Nandan Nilekani - Governtrepeneur
Picked up business sense at IIT-Bombay; helped build Infy; now, Nandan Nilekani ('78) brings the spirit of entrepreneurship to the business of governing. He is Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and co-founder of Infosys Technologies. THE CHALLENGE: The UIDAI, too, is like a start-up. My prior success in no way guarantees success in this world and if I don't deliver then the consequences could be large.
For Rohini Nilekani life seems to have come a full circle. Arghyam, her elegant house in suburban Bangalore has been turned into the unofficial headquarter of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). Ever since her husband Nandan Nilekani ('78) gave up the co-chairman's job at Infosys, the $4.6 billion (revenue, in 2008-09) company he co-founded with six colleagues in 1981, to take up a role in public service, there has been an endless stream of visitors at Arghyam. Although UIDAI's official headquarter is in Delhi, the technical team is based in Bangalore. Nandan Nilekani splits his time between Delhi and Bangalore and just like in the early days of Infosys, where the founders often met at each others homes, lot of brainstorming on the project happens at the Nilekani household. "For 30 years Infosys consumed him and now it is UIDAI," Rohini Nilekani says only half seriously.
The day we meet him at his house, Nandan and Rohini Nilekani have just returned from a workshop at the National Law School in Bangalore where he brainstormed with a group of legal experts on how to create the legal framework for the UIDAI. A week ago he was in Bihar where he had a 90-minute lunch meeting at chief minister Nitish Kumar's house. The day after our meeting, Nilekani is flying off to Mumbai to meet the Maharashtra chief minister. In the last four months he has met 12 CMs to explain to them the intricacies of the UID project and ask for their support in enrolling people into the program.
In between meeting the CMs, Nilekani attends seminars and workshops like the one organised by the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies at Shimla where he met a bunch of sociologists, NGOs and political scientists to evangelise his UID project and to understand how it can be used to create inclusive models of development.
"This is my Bharat Darshan", he says, "I had seen more of America than India before this". That time he was selling Infosys to the Fortune 500 crowd, now he is selling the concept of a national identity programme to the grassroots politicians and bureaucrats. It is a far cry from the life he led just six months ago and yet it somehow seems he has been doing this for years. Even Rohini is surprised by how well he has transitioned into the new role.
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