Nandan Nilekani to help Bengaluru civic body revamp its Covid-19 bed management portal

Aadhaar architect Nandan Nilekani is helping the Bengaluru's civic body BBMP to revamp its bed allocation software a day after a team of BJP lawmakers led by MP Tejasvi Surya alleged a scam in the way beds were allocated to needy Covid-19 patients.

Some BBMP officials and outsiders managing the Covid war rooms were blocking and unblocking beds to favour section of patients who offered them a bribe, Surya, accompanied by MLAs Uday Garudachar, LA Ravi Subramanya, and Satish Reddy had alleged on Tuesday. Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa ordered a police inquiry soon after the allegations surfaced.

Surya tweeted to say he had had talks with Nilekani in the morning, and sought his help to revamp the BBMP software. "Lots of gratitude to him for putting very best tech architects on job immediately," Surya tweeted. Yet again, Nilekani has proved he is always available for Bengaluru, he added.


Nilekani, who is also the non-executive chairman of Infosys, was not available for a comment.

The team of tech architects is being assisted by tech think tank iSpirit, which will redesign the bed booking software to make it efficient , transparent and minimise manual intervention.

Inquiries with BBMP said Surya may have been authorities by the CM's office to talk to Nilekani on getting a new software tool in place for managing allotment of Covid beds in Bengaluru, and it had no role in this.

In response to the Surya' tweet, Sanjiv Gupta, Secretary in charge of Inter-state Council secretariat in the Ministry of Home Affairs said: "A two-way API integration between BBMP bed allocation software and hospital management information system is needed to bring manual intervention to nearly zero. Delhi app also needs to be similarly revamped."

Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa on Tuesday assigned bed management responsibilities to ministers R Ashoka and SR Bommai, and call centre operations to minister Aravind Limbavali.