Rebooting Government: Nandan Nilekani's book to show government how to play with technology

BANGALORE: After a tough election, technocrat Nandan Nilekani is busy co-authoring his next book “Rebooting Government“ along with Viral Shah -a computer scientist who co-created a new programming language Julia from scratch.

The book is expected to be out in December and will narrate ideas on crowdsourcing, hackathons and app ecosystems that can help build more efficient government systems.

“It was Nandan's idea to document our learnings at UIDAI.

Five years is a good time to take a step back and reflect on what worked and what did not,“ said Shah, who worked with Nilekani at the ambitious Unique Identification project, which sought to give every Indian a unique identification number.

“While technology is disrupting everything from music to manufacturing, what about government?“ asked Shah.

“While the book is based on experiences, throughout the book we end up giving a roadmap for the future,“ said Shah, a computer science PhD, who went to work with Nilekani's UIDAI team in Bangalore in 2009. At UIDAI, Shah worked on policies and the technology that went into Aadhaar-based payments systems and the e-KYC platform.

In 2009, Nilekani wrote a book called Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation in which he shared his ideas for a better India. Soon after, he joined the UPA government to implement the unique identification project. The new book will be close to half the size of Imagining India.

“Many of the things that were ideas in the older book are in execution now. So, it's a sort of continuation,“ continuation,“ said Shah. Aadhaar, as the unique identification project came to be known, set out to achieve a target of nearly 60 crore enrollments by the end of March and met it for most parts.

After Nilekani lost the elections on a Congress ticket, the future of the project was uncertain. However, the Modi-led BJP government which came to power decided to back the UIDAI and set aside over ` . 2,000 crore for the project in its maiden budget.