Despite the Supreme Court’s recent strictures on Aadhaar, Nilekani has ensured that the scheme is now too big and too widely used to be scuttled
Nandan Nilekani has pulled it off. Well, almost. In another six months he would have quit while he was ahead, after having enrolled 600 million Indians (and possibly some non-Indians) into the world’s largest and most audacious government ID project, the Unique Identification Authority of India’s (UIDAI) Aadhaar.
Nilekani phrases it diplomatically: “As John Kingdon [a widely-respected professor of political science at the University of Michigan] describes it, three streams—problem, solution and a compelling political need—need to converge before a ‘policy window’ opens up. The problem was the need for large-scale social inclusion and for making public spending more transparent. The solution was Aadhaar. The government put political energy behind it and gave full support.”
Re-imagining Welfare
Usha Ramanathan finds this alarming: “What is happening in the Registrar General’s office is scandalous. This year, the Socio Economic and Caste Census will have the UID number attached, allowing for profiling of respondents. What happened to the idea of anonymising and protecting citizens?” Effectively, she says, the NPR is “currently collecting biometric data from citizens without a law, simply because no one is stopping them”.
(This story appears in the 18 October, 2013 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)