Billionaire Makes Biometric Bet
India has turned to billionaire Infosys Technologies Ltd. founder Nandan Nilekani ('78) to devise a fraud-proof identity number. A year from now he’ll begin rolling out the world’s biggest biometric database to enable the half of India’s 1.2 billion people who lack access to financial services to open an ICICI Bank Ltd. account or sign up for a Vodafone Group Plc mobile phone. A secure identity database will remove one of the biggest hurdles preventing the poor from accessing state benefits and the wider economy, Nilekani said.
To help the hundreds of millions of rural poor like Singh, India turned to billionaire Infosys Technologies Ltd. founder Nandan Nilekani ('78) to devise a fraud-proof identity number. A year from now he’ll begin rolling out the world’s biggest biometric database to enable the half of India’s 1.2 billion people who lack access to financial services to open an ICICI Bank Ltd. account or sign up for a Vodafone Group Plc mobile phone.
“There is huge mass of people who don’t have any form of acknowledged existence,” Nilekani, who stepped down as co- chairman of Infosys in July to set up the Unique Identification Authority of India, said in an interview in New Delhi. “There is no limit to how this number can be used. It’s like a road. What travels on the road, we don’t know.”
A secure identity database will remove one of the biggest hurdles preventing the poor from accessing state benefits and the wider economy, Nilekani, 54, said.
Nilekani’s appointment was part of efforts by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’sCongress party-led government to increase incomes for more of the 456 million Indians the World Bank says live on less than $1.25 a day.
India, the world’s fastest growing major economy after China, may expand by up to 8 percent this fiscal year, according to the finance ministry, just shy of the average 8.7 percent growth in the four years ended March 31.
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