It almost seems wild-eyed. Yet the Finternet project has 30 partners on four continents. Nilekani says that it will be launched next year.
a call for service
Nilekani was born in 1955 in Bengaluru. His family was middle-class and, Nilekani says, “surrounded by social issues and challenges.” His upbringing was also steeped in the socialism championed by the new country’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
After studying electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, in 1981 Nilekani helped found Infosys, an information technology company that pioneered outsourcing and helped turn India into the world’s IT back office. In 1999, he was part of a government-appointed task force trying to upgrade infrastructure and services in Bengaluru, which was emerging as the tech capital of India at the time. But at the time Nilekani feared being seen as just another techno-optimist. “I didn’t want to appear naive enough to believe that technology could solve everything,” he says.
Pallav Bagla/Corbis/Getty Images
He changed his mind after seeing the scope of the problem – bureaucracy, endemic corruption and financial exclusion were insurmountable without technical solutions. In 2008 Nilekani published a book, Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed NationIt was a manifesto for an India that could leap into a networked future,
And this got him a job. At that time more than half of the births in the country were not registered, and 400 million Indians had no official identity documents. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked Nilekani to implement an undefined plan to create a national identity card.
Nilekani’s team took the still controversial decision to rely on biometrics. The system, based on people’s fingerprints and retina scans, meant that no one could sign up twice, and no one had to fill out paperwork. In terms of implementation, it was like trying to achieve industrialization but skip the steam age. The deployment required a massive data collection effort, as well as new infrastructure that could compare each new enrollment to hundreds of millions of existing records in seconds. At its peak, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the agency responsible for the administration of Aadhaar, was registering more than one million new users a day. It took place with a technical team of about 50 developers, and ultimately cost a little less than half a billion dollars.
Encouraged by their success, Nilekani and his colleagues started thinking about other problems they could solve using the same digitize-the-real-world playbook. “We built more and more layers of capability,” says Nilekani, “and then it became a broader idea.” More grand.”
While other countries were building digital backbones under complete state control (as in China) or in public-private partnerships that supported a profit-seeking corporate approach (as in the US), Nilekani thought India needed something more. He wanted critical technologies in areas such as identification, payments and data sharing to be open and interoperable, not monopolized by the state or private industry. So the tools that make up DPI use open standards and open APIs, meaning anyone can plug into the system. No single company or organization controls access – no walled garden.
