 "Nilekani to quit as UIDAI chief this week")
On Sunday, the former co-founder and chief executive of Infosys, the information technology company, joined the Congress. The latter has nominated him from the Bangalore South constituency for the Lok Sabha polls.
Nilekani met the prime minister last week to communicate his decision to resign, said a government official. The UIDAI has not said anything.
Meanwhile, it touched the 600-million mark in Aadhaar cards (with multi-purpose national identity numbers) last week, a target it had set during its early days.
Nilekani is in New Delhi and will return to Bangalore on Tuesday.
Nilekani had written about giving every Indian a unique identity number in his book Imagining India. Subsequently, he was invited by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to join the government in June 2009 to lead the Aadhaar programme. In five years, Nilekani, who was given a cabinet minister's rank, has had achievements and setbacks. He is credited covering half the population under the scheme and making significant linkage with the banking channel, being used to reform the leaky subsidy regime.
The Reserve Bank, capital markets regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India and the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority have accepted the Aadhaar as a proof of address and identity. A little over 60 million bank accounts have been seeded with Aadhaar and 100 agencies are using it for authentication services. RBI recently asked banks to put in place the infrastructure to make sure Aadhaar-based biometrics can be used as an additional factor of authentication for card transactions. After the initial resistance, banks have largely accepted Aadhaar for proof of identity and address; some have also begun to launch applications based on its payment gateway and authentication services.
However, Nilekani has had to battle opposition on several fronts from within and outside the bureaucracy. In late 2012, the government decided to roll out Direct Benefits Transfer (DBT) on a war-footing, where the subsidy money would directly go into the Aadhaar-linked bank accounts of the intended beneficiaries. While the scheme covers 121 districts, it could not reach the desired scale due to implementation issues.
A year after DBT was begun, the government has disbursed Rs 3,000 crore through this channel. Almost 80 per cent of this amount was towards cooking gas subsidy. However, last month, the government decided to put this is abeyance for now, given some of the ground-level problems. Other challenges include a petition in the Supreme Court questioning the rationale for making Aadhaar mandatory for government services. In its interim order, the apex court had said no one should suffer for not having the Aadhaar number. This dampened the government's enthusiasm for DBT, even as the matter has turned into a full-fledged argument on the need for a unique identity number itself.
The project is also facing another uncertainty in the form of the UID Bill, yet to be cleared by Parliament. The Bill gives the project a statutory backing. "It is unlikely that a replacement for Nilekani will be announced by the current government," said an official who did not wish to be identified.
In the Lok Sabha elections, Nilekani will face Bharatiya Janata Party strongman H N Ananth Kumar, who has won in all the five polls since 1996 from Bangalore South.