Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations (5 page)

Given all these benefits, a cost analysis was performed by the UIDAI. Capturing and de-duplicating iris data was found to increase the cost of each enrolment by around Rs 4.40. Of this additional sum, the capture device cost Rs 2.90 while the additional labour as well as the iris de-duplication software cost 75 paise each. These numbers were projected to decrease as enrolments went up. The overall increase in the project cost was estimated at Rs 5 billion, an expenditure justified by the massive improvements in inclusiveness and data security that iris data can bring about.
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It wasn’t just the government that raised objections to Aadhaar. Concerns about national security led some people to protest on the grounds that any resident of India could enrol for Aadhaar, even non-citizens; they were apprehensive that illegal immigrants could use their Aadhaar number to bilk the government of funds by claiming social security benefits. These fears are not grounded in reality. As we’ve pointed out before, Aadhaar is purely an identity platform, and provides no information other than verifying who someone is. It
offers no information on the citizenship status of the Aadhaar holder, and merely furnishing your Aadhaar number is not sufficient to get any welfare benefits; you still have to prove to the state that you are below the poverty line if you want subsidized foodgrains, or that you are above eighteen and live in a rural area if you want to enrol in the MGNREGA scheme, or that you are a child enrolled in a government school if you want a free mid-day meal, and so on.

Although the Aadhaar number was never meant to be mandatory for any government service, some felt that no government schemes should be linked to Aadhaar until all 1.2 billion residents of India had one. They were concerned that prematurely making an Aadhaar number-based service available would leave the unenrolled out in the cold. The UIDAI has always advised government agencies to rely on alternative methods of identity verification until Aadhaar achieves sufficient coverage. Unfortunately, some agencies jumped the gun in declaring the Aadhaar number to be mandatory for availing of certain benefits. This was in opposition to the UIDAI’s stand on the matter, and the Supreme Court had to step in and reverse any such declarations.

Another point of view held by some NGOs was that Aadhaar-linked direct benefit transfers could be used as an excuse by the state to abdicate its responsibility towards social welfare. Instead of building better schools and primary healthcare clinics, for example, activists feared that the government would restrict itself to disbursing cash benefits using Aadhaar. However, using Aadhaar to accurately identify those individuals deserving of social welfare benefits has been acknowledged by the present government as an essential step towards welfare reforms, and has always been a key goal of the programme.

Citizen groups concerned with data privacy and security objected to the idea of creating a database containing the demographic and biometric data of all Indian residents, fearing the emergence of a surveillance state in which biometric information could be used as a targeting mechanism; at a time when whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden have revealed the extent to which governments can snoop into the private lives of unsuspecting citizens, such a database might
prove an irresistible temptation to a government wanting to keep tabs on its people, violating their right to privacy in the process. Given that India still doesn’t have a single, well-defined law that regulates data privacy, such concerns were valid. The UIDAI was well aware of these issues, and hence designed all of Aadhaar’s data collection, storage and retrieval processes with great emphasis on security. These design decisions have been outlined in great detail in many of the technical documents put out by the UIDAI.

Once the UIDAI collects an individual’s data, it is stored securely in government-owned data centres in Bangalore and Noida. Unless an individual provides explicit consent, their data cannot be shared with anyone, not even another government department. If any government or private agency wishes to make use of Aadhaar for identity verification or e-KYC processes, they can only do so with the consent of the Aadhaar holder. In such cases, the information supplied by the UIDAI to the agency is exactly the same as the data found on any other government-issued photo identity card.

This stance on data privacy was tested in 2013, when a Goa court ordered that the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) be provided access to the UIDAI’s database. A Goan schoolgirl had been raped, the police were unable to solve the case, and the CBI hoped that the database could be used to compare fingerprint data and identify possible suspects. Although well intentioned, such a directive was in clear violation of the UIDAI’s policies on data privacy and individual consent. The UIDAI ended up petitioning the Supreme Court on the matter, who ruled that no such information could be provided to the CBI unless the suspect himself had authorized it, in effect barring law enforcement and other government agencies from obtaining an individual’s biometric data without their approval.
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Many of these issues were resurrected when the National Identification Authority of India (NIDAI) Bill was proposed. This was the piece of legislation that would grant the UIDAI statutory approval and parliamentary recognition. The Standing Committee on Finance presented a parliamentary report regarding the NIDAI Bill which rehashed the older arguments against Aadhaar.
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One contentious issue
was the distribution of power between the executive and the legislature when it came to overseeing a project of this magnitude. The hazard of duplicate identity schemes run by different governments also found a mention. As we have described, a consensus was reached between the UIDAI and the home ministry regarding the distribution of work for the Aadhaar and NPR schemes. The UIDAI also reiterated that Aadhaar is meant to function as an open platform, compatible with any scheme that requires ID verification. Some of the technical issues regarding the accuracy of biometrics as discussed in the report were factually incorrect. The UIDAI has issued several detailed reports that refute these arguments. As of now, the NIDAI Bill has not been enacted as a law by Parliament. However, the new government at the Centre has thrown its weight behind the Aadhaar scheme, extending enrolments to an additional four states—Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand—and setting the UIDAI a target of a billion Aadhaar enrolments to be completed in 2015.
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Whether it’s giving Aadhaar numbers to two-thirds of the country in five years, or taking on any other project that seems audacious at best and impossible at worst, some principles always hold true.

Set a goal that is reachable, but which requires a lot of hard work and effort to get there. Have a clear-cut vision of what you are trying to achieve, a vision that should be inspiring enough and powerful enough to attract the best minds in the business. Try and build as diverse a team as you can, and don’t let your thinking get bogged down by whether they’re bureaucrats, tech geeks, finance wizards or academicians, as long as they have something of value to contribute.

Many of the lessons we learnt in these five years were probably unique to the environment in which Aadhaar came to be, but are generalizable beyond Aadhaar. In the din of democracy, every ministry, committee, agency and member of Parliament has a viewpoint on a given programme, and all these viewpoints must be considered and given due attention. We must be sure that the needs of all groups are
being met and nobody is being inadvertently excluded. This can only be achieved if we can build a coalition for change.

Despite the opposition that the Aadhaar programme faced from some quarters, the UIDAI worked hard to build a strong, positive coalition that understood and supported the goal of granting an identity to every Indian. This coalition had many faces, each with their own reasons for participating. There were state governments, who recognized that Aadhaar and its various applications could benefit both the administration and the people under its jurisdiction. For every smart-card supplier who was unhappy, there were biometric vendors who supported Aadhaar’s biometric efforts. While some NGOs rose in protest, there were others that endorsed Aadhaar as a solution for the poor and marginalized to gain an identity. And finally, there were the people of India, who voted with their feet and walked in large numbers to their local enrolment centre to voluntarily sign up for an Aadhaar number—the silent millions who finally spoke and claimed their unassailable right to possess an official identity as a resident of the country.

In any private sector company, there are a limited number of people to whom you are answerable. In the government, however, every project has many masters, all of whom can, and often do, question the manner in which things are being done. The former commissioner of the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Charles O. Rossotti, includes in his brilliant book
Many Unhappy Returns
a sketch that Senator Bob Kerrey drew for him on a scrap of paper during his confirmation hearing, listing out all the government officials and departments to whom Rossotti, as the IRS commissioner, would be directly answerable. There are sixteen different agencies on that list. Not surprising that Senator Kerrey signed his artwork, ‘Good luck in the bullseye’. It was no different for the UIDAI, which was answerable to multiple departments and agencies within the government as well as to the public at large. We had to learn how to handle feedback from so many different sources, and assimilate all these different opinions.

The UIDAI began operations with a minimal staff housed in temporary offices in New Delhi and Bangalore, operating on a
shoestring budget (we discuss this in detail in the next chapter). We could have waited for years until formal offices were built, a full complement of officers was appointed and an ironclad legislative bill was passed before we started work on enrolling residents. Had we done so, it is entirely possible that today not a single Indian would have received his or her Aadhaar number as yet. Forging ahead was a calculated risk, but one that bore rich rewards. The many innovative ways in which Aadhaar is being deployed would have otherwise remained a mirage confined to the pages of government reports.

Let’s return to where we started, to Ranjana Sonawane of Tembhli. Did her life take a turn for the better after she received her Aadhaar number? When reporters visited her in 2014, not much had changed. She was still struggling to make ends meet, concerned about providing a good education to her three sons. She asked, pointedly, ‘How will I eke out a living with a card?’ Her question highlights the fact that Aadhaar is not a panacea for all that ails the many Ranjanas across the nation. If our country is a jigsaw, then Aadhaar is only one piece of that puzzle. Ultimately, Ranjana’s story tells us that it will take multiple government systems working in tandem to build a picture of a truly inclusive India that fulfils the aspirations of all its citizens..
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LIKE MANY OTHER bureaucrats, Ram Sewak Sharma is possessed of a polite manner and speaks beautifully chaste Hindi. However, behind this courtly veneer lies an extremely sharp, pragmatic and decisive mind, fairly unusual in government circles. Also unusual is his keen understanding of technology, honed during his days in the Jharkhand state government’s information technology department. A hobbyist programmer since college, he’d even taken a mid-career break to get his master’s in computer science. On 1 July 2009, he met Nandan at the Maurya Sheraton in New Delhi to discuss what he had been told was a ‘project of national importance’. As he tells us, ‘Nandan informed me that he was going to join the UIDAI as chairman and was looking for somebody to work as CEO. We discussed the project in general terms, but from a bureaucrat’s perspective it was clear that this was a brand new start-up and would have to face huge challenges in setting up the initial infrastructure and organization. When Nandan asked me if I would like to do it, I said yes, because if he could take the risk, so could I.’

Six months earlier, the UIDAI had officially come into existence, and the government had reached out to Nandan with the opportunity of leading this programme. While exciting, it was also an extremely challenging project, completely unlike anything the government had
worked on so far. And so, Nandan reached out to several colleagues and experts in various fields to gather their opinions. Some of these colleagues included Srikanth Nadhamuni, a co-founder of eGovernments Foundation, a non-profit organization that helps governments improve service delivery via technology; T. Koshy, then an executive director at the National Securities Depository Ltd, who was familiar with the use of technology in government; and Sriram Raghavan, the founder of Comat Technologies, a firm that had worked extensively at the ground level with ration-card issuance and duplicate elimination in Karnataka. These early meetings familiarized Nandan with the kinds of challenges and complexities to expect, and were key in forming the early architecture of Aadhaar.

Next, Nandan sought a meeting with Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, the government department that was to be the official home of the unique ID scheme for the next five years. All these discussions convinced Nandan that building a unique ID platform was exactly the sort of worthwhile challenge he could sink his teeth into. On 15 June 2009, he met the prime minister Manmohan Singh, and officially expressed his interest in heading the unique identity project. Ten days later, he was appointed chairman of the UIDAI at a Cabinet meeting. By 9 July, he wrapped up his responsibilities at Infosys; less than six weeks after his first meeting with the prime minister, Nandan took charge of the organization that would implement the ‘biggest social project on the planet’.
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On 12 August 2009, the prime minister’s advisory council held its first meeting with the objective of establishing the UIDAI’s initial benchmark—the number of people who would receive an Aadhaar number within the next five years. In order to come up with an estimate before this meeting, the UIDAI organized a conference with experts from various fields. The economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, B. Venugopal, an executive director at the LIC, Shankar Maruwada, a marketing and analytics expert, government officials
such as Ram Sewak Sharma, professors from Ivy League colleges, representatives from NGOs and many others weighed in. The initial estimate that emerged predicted that 400 million people could be enrolled in five years. Nandan felt that this was too conservative a goal. As he says, ‘This is one-third of our population and appeared too small given that we had five years, so I said let us target 600 million. When in the meeting I committed 600 million by March 2014, I had no clue how to get there. It’s a happy situation that by the end, we comfortably surpassed it.’

Setting such an ambitious goal was a deliberate choice; during his time in the private sector, Nandan had come to realize the value of stretch goals that could push people out of their comfort zones and energize them into delivering the impossible. How could this principle be put into practice inside the Byzantine byways of the Indian government? The original proposal envisioned the UIDAI being set up along the traditional lines of a government agency, with every state having a joint secretary heading the operations and managing a large field staff, all potentially adding up to thousands of employees. Instead, Nandan decided to take up an approach he describes as a ‘crazy idea’—to run Aadhaar as if it were a start-up inside government, following in the footsteps of trailblazing organizations like the Atomic Energy Commission and the Indian Space Research Organization. The UIDAI adopted a lean, open organizational structure—key planning and strategy decisions were taken by a core team that numbered only 300 at most. The actual execution of the project became the responsibility of outside vendors, who were selected to partner with the UIDAI through standard government processes.

The core team needed to have people who were comfortable with risk, who had expertise in multiple fields, and who had both the energy and the enthusiasm to chase down a formidable target. It turns out that the Indian government had many such individuals within its ranks. Following in the pioneering footsteps of Ram Sewak Sharma was K. Ganga, Deputy Director General (Finance), whose crisp saris became a personal trademark. She came from the Indian Audit and Accounts Services and had been at the forefront of pioneering IT-based
initiatives as far back as 1989. She also served as the financial advisor to the President of India. She recollects, ‘When a common friend asked me whether I would like to join Nandan, the IT czar of India, as his chief financial officer for the most ambitious and transformational project that was ever undertaken by the Government of India, I did not even bat an eyelid before I said yes.’

Nandan’s private secretary, M.S. Srikar, a gold medallist from the National Law School of India, was originally from the Karnataka cadre of the Indian Administrative Service. ‘Having worked in the government for over little over a decade in 2009, the opportunity to work in a new, unique experiment which could redefine the way government functions was an exciting prospect. I was undergoing my mandatory mid-career training in the IAS Academy in Mussoorie when I was informed that I was proposed as the private secretary to the chairman of the UIDAI, Mr Nilekani. It was followed up with an interview in Delhi at short notice before I was picked. It was rare to be interviewed in government for an assignment, but Nandan put me at ease and sought my views on a number of issues,’ Srikar recounts. In order to help with the complex technology procurement process within government, B.B. Nanavati joined the UIDAI from the Indian Revenue Service, bringing with him knowledge of years of IT procurement.

Ashok Pal Singh, who served as deputy director general (DDG) in charge of financial inclusion and also logistics, came into the UIDAI from India Post. Soft-spoken and businesslike, Viral describes him as a ‘rare strategic thinker in a tactical environment’. The idea of a unique identity for every resident of India was something that he had devoted much thought to, going so far as to come up with a plan for post offices to provide ID cards and bank accounts to people via a smart card-based system. When he heard of Nandan’s appointment, he remembers thinking, ‘Here is a person who will buy into this idea unlike regular people in the system.’ He sent Nandan an unsolicited email—‘a shot in the dark’, he says—and got a reply within fourteen minutes, inviting him to come on board.

Rajesh Bansal, Assistant Director General (Financial Inclusion),
was in the US completing a master’s in public policy at Duke University; his thesis dealt with the need for India to set up a national ID system to improve governance and service delivery. He tells us, ‘I was taking an evening walk when my wife called me from India and told me, you’re going to fall off your chair. You will not believe this but the government has just announced the scheme you’ve been writing about in your thesis. Naturally, as soon as I got back, I was terribly keen to contribute in some way. I shared some of my ideas with Ram Sewak Sharma and he asked me to join the UIDAI.’

The UIDAI’s roster was dazzling in its diversity. Government officials were deputed from the Indian Administrative Service, the railways, the postal service, the telecom service, the Reserve Bank of India, the defence accounts service, the civil accounts service and the revenue service, among others. Experts from the private sector came on board as well, with experience in technology, marketing, public relations, outreach to civil society, law, research and academia, and other related fields. Many such individuals were hired as consultants through the National Institute of Smart Governance (NISG). Others, especially members of the technology team, were initially hired as volunteers or took sabbaticals from their organizations, including such technology behemoths as Hewlett Packard, Oracle and Intel. In fact, Nandan wrote a letter to NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service Companies), asking them to lend their employees to the Aadhaar project. The response was extremely positive, with many companies contributing talent to the Aadhaar technology team at their own cost. Students from some of the world’s best educational institutions were selected as interns. Irrespective of their designation, everyone who joined the UIDAI had to undergo an interview and sign an agreement. Everyone had a clearly defined role and responsibility within the organizational structure.

Many of those who joined gave up comfortable positions and perks to be part of this project. Ashok Pal Singh summed up the situation perfectly when he said, ‘In terms of perks, privileges and pay, this place has nothing more to offer than any job in government. In many respects, it is worse off. And yet, everyone is here because they
want to be.’ Without this diversity and this level of commitment, the Aadhaar project may never have got off the ground.

Turf wars between government ministries and a lack of coordination mean that projects developed in one ministry may not be adopted by others. To avoid these sorts of squabbles, the UIDAI was housed in the Planning Commission (the present-day Niti Aayog), a neutral body. This way, all ministries could sign up for the Aadhaar platform without stepping on any toes.

In theory, the birth and evolution of the UIDAI sounds quite orderly and bureaucratic in nature—deciding how to execute a massive government project, defining some key operational principles, setting up committees to issue recommendations, and roping in consulting experts for their opinions. But all of this orderly thinking happened not in spacious government offices, staffed with a full complement of personal assistants, but in the chaotic, frenetic environment familiar to anyone who’s ever set foot in a technology start-up.

The UIDAI started functioning with a bare-bones budget of Rs 1 billion for the first year (which was never completely utilized), a skeleton staff, and very little office space. And yes, 1 billion rupees in the Government of India is considered a small project. The senior bureaucrats who held the posts of director general (DG) and deputy director general would have been entitled elsewhere to comfortable cabins of their own; here, they were squashed, cheek-by-jowl, with everyone else in a miniscule room in the erstwhile Planning Commission’s Yojana Bhavan office in New Delhi. Eventually, the UIDAI headquarters moved to the Jeevan Bharti building in Connaught Place, a location formerly occupied by Air India. Even then, the team did not wait for the offices to be renovated before they moved in. They worked in one half of the office, ignoring the noise and dust around them as the other half was being refurbished.

Simultaneously, the technology team began to take shape in Bengaluru. Passionate about wanting to make a change, entrepreneurs
from Silicon Valley and employees of blue-chip technology companies alike signed up to participate. Leaving their families behind, some of the early team members moved to Bengaluru, camping in an apartment on the Outer Ring Road, a stone’s throw away from the house of Srikanth Nadhamuni, the UIDAI’s head of technology. The living room of that apartment became the Bengaluru tech team’s office for several months, with many of the key design decisions being outlined, in Srikanth’s words, ‘on two whiteboards and at two tables’. Raj Mashruwala, soft-spoken and a meticulous planner, was one of the project’s earliest volunteers. He tells us, ‘I had signed up to be part of the UIDAI project around the end of July and flew back to the US to tell my family I was moving to India. I came back two weeks later, took a taxi from the airport and met Srikanth at an appliance store on Outer Ring Road to buy the necessities for the apartment. The next day the office was operational.’ The UIDAI’s chief architect, Dr Pramod Varma, also joined the team in the very early days. A member of the royal family of the former kingdom of Travancore, his boundless enthusiasm and boyish mop of hair give him the air of a college student. Having worked with Nandan at Infosys almost a decade earlier and subsequently in start-ups, he recalls, ‘The moment I read about Nandan having been appointed to build a national ID platform, I knew that I wanted to be part of this project, and immediately reached out to him.’

Vendors who visited the team expected the trappings of a government office, and were utterly perplexed to find that they had apparently wandered into a typical bachelor pad. Raj recalls, ‘We gave the guys from Sun Microsystems our address and they called us up once they reached to ask if this really was the correct place or if they had got lost. Another time, we met a team from one of the biometrics vendors at the apartment. Later, they told us they could not believe that this was an official Government of India organization—they actually wondered if it was an elaborate sting operation set up by a competitor to trick them into revealing their technology.’ Perhaps to the relief of the technology vendors, the team later moved into more formal offices in one of Bengaluru’s mushrooming tech parks on the nearby Sarjapur Ring Road.