Face-to-face with the Aadhaar man

What happens when a bunch of enthusiastic management students come face-to-face with the chairman of the country’s ambitious Unique Identification (UID) project? An afternoon full of fun and frolic, and subtle job requests.

That is exactly what happened at IIM-B when Nandan Nilekani, the man behind Aadhaar, walked in to address students.

Students from various management programmes not just pushed across a volley of questions regarding challenges in executing Aadhaar, goals and targets; but also hinted at possible recruitments by the UID.

A student from the EPGP programme asked about recruitments into the UID project. “We don’t pay as much as MNCs. Be ready for a cut in salary,” warned Nilekani, coaxing the student to actually mail his CV across to process his request.

Circling Nilekani all the way from the auditorium to the canteen, students were seeking answers on the IT sector and Aadhaar, and revealing their zest in undertaking jobs that can work in shaping and moulding the country.

Updating the youngsters on the Aadhaar activities, Nilekani said the team UID is highly optimistic of getting at least half the population enrolled by the next year end.

“We want to get every one out of two people enrolled for Aadhaar by 2014,” said the former Infosys CEO, who joined the UID project in July 2009.

Nilekani said though there are lots of challenges in terms of backlogs of enrolment, backlogs of letter delivery, and logistics and supply chain issues, the Aadhaar team is working towards achieving its targets.

“We have enrolled about 430 million people till date. Our challenge is to get a million people enrolled every day. We know it is doable. We have cracked the technology challenges and sorted out the business model.”

Admitting that the UID team did make some errors in the past related to supply chain, their key challenge now remains to stabilize the project and make it sustainable in the long run, he said.

“We know a project as large as Aadhaar can work in India. Our goal now is to make it sustainable and irreversible in the future,” said Nilekani.

The questions posed by students ranged from security issues to the costs incurred for Aadhaar to getting the homeless enrolled. Nilekani revealed that it cost Rs100-150 to provide the Aadhaar card to each person.

“We are working with NGOs executing specific programmes to get the homeless under the ambit of Aadhaar.” When students asked questions regarding security of the information collected by the UID, Nilekani tried allaying apprehensions saying: “We do not expose the data about people to the world. Aadhaar is shielded within rings of security.”