11891 - Aadhaar: An offer that Nandan Nilekani couldn't refuse - Money Control

Aug 26, 2017 11:37 AM IST | Source: Moneycontrol.com

Aadhaar: An offer that Nandan Nilekani couldn't refuse

It was the mega identification project that had prompted Nilekani to leave Infosys after 28 years in 2009 to try his hand at bureaucracy.

Moneycontrol News

Nandan Nilekani is back at Infosys, returning to the company he co-founded as the software major looks to tide over a leadership crisis.

In his first press interaction since his return, Nilekani said his experience with the Aadhaar project would hold him in good stead in his mission to revive Infosys.

In fact, it was the mega identification project that had prompted Nilekani to leave Infosys after 28 years in 2009 to try his hand at bureaucracy.

Nilekani was initially offered a role in the Planning Commission by the UPA government. He pitched for a job in the education ministry, which was politely refused.

He was then appointed as the Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), a cabinet-ranking position attached to the Planning Commission.

As the head of one of the United Progressive Alliance's (UPA) most passionate initiatives, Nilekani's work was cut out for him.

He was responsible for implementing what was envisioned to be a multipurpose national identity card or simply, a Unique Identity Card (UID, for the people of India that would be part of the world's largest biometric identification programme.

Nilekani would commute between Delhi, where he worked and Bengaluru, where his family lived, every week. Soon, he realised the potential of the project he had undertaken. He was creating a system that would connect governance and technology, something that the two cities stood for.

Nilekani and his team met several obstacles. They had to construct a system that would be able to match and maintain name, age, gender and the biometrics of over a billion Indians, besides keeping them secure.

Initial trials, when several errors were made, had shown just how difficult the task was going to be.

Besides the technological challenges, Nilekani had to deal with the administrative obstacles.

His colleague from Infosys, Narayana Murthy told The New Yorker, "The challenge is in making sure that literally hundreds of thousands of officers fall in line, they rally to his (Nilekani's) call and march to his tune."

Ahead of its launch in April 2010, the project was officially named "Aadhaar" and in September that year, people of Tembhli in Maharashtra became the first village to receive Aadhaar cards.

Despite concerns over the issues of privacy, Nilekani stood his ground and defended the system he had created.

In 2015, he co-authored "Rebooting India" with his UIDAI colleague Viral Shah, in which they made the case for using Aadhaar to help eliminate distortions, biases and fraud.

He steered the project for five years before stepping down in 2014 to contest the Lok Sabha elections. Three years on, the NDA government has taken the Aadhaar project to the next level, pushing to make Aadhaar as the go-to identification document for every Indian.

11276 - Is your Aadhaar a safe bet? - Mid-Day

Is your Aadhaar a safe bet?

By Kusumita Das | Mumbai | Posted 07-May-2017

Viral Shah, who worked with Nandan Nilekani in rolling out Aadhaar, addresses the nation’s concern regarding how vulnerable we are making ourselves

An Aadhaar card submission queue at Hanuman Nagar, Kandivli (East)

It was a chance meeting with UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India) chairman and Infosys co-founder Nandan Nileknani circa 2010, that led to Viral Shah’s brief, yet significant stint with Aadhaar. At that time, Shah, who was in the US, fresh out of his PhD. from University of California, Santa Barbara, was in India to renew his visa. His eyes were set on collaborating with MIT on a project for his post doctorate. The meeting with Nilekani, however, changed everything. Shah dropped his visa application and immersed himself in rolling out the system as we know it today. "He told me about this cool and significant system that he was working on which would change the future of the country, but he mentioned he had no salary to offer. He had an open-door policy and he was getting hundreds of applications from people who understood the kind of impact Aadhaar was going to make. I wanted to be a part of that, I must have been among the first five or 10 people in the team," says the 37-year-old, who was assigned the role of building applications for Aadhaar in financial inclusions. "I rolled out the eKYC (Know Your Customer) and the LPG, kerosene and fertiliser subsidy, of which the LPG took off in a big way." Shah worked in Aadhaar for a little over two years, till 2012, before he left to resume his original passion — scientific computing. "My job in Aadhaar was to roll out the financial inclusion part of the system, and not to run it. While economic policy is also an area of my passion, I was itching to start something of my own," says Shah, co-founder of Julia Language, a high-performance computer (programming) language.

From the time he had worked on Aadhaar, till now, the one thing that has significantly changed, he feels is the scale. "And therein lies the challenge." As the debate over how safe Aadhaar is gains steam, we ask the expert to tell us whether or not the nation’s fears are unwarranted.

Is the biometric system really safe?
The UIDAI has the least amount of data as compared to most government departments, like the Income Tax or the Election Commission. The RTO offices know more about my driving history and the public hospitals, my health records than Aadhar will ever do. Let’s not even get to the amount of data Uber and Google has about us. It is important to understand the system of federated information. It is practically impossible to put so much information on one platform. If the Income Tax department wants to link your PAN card to your Aadhaar, the data is not with Aadhar, it’s with the IT. The same applies to my driving license, where the RTO will have my data, and flight tickets, in which case, the airline will have it. It is the service provider who has the information (which they do anyway), not Aadhaar. So, if MS Dhoni’s Aadhaar is leaked, all one has is the number. For more information, one would require a court order to access individual departments, something only the police can avail of.

Why link Aadhaar to all these channels then?
That’s a wrong question to ask, in my opinion. What we should ask, instead, is why these channels are linking to Aadhaar. Because the former makes it seem like the UIDAI is collecting all the info. Yes, the benefits of linking a flight ticket to Aadhaar, needs to be made clear. Perhaps, it is to put a cap on benaami travellers. The larger question is, is my data safe with them? And that is for these channels to answer and assure. The organisations that have your data should be made accountable for their usage and safety. And, of course, the government needs to play a role in that.

                                     Viral Shah

Your take on the recent Aadhaar number leaks?
There are certain subsidy departments that are under a lot of pressure from the RTI to keep their workings transparent. They need to disclose as much as they can under the RTI act. The country is new to the conflict of revealing some information and safeguarding the rest. Yes, a leak like this should not happen, and these are the cracks that need to be fixed. It is important that people should question the government — how it’s keeping their data. But, the fear mongering needs to stop. A leak of information, in the scale people are imagining it, is impossible. Aadhaar data is collected and encrypted at source. Even the company collecting the data cannot access it once it is entered in the system. That packet is sealed forever.

Why have so many unique identification numbers?
Every number exists for a reason, be it your PAN card, passport or driver’s licence. At some level, it might seem like an overload. But, a government that is asked to create bank accounts for the poor, also gets questioned about money laundering. There is always this push and pull, and taking a step will upset the balance. But, to replace everything with Aadhaar, would be a futile and expensive exercise. What people want is a simpler interface, show the (Aadhaar) number and get their services, without having to show other ID proofs. Will that happen? I think it will. It’s a decision to be taken by government departments.

9883 - Like Aadhaar, Like GST: Even if GST legislation is blocked, plenty can be done through executive action - Nandan Nilekani

Like Aadhaar, Like GST: Even if GST legislation is blocked, plenty can be done through executive action

April 25, 2016, 2:00 AM IST TOI Edit in TOI Editorials | Edit Page, India | TOI

By Nandan Nilekani and Viral Shah

In the run up to this year’s budget finance minister Arun Jaitley said, “GST has been supported by most political parties and I am sure others will also see reason and this law will become a reality very soon. Reform is a continuous process and there is no finishing line. It has to go on because challenges keep coming up.”

Every single budget speech in the last six years has mentioned GST. By some measures, we are closer to GST than we have ever been, and by others, we are as far as we ever were. If the yardstick for measurement is passage of the GST legal framework, we have made little progress. If the yardstick is all the hard things such as overall design, stakeholder buy-in, readiness, institution building, and technology, we are quite close to launching GST. The question naturally arises – should GST wait for the law? The answer is an emphatic No.

In 2009, the Empowered Committee of State Finance Ministers put out its first paper on GST. In 2010 the Empowered Group on IT for GST, headed by Nandan Nilekani, proposed the IT Strategy for GST. This solution consisted of creating a professional company, the Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN), to manage the technology for GST. The ownership structure of GSTN would include the central government, all the state governments and various other institutions.

A key part of the IT Strategy was that the technology development could get a head start, while the political establishment finalised business rules such as tax rates and exemption lists. This design was unanimously accepted by the Centre and all states, and the GST Network was announced in the 2012-13 budget speech and created shortly thereafter. Over the last few years, the GSTN has made substantial progress towards technology readiness. GSTN is a fine example of cooperative federalism.

Most steps towards GST readiness can be taken through executive decision. The excise and service tax arms of the Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC) in the finance ministry can be merged. Combining excise, a tax on goods, with service tax will present many conceptual difficulties which can be ironed out. State VAT which is a tax on goods is actually easier to integrate. Then the GSTN can offer a state of the art VAT system, which is future compatible with GST, to all states on a opt-in basis.

A common gateway for payments of both central and state taxes, and common taxpayer registration can be done right now. At least 15-20 states will be happy to implement this solution. When the law is passed, GST can be enabled with far less disruption.

The combination of invoice matching from a state of the art VAT system with data sharing, which can be done by GSTN in partnership with CBEC and the states, will give a huge boost to tax collection at both states and Centre, and show the power of cooperation. After all the real issue is not about autonomy, but to simplify taxation for businesses, and fight tax evasion.

Synchronous design, where everyone has to agree to everything at the same time is almost impossible to implement. Either everyone comes on board or nobody does. In government, the key to success is to design asynchronous systems, so that participants can come on board at their own pace, and the progress of many is not thwarted because of a few. While the GST legal framework is synchronous, the actual design and implementation through GSTN is not. GSTN can on-board states one by one, modernising their VAT systems, and states with well-developed VAT systems can join later.

Laws are the software that drive society. Just like software takes time to develop, so do laws. All laws, especially around taxation, should be simple enough that they can be expressed as software. Eventually, while tax rates and exemption lists are simply values in tables that are easy to change, the software rules that are embedded in the GSTN will be sticky. We believe that laws can be finalised even as implementation starts using a well-designed technology framework and all field and software aspects are well understood.

A similar approach was taken with Aadhaar. Aadhaar reached a billion by having a scalable design that aligned incentives of all stakeholders and was asynchronous in its design. Registrars, enrolment agencies, technology vendors, and even the residents all came on board at their own pace and convenience. The benefits due to financial savings and inclusion convinced the establishment to get the law passed. While the lack of a law curtailed the usage of Aadhaar, the final law incorporated valuable feedback from implementation experience and put Aadhaar on a much firmer footing.

GST needs similar out of the box thinking. It will lead to the economic integration of India, smooth movement of goods, realise Make in India, and lead to our overall prosperity and well-being. The lack of a law ought not to prevent all these good things from happening. If the law is passed, this work will make the world’s largest business process re-engineering project much simpler. If not, upgrades to existing archaic systems will be welcomed by one and all.

Nandan Nilekani headed Infosys and is former chairperson, UIDAI. Viral Shah is co-inventor of the “Julia” programming language

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

9052 - After Aadhaar Card, now Nandan Nilekani lays road map for improved India - One India

After Aadhaar Card, now Nandan Nilekani lays road map for improved India 

Posted by: Shreyas Updated: Wednesday, November 11, 2015, 8:11 [IST]

Read more at: http://www.oneindia.com/india/nilekani-book-lays-road-map-for-improved-india-1923909.html

Bengaluru, Nov 10: A new book, authored by Nandan Nilekani and Viral Shah, extensively talks about challenges that the new India is facing. The book, "Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations", was launched at Taj West End Hotel in Bengaluru on Monday, Nov 9. Outlining studied road map to invigorate India, the book proposes for the romancing between positives of technology and the government. Though Nilekani, the co-founder of Infosys and former chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India(UIDAI), takes critical stand against snail-like system of bureaucracy, he admits there are many goods in the system which has to be amalgamated with technology to see the emergence of changed India. "We have lot of aspirations and aspirations are non linear. With the 19th century of bureaucratic system alone, it is impossible to meet all the aspirations," he observes. The book that is also co-authored by Viral Shah spreads broad light on bringing fertilizer subsidy of farmers under Direct Benefit Transfer Scheme (DBT) as to save travel expenses of backbone of India to collect the subsidy amount. "While me and my team was touring in Uttar Pradesh, we witnessed an untoward incident of police resorting to lathi charge to control flooding farmers to collect subsidized sack of fertilizers," Viral narrated. He asks when urban class can avail technology to see ordered materials coming at their door step, why can't same be applied for the rural mass, especially farmers. Roping young intellectuals Viral and Nandan were addressing an elite gathering, which was attended by noted personalities like, co-founder of Infosys, Narayana Murthy, former MP Divya Spandana (Ramya), hostorian Ramachandra Guha and others. Nandan envisaged in the book only integration of technology open doors to innovative India. The book, however, proposes ten challenges for India and suggest start-ups within the government itself. "As many as 100-200 young intellectuals should work on technical front to revolutionize techno-government system." Nilekani proposed. Bureaucratic receptiveness The authors in the book write about how the government regulatory bodies has to encourage new kinds of business emerging on the back of technological revolutions. The rigid bureaucratic system has to be changed in order accommodate aspirations of new business ventures to reboot India, the book reads. Besides, the book has a chapter on political economy and implications of centralized voting system to eliminate the problem of constituency constrain at the time of voting and end corruption at the time registration of voting rights. Intellectual Property Diverse key sectors-health, education, election, transportation, energy, finance and others has to be enabled with improved technology to change the lives of lay man of the nation. Nandan and Viral in the book floated the idea of cash-less and paper less system. Ahead of materializing the project, it is impending to create intellectual property to set the stage to transform the system. The technology lends speed to the government institutions that has been marred with bureaucratic apathy for many decades. He cited the example of success of Aadhar by the UIDAI and the work the team underwent before realizing the project. He opined, though Adhar was introduced by the UPA (United Progressive Alliance), the incumbent Modi government has been reaping the benefits. He divulge he met PM Narendra Modi to convince not to drop Adhar. Net Neutrality Nandan Nilekani stands firm by the side of net neutrality as he fear of few Internet giants slowing whole digital network of the globe. "I am for net neutrality and I fear, if the aspect was neglected there is a massive threat of few Internet barons of Silicon Valley controlling global digital network." Watch videosof the exclusive interviews:

Read more at: http://www.oneindia.com/india/nilekani-book-lays-road-map-for-improved-india-1923909.html

9048 - Government needs to think beyond building websites: Viral B Shah, coder and author - Economic Times

Government needs to think beyond building websites: Viral B Shah, coder and author

ET Bureau Nov 9, 2015, 10.45AM IST

By J Vignesh

BENGALURU: By the time he was in his eighth standard, Viral B Shah, co-author of 'Rebooting India Realising a Billion Aspirations', knew that coding was his passion. It started with BASIC and led to Julia, a language designed to meet the requirements of numerical, scientific and general purpose programming.

The 35-year-old, who grew up in Mumbai in "a traditional and simple Gujarati family", landed in Bengaluru in 2010 to work with UIDAI."After my PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I worked at Interactive Supercomputing, a small startup. It was acquired by Microsoft and I decided not to join a large software company and instead moved back to India to work on Aadhaar," he said.

Shah also started working on Julia, with three others, at the same time. "Aadhaar by daytime, Julia at night," he added.

Aadhaar led to his associa tion with Nandan Nilekani, the IT czar who later became his co-author.

Shah's role in the project focussed on facilitating various government payments such as subsidies, social security benefits and peer-to-peer remittances using Aadhaar.

The book, which grew out of the experiences from the Aadhaar project, aims to solve the challenges that the country faces. " With our book, Rebooting India, Nandan and I project all our learning to solve various grand challenges that India faces using software at the core. We believe that a government needs to not just create websites but completely reimagine gover nance with technology at the core, just like Amazon did with retail or Uber and Ola did with taxis," he said.

Shah feels that the energy for tech in general and startups in particular is palpable.

"Bengaluru is, according to me, the only rival to silicon valley.

The ecosystem is evolving. It is the hub for people with coding degrees. IoT has become a big thing here. There are makerspaces coming up and hackathons happening. There is so much energy and innovation happening," he said.

Apart from the geek that he is, this passionate coder loves to hike and play Ultimate Frisbee and says that his favourite Bengaluru moments have been, "Taking the walk with Bangalore Walks down MG Road and learning about the city's scientific past — the most interesting being the great trigonometric mapping of India that started at Trinity Church." 

He also has a thing for idlis and enjoys trying them at different eateries.

But having said all that, the entrepreneur in him wants to help nurture the upcoming ones. "I love meeting with entrepreneurs who are thinking of one crazy idea after another — trying to change India and the world, all with an app," Shah said.