UID will empower the poor, says Nilekani

Nearly two months into his new job as the head of the Unique Identification Authority of India, Nandan Nilekani says the real beneficiary of the project will be the poor who have no identity at present.

"The UID project is really for the huge number of people who are outside the system. For the poor, this is a huge benefit because they have no identity, no birth certificates, degree certificates, driver's licence, passport, no address. There are 75 million homeless people in this country, 75 million tribals. So if we are able to help them get the number then we can actually empower them," Nilekani says.

He is in a hurry because "the next 12-18 months are very critical in getting this project off the ground," by when the first set of identity numbers will be issued. If all goes well, five years from now the UID data base will cover a few hundred million people. Several countries have card or number systems for their citizens but not on the scale contemplated in India -- a billion people in one data base with biometric information.

The former head of Infosys, which has a head count of over 100,000 right now, leads a team of three -- four if you add a PA -- from out of its temporary home at the Planning Commission. The project, which aims to give every Indian resident a unique identification number, could have a headcount of a few hundred at its peak.

Nilekani, who is of the rank of a Cabinet minister, will also be able to settle down in his allotted bungalow in Lutyens' Delhi only by the end of the year as it is not yet vacant. So right now he is shuttling between Bengaluru and Delhi, coming home to Bangalore for the weekends. In Delhi he moves around not in a white Ambassador with a red beacon but a white Tata Indigo without a beacon. He has had it removed.

He describes his journey from India's seat of IT power to the seat of political power as "Bengaluru meets Delhi" with a laugh and then adds with all seriousness, "I am hoping to blend in the  project the best of both worlds."    

One way he is doing this is through his time management. It has both changed and not changed.

Earlier, meeting customers took up a lot of his time. "I don't meet customers anymore," he says, and then sort of corrects himself by clarifying that he meets a "different kind of customers. When I meet the chairman of LIC, he is like a customer to me as he is going to help me fill up my database with names. Food and civil supplies, petroleum ministry, banks, RBI -- they are all customers for me, as they are helping us to fill our tank."

If this is the Delhi in his life, then the Bangalore that he is seeking to bring to Delhi is reflected in his attitude to his new customers. In the last two months, "I have learnt that if you reach out to your partners, if you go to them with a value proposition, if you tell them the benefits of partnering, they are very open to partnering." 

That naturally requires reaching out and one of the key activities that Nilekani and his team have till now been engaged in is going out and meeting everyone. They have met a large number of government departments across the board – finance, home, labour, rural development ministries. They have also announced a big collaboration with NREGA to roll out UIDs. 

As and when the staff come on board, they will reflect this amalgam of Bangalore and Delhi. "We want to have both young and experienced people. We want a nice blend of top talent, some from the government because this project needs a lot of government experience. We are actually talking about changing government processes in many areas like NREGA and PDS. And we will have top talent from outside -- technology, legal, marketing."

There are only a few staffers currently, hence a lot of others are pitching in with ideas and support. So, "whatever we can do we have been doing, sort of brainstormed and coming out with the first approach to how we will do this project." This approach was shared with the prime minister's council for the UID authority and "in principle they have approved it."

The UID authority will issue a number, not a card. It will run a central data base which will have one entry or record for every person resident in India. Every entry will contain information on demographics like name, address, date of birth, plus some information which acts as the person's biometric identifier.

"Think of it as a depository of names, as opposed to a depository of stocks," says Nilekani. The authority will work with multiple partners like NREGA, income tax, passport, banks, insurance companies, LPG dealers -- all those who deal with Indian residents, providing goods and services.

The partners will both act as enrollers for the data base and use it for verification in the course of their day to day work. When somebody comes to a partner for a particular service and does not have a UID, the partner will enroll that person through its channel. Then once the data base starts filling up, you can do authentication anywhere in the country online, real time. The response time will be a few seconds.

"It's a number (not a card) and the number walks with you," explains Nilekani. For biometric identification it will include a person's fingers and face and other details. What is yet to be decided is if six or eight or 10 fingers will be used for identification.

The big challenge is enrollment, getting all the people on board. Once they are in, the number of changes is relatively much less. Then it becomes more of an authentication data base. There are no transactions or profiling attributes in this data base. It doesn't identify rich, poor, religion or caste. It is also not an open data base, as there are a lot of privacy issues involved. It will only be used for verification.

"The government has to figure out what the policy is" for inter-departmental accessing of information. The income tax authorities may want to check for tax evasion, which the financial intelligence unit already does across departments. Internal security agencies may want to do the same.

Significantly, the creation of this data base  through which Big Brother will be able to keep a tab on every Indian, may hasten the process of creating something that does not yet exist. "India does not really have a privacy law. So all this will act as an impetus to define the privacy framework for Indians," argues Nilekani.

There are a few things that the UID chief will just not talk about. One of them is what kind of opportunity the project represents for the Indian IT industry. The Rs 120 crore initial budget for the project has to be seen in context. The expenditure on it will be distributed among the authority and its partners. They will invest in the enrolling process as they will benefit from doing so. If a social programme can improve its targeting through this data base, if businesses can do things more efficiently or cheaply, then the expenditure will make sense. "There will be a spend across the system, not necessarily all by us."

But loads of work is coming the way of vendors.  The UID authority will outsource the basic data centre and network for somebody to manage. Some company will be selected for that through a transparent process. "We are being approached by a lot of vendors and we have already started sharing the thinking, strategy, with many stakeholders."

Nilekani is very particular that the media and public gets it right and so, summarises: "It is a central database, enrollment happens through partners, there are no duplicates, so people can get in only once, it is online authentication, we don't get into profiling or transactions. That is the responsibility of the partners but it empowers them to do things better."

When a person goes to work on a project, you can record it with his UID, when he gets some work you can record it again. It is all in the system, authenticated. "That way you can go to a much higher kind of system that will be real time in nature, with authentication built in."

At some point, if a commercial organisation wants to use the UID data base for something like address verification, then the authority could levy a charge and earn revenue. A mobile company or bank today spends a certain amount on knowing its customer. "If we can save them some money by doing an online verification, then there could be a charge." 

But for that the data base has to fill up. It will be invaluable only when it is full of people's names. So there is a long way to go but there is a pot of gold, in the form of enormous invaluable data, at the end of the rainbow. Nilekani visualises that "this data will be used in getting Indians who are on the margin, who have been left out because of identity, to get the benefits."