Enlisting Nandan Nilekani should only be the first step…

There is no excuse left for the Government of India not to do what it needs to do. Dr Manmohan Singh is no Indira Gandhi; he has a very fine brain. Sonia Gandhi is no Indira Gandhi; she lets others use their brain. Rahul Gandhi is no Indira Gandhi either, he actually uses his brains. The Government always had Montek Singh Ahluwalia, then they got Kapil Sibal in the cabinet and then Shashi Tharoor in the Ministry of External Affairs. Now that the Government of India has also enlisted Nandan Nilekani to head the department of Unique Identification Authority of India, there is no reason why India should not leap-frog to the next level of development. It has the required brain-power to articulate the vision for a new India! Shweta Rajpal Kohli of NDTV spoke to Nandan Nilekani on Monday August 24, 2009, on his appointment as a full cabinet rank minister by Dr Manmohan Singh to streamline the identification card system. Nandan underplays the appointment and compares himself to a plumber who is assigned a job to create a pipeline to the consumers. This is a huge statement and he is exactly right. What India needs is a set of good implementers who can make things happen. Just THINK about his statement!

There are always some very good ideas available to the Government of India but it never had the resources to implement them. Now that they have the money to do the things that have been discussing for decades, the communists and their ‘Left Front’ became the cog-in-the-wheel. That problem has also been solved by a sophisticated Indian voter early this year. What remains to be seen is if this government has the backbone to stand-up to the entrenched interests and implement the much touted reforms. Nandan Nilekani has been extremely articulate in his book ‘Imagining India’ about the problems India faces and some simple solutions to those impediments. The Unique Identification Card system is one such solution. Nilekani believes that once the remote consumer is identified and given a tamper-proof ID card, they could then access any product or service directed towards them by the government or any other agency. The problem that I see with this very exciting proposal is that how do you guarantee that the consumer got the service and that he or she was able to retain it? Take for example cash transfer, the remote consumer could be in debt and the creditor could be waiting alongside the recipient to strip him/her off the money. In this case the identified recipient would be left high and dry. How would the government guarantee that the aid or any other service is received by the needy and used to achieve the objective? I hope Nandan has an answer to that!