corruption free society. The economy that is supposed to sustain the weight of these demands has been growing in single digit at around nine per cent a year at the best of times – a flimsy scaffold on which to construct dreams of a better life.”

The question is how do we build a foundation strong enough to nurture these dreams and bring them to fruition? As an enabler of peoples’ aspirations, the authors insist this requires “a radical rethink of the relationship between the government and its people compared to the one that still seems stuck in a bygone era in its reluctance to embrace technology’s transformative powers”. Even for an urban, middle class Indian dealing with the government is cumbersome. Merely starting a new business in India takes weeks; most of this time is spent in completing the required paper work and legal formalities.

“Whether it is paying taxes or negotiating complex labour law requirements we haven’t built a truly entrepreneur-friendly environment where anyone with a bright idea and some capital can easily start a business,” emphasised Nilekeni, a former CEO of Infosys, and Shah, who is the co-inventor of the Julia programming language and cofounder of FourthLion Technologies. They believe technology can transform government by: (1) Scale – solutions that handle millions of people and billions of transactions; (2) Speed – solution that can be developed in months and years, not decades; (3) Cost — solutions that decrease process and service costs; (4) Enforceability — solutions that can be monitored in real time; (5) Diversity – solutions that work as platforms to foster innovation; (6) Autonomy – solutions that allow government (central, state, local) and its agencies to function independently; (7) Mobility – solutions that are accessible anywhere in the country; (8) Integration – solutions that incorporate the best components across the public private spectrum; (9) Collaboration – solutions that share information and develop partnerships across government; (10) Inclusion – solutions that lowers entry barriers and widen access for all.

The profound shift of balance of power between the government and the people is only possible because of technology. “We need to fix our country’s problems at great speed, at scales with high quality while providing solutions that are easy to access, independent of geography and at low cost. “Technology the great leveller is our only hope of meeting these goals. Many of the states are well run today and the formation of the NITI Ayog and the GST reform will lead to further fiscal consolidation. States should be free to opt for these common platforms because they see a clear benefit in participation rather than through the carrot of money or the stick of the legislation.

The issue of fund flow can be resolved by cutting down the number of schemes and running them more efficiently; equally important, a great proportion of the central funds should be untied, eliminating restrictions on how the money can be spent and allowing states to use their money more effectively. Increasingly India is getting to the point where money itself is no longer the bottleneck. The finances of many states are quite robust. The Centre-State relationship has evolved to a point where “we believe the centre must provide value beyond money through world class platform development”.

The biggest barrier to the ideas Nilekeni and Shah believe is mindsets. In a system that clings tenaciously to hierarchy, it is hard to recognise that a 25-year-old ‘techie’ might have better ideas than the veteran official in his fifties. That value and knowledge lie not at the top of the silo, but at the boundaries across various disciplines. That problem solving is not about big budgets and a cast of thousands, but small teams with shoestring budgets — teams that include technologists, social activists, people who have built successful businesses, domain experts and bureaucrats.

Nilekeni and Shah have identified a dozen great challenges in their book. The first two — Aadhaar and PaHal — have already been scaled successfully. That leaves ten more grand challenges for which ten new start ups are required in the government, each with a team of ten dedicated multi-disciplinarian champions. Such teams operating under the authority of the Prime Minister can drive the sweeping transformation and innovative thinking capable of fulfilling a billion aspirations, say the authors.

“We are much better off dreaming, taking risks, and trying to realise a billion aspirations; at best we risk falling flat on our faces. Far more egregious, and most dangerous to our country, going about business as ususal, leaving a billion voices unheard and a billion frustrations unresolved,” observed Nilekeni and Shah.

The authors are confident that the problems are enormous. And these can only be tackled by fast changing technological tools including cloud computing, big data and analytics to move towards a different kind of aggregation, one that is gaining traction in the private sector.

9128 - Nilekani @ 60: Getting set for yet another innings - Indian Express

Nilekani @ 60: Getting set for yet another innings

 By: ENS Economic Bureau | New Delhi | Published:December 2, 2015 1:09 am

Nandan Nilekani

Nandan Nilekani needs no more awards to feel his lifetime’s work has been appreciated — he’s won a bunch of them and must treasure, above all, the Joseph Schumpeter Prize that was awarded to him in 2005 for innovative services in economy, economic sciences in politics.

That recognition was particularly prescient as just a few years thereafter, in 2009, Nilekani joined the government as chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India to spearhead an initiative that someone rightly described as “biggest social project on the planet”. The idea was to provide every Indian citizen with a social security number and proof of identity that would forever change the way they accessed cash or services.

The Aadhaar project allows the government to pursue social welfare scheme more efficiently and save the exchequer thousands of crores that would otherwise have found their way into the wrong hands. That it has turned out to be a stunning success — netting some 910 million people – and has all top regulators in the country — the Reserve Bank, Securities and Exchange Board of India, Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority and Telecom Regulatory Authority of India — batting for it, despite the Supreme Court’s refusal to make it mandatory, is testimony to Nilekani’s brilliant thinking and ability to execute.

The programme has had its share of detractors but as this paper has pointed out, the invasion of privacy argument doesn’t hold because although Aadhaar is a database of biometrics, it cannot be used to construct a profile of an individual.

For his outstanding contribution to the IT industry and for creating Aadhaar, Nilekani takes home the Express IT Awards Lifetime Achievement Award, 2015.

For anyone to make a big success of even one career is creditable – helping build and lead a company like Infosys is in itself an admirable achievement. But Nilekani has done it twice over with Aadhaar and with a bit of luck could pull it off a third time.

The small-town boy from Dharwad may not yet have all the levers he needs – a position in government or a mandate from the people – to launch another scheme like Aadhaar. But that is unlikely to stop him from trying to transform lives and livelihoods. At 60, Nilekani has the energy, experience and enterprise to take on a project and make it succeed.

As he says, his wealth lies not in his bank balance but in his experience as co-founder of Infosys and Aadhaar chairman where he delivered more than he had promised. And he’s generous with both – between mentoring start-ups, helping out with EkStep and advising the National Payments Corporation of India where they’re working on a payments platform for interoperable mobile payments, Nilekani’s more than busy. As he says, he can contribute best by leveraging his knowledge of technology, business and social activity. EkStep is particularly close to his heart. “I think the change that I would like to see, I would do it through ‘EkStep’,” he said in a recent interview. Going by his track record, Nilekani’s ideas could once again bring about a change of unimaginable magnitude, this time bettering the lives of hundreds of children across the country.

9088 - Ventures in infancy need PM Narendra Modi's support: Nandan Nilekani - Economic Times

Ventures in infancy need PM Narendra Modi's support: Nandan Nilekani

IANS Nov 20, 2015, 04.45PM IST

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi must support new ventures just like a large corporation needs its chief executive to give directions and nurture ideas to grow, says Nandan Nilekani, technocrat and co-founder of one of India's best known IT companies, Infosys.

"In a large corporation, a CEO needs to provide air cover to the teams, nurture new products and ideas. Similarly, the prime minister also needs to provide air cover and nurture these projects in their infancy and then make them part of the mainstream when they achieve scale," he said.

"This is the arithmetic: 10 projects multiplied by a team of 10 for each project plus prime minister's support will equal 101," Nilekani told IANS in an interview.

In his recent book, Rebooting India, co-authored with Viral Shah, Nilekani talks about a tech-driven vision of modern India. "We identify 12 grand challenges. Of these 12, two have attained scale - Aadhaar and Pahal," he said.

"That leaves us with 10, of which four are in the early stages where a lot of ground work has been done - GST (goods and services tax), electronic toll, cashless economy with MicroATMs and Aadhaar, and a paperless society with eKYC (know your customer)," Nilekani said.

"For the other six grand challenges -- health, education, elections, energy, justice and government expenditure management, we have projected our learnings from our time in government, and come up with a detailed implementable roadmap."

Expressing his confidence on Aadhaar, which he oversaw as the chief of the Unique Identification Authority of India, and Pahal, for giving up subsidy on cooking fuels, Nilekani said if they are successful, then the 10 projects he has envisaged will also materialise.

Asked about mushrooming of startups in India and his investments in some of them, he said: "I invest in startups that are operating at the India-scale, building products that organize the unorganized and empower the small guy."

Nilekani, who founded Infosys with six others and was its chief executive from March 2002 till April 2007, has already invested in half a dozen start-ups.

Talking about Aadhaar project, Nilekani said: "In Rebooting India, we define the India stack that shows the power of Aadhaar. It consists of Aadhaar authentication, e-KYC, e-sign, digital locker and cashless payments."

He said all these pieces have been designed and developed.

"The first three have rolled out at scale -- e-sign is defined and being implemented. The digital locker is now in the definition phase. The National Payments Corporation of India is implementing the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) that will bring cashless payments," he said.

"Thus, we can make all trans

9059 - Make simplicity the aadhaar of Digital India - Asian Age

Make simplicity the aadhaar of Digital India

Nov 15, 2015 - S. Raghotham

Nandan Nilekani (Photo: B. Shashidhar)

Simple, well-designed technology is the only way to bring to life a decrepit government system, and the only way to do it is for the government to nurture start-ups within its fold with support from the very top leadership, a la the nuclear energy programme established by Homi Bhabha with support from Jawaharlal Nehru, or the space programme and the Green Revolution under Indira Gandhi, writes Nandan Nilekani and his colleague during the Aadhaar project Viral Shah in their new book, Rebooting India, a modern-day treatise on why and how to digitalise government and governance. Nilekani and Shah say that the trick to overcome a dysfunctional, yet in-your-face, government is to reduce policies and rules into a set of algorithms and deliver them as online services. They enumerate 12 big challenges for the government and show the path to achieve them, using their Aadhaar experience and design principles. Excerpts:

Your first book, Imagining India, had a broad intellectual sweep where you engaged not so much with technology as with social issues, even controversial topics. In Rebooting India, you have plumbed down to a dozen ideas that are technology-dependent, leaving aside other kinds of intervention that might be controversial. What made you decide to focus only on things that can be solved by technology?

Nandan: When I wrote Imagining India, I was looking at the broad swathe of India’s problems and opportunities and I saw that there are many ways of bringing about change, one of them was through ideas. Societies change when ideas change. That’s what led to that book, and you are right, it had a broad intellectual sweep and I looked at and laid out the whole landscape.

Even in this book, Rebooting India, if you look at it, the sweep is there, but we came to the conclusion that technology is the only thing that can fix many of India’s most pressing problems at speed and scale, because there is a mismatch between the aspirations of people and the system’s ability to deliver on its promises. If you don’t fix the system, which is quite decrepit in some sense, then you will continue to have people unhappy about not meeting their aspirations.

Viral: The other thing is that, in fact, to bring about speed and scale, the system should only have such rules that can be encoded in software. Aadhaar is a perfect example. You can do everything in the software.

It is interesting that you have described the nuclear programme as an “early government start-up” in the book...

Nandan: Yeah, Indian history has many examples of start-ups — the nuclear programme, the space programme, the Green Revolution. In all those cases, there was a certain big idea which was not something you could do in the traditional system, so you created a group of people and empowered them to get it done.

In a sense Aadhaar is just the latest example of that way of doing things. But we said rather than just wait for the next one to happen, let’s articulate that this is the way to do things. Start-ups in government are the only way you can address new challenges in an innovative way. And so we identified those 12 challenges, two of which we have done. So, we need 10 start-ups to do the rest. It’s about getting people to think that if you are going to address these mega-challenges, you have to think differently and do it differently.

Why these particular 12 challenges that you have written about?
Nandan: It’s just that we had done Aadhaar and, actually, on the first six ideas in the book too we have done work. For example, we designed the LPG cash transfer system, which was then taken to completion by this government; eKYC for a paperless India; cashless economy using business correspondents and MicroATMs; the Goods & Service Tax Network design was done when we were there, and so was electronic tolling. So these six things were done. And then we said, let’s take up some other big challenges. So we looked at the legal system, power, health, education, expenditure and so on. These are all areas where we had done something or the other. So we thought, look, we might as well put down our experiences and some thoughts about the future so that it’s there on record. Many of them may happen, some may not, but at least our mission is to put it down on paper.

Viral: There are several things we have touched upon in the book about the design behind Aadhaar. One is, don’t put a rule into the system unless it can be embedded in software. That means, minimal Know-Your-Customer (KYC) — only name, address, date of birth, gender, biometrics.

Nandan: I think simplicity at the front-end and complexity at the back-end is a very important principle. Which is, make the customer or citizen interface as simple as possible and move the complexity back, because that’s the only way you can get speed and scale. There are a lot of design principles in Aadhaar that are applicable to every such project.

See, for example, in Aadhaar, you can enroll anywhere in the country. It’s a very powerful idea. You may be someone from Jharkhand working in Gurgaon, you don’t have to go home to enroll, you can enroll in Gurgaon. That’s a simple thing. But it is possible only because at the back-end we are able to figure out duplicates using biometric de-duplication. So there is simplicity, convenience for the user, but at the back-end there is extreme sophistication.

You also talked about a “Digital Locker” for all people when you were at the Unique Identification Authority of India…

Nandan: Actually, the credit for that should be given to this (Modi) government. The e-Sign, which is the electronic signature capability with Aadhaar and “Digital Locker”, which allows you to store documents with an Aadhaar signature and retrieve them with Aadhaar, were implemented by this government as part of the Digital India programme.

You seem to have come to the conclusion that even government policies and rules must be reducible to an algorithm. Why do you think that’s necessary?

Nandan: Well, the advantage of expressing government policy or rules with algorithms is that you can express that as logic and, therefore, it eliminates discretion. When you make rules ambiguous and fuzzy you are putting power into the hands of an individual to interpret the rules and that leads to all the dysfunctionality that you see in government. So, it is very important that as far as possible, rules should be embedded in software.

The other advantage is that you can provide service online without any individual being involved. So, in a way, that makes the government invisible, behind the scenes. It also holds you to a discipline, it forces you to think of a rule as software, it is a way to discipline you to make rules non-ambiguous.

Viral: It’s also the only way to make it scalable and repeatable a million times.

And you conclude that the way to do all this is to bring in new people from outside the establishment...
We are saying, we need to do these 10-12 projects, we need to do start-ups, but the start-up should be an amalgamation of people from within and without. People from inside are vital, because they understand government processes. No outsider can figure out how the government works, so people who have spent 20-30 years doing that stuff, navigating the Central Bureau of Investigation, Comptroller and Auditor General of India, Chief Vigilance Commission, procurement rules, Parliament, Right to Information, etc., are necessary. But you also need to complement them with people from outside to bring in domain knowledge, technology, custom-oriented thinking and so on. And you need entrepreneurial leadership, because for a start-up, whether in the government or in the private sector, you need to think like an entrepreneur. That’s what we are saying.

If Prime Minister Narendra Modi were to ask you to come back into government…
Nandan: No, I have no plans...

Is it an unambiguous “no, not at all”?
Nandan: Yeah.

Why’s that?
Nandan: Well, I have done that. I am done with running companies, I am done with running government projects. Now I am happy doing things with a public change component, but where I don’t have to run large organisations.

At the book launch in Bengaluru, you talked about the risk of “digital colonisation”. Could you elaborate on that?
Nandan: What’s happening is, because of the winner-takes-all nature of the Internet, a few companies dominate the Internet. Then they try to sort of bend the rules in their favour. That’s why I am totally for Net Neutrality. And more and more, they are trying to say that the identity and authentication will be done by them. Now that’s not a good thing. Identity and authentication should be a public good, not controlled by private companies. I think India is the only country in the world — maybe Estonia also — where identity and authentication is a public good, independent of any app or platform. It’s very powerful and very strategic.

9038 - Concerns over Aadhaar security ‘misinformation campaign’: Nilekani - The Hindu

NEW DELHI, November 7, 2015

Concerns over Aadhaar security ‘misinformation campaign’: Nilekani

• YUTHIKA BHARGAVA
• PUJA MEHRA

Only the Unique Identification Authority of India can read the encrypted data and that too only in the system.

Terming concerns over security of data collected for Aadhaar enrollement as “targeted misinformation campaign”, Nandan Nilekani who was the chief architect for rolling out the initiative said the system is completely secure.

“It is targeted misinformation campaign…There are no grounds for it. It is pure misinformation. For Aadhaar, the data is encrypted at source. When you enroll, the data is encrypted and stored in a disk…operator has no control over that,” Mr. Nilekani, who is also the former CEO of Infosys, explained during an interview with The Hindu.

He further added that only the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) can read the encrypted data and that too only in the system. “No human can read it. The data is encrypted at the highest 2048 bit encryption, which takes 1000s of years to crack and it is what the government notifies it as minimum security standard.”

Mr. Nilekani also talked about other questions raised in the Supreme Court such as whether or not individuals are making an informed choice when they are giving out information about themselves, including biometrics.

“When you choose to go for Aadhaar and give biometrics of course it is an informed choice,” Mr. Nikelani said.

He reasoned when a person travels to America, for example, they give their biometrics. When one uses an iPad, information about them, including biometrics, goes to the Apple system. Similar is the case with Gmail, they have access to all mails.

“So person makes a conscious choice that while I understand that these things are there, I am still doing it because it is beneficial. Aadhaar is like that, you are getting a number which ultimately benefits you in many ways,” he added.

In a new book titled ‘Rebooting India’, which he has co-authored along with his UIDAI colleague Viral Shah, the two make a pitch for using technology to help realize the dreams of a billion people. The books suggest that the government should have 10 startups with headed by domain experts to redesign the system.

According to Mr.Nilekani and Mr.Shah, if ideas given by them in the book are implemented, each will lead to a saving of minimum of Rs.10,000 crore a year.

Startups

“It is fundamentally it is saying that if India has to meet its challenges, if a billion people's aspiration have to be met, business as usual will not deliver. Billion people are demanding something everyday... they want better life, better jobs, better education.

If you don't satisfy that you will have all sorts of distortions and in some sense all these issues of caste, religion and reservation is because there is not enough opportunities as the system is not delivering,” Mr.Nilekani said.

He added that the only way is to really dramatically re-engineer the system and that can only be done by innovative startups.

9035 - Nandan Nilekani's recipe for a start-up government - Business Standard

Nandan Nilekani's recipe for a start-up government

Nandan Nilekani and Viral Shah's Rebooting India uses their experience at UIDAI to argue for technological solutions they claim will revitalise India

Mihir S Sharma 

November 7, 2015 Last Updated at 00:18 IST

Technocrats are often unfairly accused of various crimes against democracy. They do not believe in accountability, it is argued; they are insufficiently respectful of politics, they have contempt for existing institutions, or they are overwhelmingly in love with “new” methods.

Of these various accusations, only one can be levelled with any justice at Nandan Nilekani and his erstwhile team at the Unique ID Authority of India, or UIDAI: the last. Aadhaar is a superb tool, one of the best-designed technological interventions to improve Indian governance that can be imagined; but, in many other situations, it could be claimed that even the finest technological interventions will only go so far in solving deep-rooted institutional problems.

Rebooting India, written by Nilekani and another member of the UIDAI, Viral Shah, is at heart an argument for the transformative nature of technology in government. The authors talk about Aadhaar, of course — and then the various killer apps it makes possible, such as inclusive banking, direct benefit transfers, and paperless know-your-customer protocols.

They then go on to discuss other tech fixes they worked on with the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, the previous coalition in power, as part of the Technology Advisory Group for Unique Projects. The Goods and Services Tax Network, or GSTN, for example; the Central Electronic Toll Collection System, or CES, for highways; and the Expenditure Information Network, which would take government transparency to another level by allowing citizens to track where their taxes were being spent.

Not all of these projects took off the way they were supposed to — the EIN is still largely theory. And so the authors’ discussion of them is followed, thankfully, by two successes: India’s electronic voting machines, which have vastly improved the reliability and robustness of our elections, and digital outreach for political parties, which has become since Narendra Modi’s commanding victory a new baseline in Indian politics, even in states as economically backward as Bihar.

Synthesising these examples, Nilekani and Shah wind up with a proposal: that India needs a way to reconcile the energy of start-ups — speed, agility, expertise and market-based incentives — with the strengths of government — scale, stability, intelligent generalists and process-based incentives.

They suggest a new departmental model is needed, a “National Information Utility”, which would bring talent from both government and the private sector together. Such NIUs, which they think could combine the strengths of government and start-up, are “essential to implement technology-enabled solutions to the challenges our country faces today”. The UIDAI, they hint, “could be considered an early forerunner” of the NIU.

Having laid out this proposal, Nilekani and Shah turn to areas where the technological solutions that an NIU could steer would matter. In the building of an electronic medical record system for all Indians, to aid healthcare; online courses and “digital lockers” for educational certificates; smart grids and new-generation batteries to improve power distribution; and a centralised court operation platform that would digitalise and make searchable all court records, as well as allow the progress of any case to be tracked.

Government, they conclude, is “a platform”; it must shift as the priorities of citizens change, and this is their preferred way to do it.

This is a refreshingly optimistic book. The authors’ experience in government — the disputes, the turf wars, the slowness, the political dithering — is gestured to, but does not affect the book’s exalted tone. Other technocrats in government have written books born of their experience, but few have been as purposeful and forward-looking as this. And nobody can read it and believe that the authors are not committed to accountability or to institution-building.

Many of the specific technological interventions strike me as eminently workable, and indeed have been on the agenda since the UPA and are now being incorporated into Modi’s “Digital India” programme. Perhaps the book suffers just a little in comparison, therefore, to Nilekani’s Imagining India, which somehow managed to present ideas every few pages that struck you with their radical new-ness at the time.

I will confess, however, to a small feeling of disappointment. Not in the nature and quality of the argument — the book is easy to read, especially given its subject matter, and ultimately persuasive about its suggestions. And Nilekani and Shah have to be given full credit for being good, decent people; this is far from the standard post-UPA book template, a whiny, tell-all in which the author takes credit for any successes, blames Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi for any failures, and drops dark hints about errors and quarrels to try to get the book’s name on the front pages and prime-time talk shows.

But in the end, Nilekani and Shah’s solution — a few hundred people in ten government “start-ups”, reporting directly to the prime minister — simply feels insufficiently deep. You’re left with wonder that both of them have such hopes from technological adoption, and from small groups in government, even after five far-from-easy years with UIDAI. This is a testament to their sunny nature, but means that the book and its argument feel incomplete. You need more.

Policy change of the sort envisioned here creates angry external interest groups; it creates internal opposition, it has legal and procedural obstacles. Aadhaar faced all of these. A book that truly made the case for these technological interventions would also devote as much time and thought to the politics of these policies. Who would object, and why? How could those objections be overcome? What buy-ins for dissenters, and at what cost to efficiency and speed of implementation?

Many of us hoped that Nilekani would be the first of a new breed: the technocrat who understood politics. In fact, he probably is. But this book does not sufficiently showcase that understanding; the problems of adoption are mentioned, but are effectively sidelined in most cases.

What is most disappointing is that they conclude with the common fantasy that all you need is a supportive prime minister, and that being “anchored” under a PM would allow the NIUs to succeed. Successful PMs have to balance interest groups just like everyone else; good underlings for successful PMs help them do that. Those who create or conserve political and bureaucratic capital are more valuable than those who spend it.

But these disagreements shouldn’t stop anyone from reading the book; on the contrary. How and why these solutions will be implemented is yet to be understood; but they are solutions, and I believe that most of them will somehow come to be. Such is, after all, the promise and peril of technology. Nilekani and Shah have seen the future, and it works.

9032 - Not looking for a career in politics or government: Nandan Nilekani - Economic Times

Not looking for a career in politics or government: Nandan Nilekani

By Anirban Sen & Sowmya Aji, ET Bureau | 5 Nov, 2015, 09.29AM IST

"I believe I can add value from the outside -- so I’m not looking for a career either in politics or in the government" 

A day ahead of the launch of his latest book 'Rebooting India' with former UIDAI colleague Viral B. Shah, Infosys co-founder and former UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani said that the current Modi-led government needs to do more in terms of execution and is yet to keep the promises that were made at the time it came to power, while asserting that he does not intend to return to politics and cont .. 

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