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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.
How Aadhaar will transform India in the future
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.
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