Nandan Nilekani reboots
eGovernments Foundation
BENGALURU: Just a few
months after going down in a hard-fought Lok Sabha election campaign, Nandan
Nilekani is back in his garage incubating new ideas. This time the InfosysBSE
0.92 % cofounder and former CEO is backing two projects -one to help school
children at the primary level to develop reading and writing skills using
tablets and the other is an intelligent software application that revives his
old government technology organisation --eGovernments Foundation.
The eGovernments Foundation,
cofounded in 2003 by Nilekani, is being reinvigorated with fresh funding and
some new backers. Last month, the Omidyar Network made a grant of $1 million
(Rs 6 crore) to the foundation, with Nilekani topping that up with around Rs 3
crore. CV Madhukar, who leads Omidyar's Government Transparency investments,
has joined the foundation's board.
Nat Malupillai, a
Cornell University graduate who worked as director technology at Target until
recently, has also joined as the CEO of eGovernments.
"Data-driven
governance is our mission," said Srikanth Nadhamuni, the cofounder of
eGovernments and a former head of technology at the Unique Identification
Authority of India whose chairman was Nilekani.
With the new funding,
the foundation's team of engineers and designers is putting together two new
products called Smart City Dashboard and Smart City Mobility. Using a dashboard
screen that reflects the progress across key municipal processes with different
colours and visually appealing charts, Nilekani and Nadhamuni are attempting to
make it "a flat world" for government decision makers.
Already, Andhra
Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu has shown interest when he visited the
foundation's office a week ago. "Nandan has personally been participating
in discussions and helping us with specific suggestions,“ Nadhamuni said.
Out of public
spotlight now, Nilekani is coauthoring 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 contain ideas on crowdsourcing, hackathons and app ecosystems that can
help build more efficient government systems.
"I like to
believe that we are trying to be the catalysts of helping government offer
services to people without corruption," said Malupillai, the new CEO of
the foundation.
"What we are
trying to do is to take this lead, and then make other market players enter
this space and help local bodies deliver services without corruption," he
said.
After Nilekani lost
the elections on a Congress ticket, the future of the project was uncertain.
However, the Modi-led BJP government decided to back the UIDAI and set aside Rs
2,000 crore for the project in its maiden budget.
The primary school
project, which will help students develop reading and writing skills through
interactive software application, is being piloted across several schools, but
the details are not available.
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