Nandan Nilekani May Quit UID

From the archive: first published September 26, 2011.

In September 2011, speculation in the press suggested that Nandan Nilekani — the Infosys co-founder turned chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India — might walk away from the government's most ambitious identity project. Whether or not he was truly close to quitting, the speculation captured something real: by late 2011, UIDAI appeared to be under siege — and the heaviest fire was coming from within the government.

Nilekani had entered government two years earlier, resigning as co-chairman of Infosys in 2009 after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appointed him UIDAI chairman at Cabinet rank. The mandate was audacious: issue unique ID numbers — Aadhaar — to 1.2 billion Indians, creating the backbone for a future in which welfare subsidies could be replaced by direct cash transfers. His 2008 book, Imagining India, had made him the rare outsider the establishment trusted to build something of that scale.

But the differences piling up against the project were territorial, political, and technological. The sharpest came from the Home Ministry, whose National Population Register (NPR) was building its own database through house-to-house canvassing — Home Minister P. Chidambaram held that the NPR's method was more foolproof than UIDAI's walk-in enrolment. Civil liberties campaigners questioned the privacy architecture. The legislation that would give UIDAI legal standing, the National Identification Authority of India Bill, was struggling in Parliament.

Nilekani publicly shrugged it off as the normal debate around a project of such transformational scale, saying the authority would work with the other arms of government and build consensus. Privately, officials at the authority spoke of skepticism mixed with vested interests.

The standoff continued into 2012. That January, the government forced a compromise: UIDAI would enrol some 600 million people across 16 states while the NPR handled the remaining 600 million in the rest, with data exchanged at the back end to avoid duplication. Nilekani stayed at his post and drove Aadhaar past the tipping point — enrolment crossed 600 million — before leaving in 2014 to contest the Lok Sabha elections from Bangalore South as a Congress candidate.

Editor's note: this article was rewritten during our editorial review. The original 2011 version reproduced a press article verbatim and broke off mid-sentence; the text above is an original summary of the reported facts, with the outcome of the 2011 standoff added.