The origins of Aadhaar

livemint.com:

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In 1998, a young consultant from Tata Consultancy Services was dispatched to the authorities overseeing India’s census, an immense effort carried out once a decade. The company was propelled by the concern that once computer dates ticked from 1999 to 2000, all the IBM mid-range computers it had used to stop the banking system from collapsing and planes falling out of the sky would have no work worth their capabilities.

The consultant was twenty-three at the time, and told to suggest that his company could help process the census data. But the man in charge of the census was conservative in his thinking, and enamoured of things as they had been done for the past century. He indicated that the 2001 census would be done by pencil on paper too.

The consultant asked for a meeting with a senior official in the home ministry, a joint secretary who advised him to forget about the census, for there was a bigger concern: the government was considering a national identification system to help them manage unauthorised migration. The consultant recalled that representatives from Unisys and IBM were at one of his meetings. He relayed the message to his boss, who assembled a small team of consultants to work on a concept report for the ministry.

She was leaving the company, and installed as the group’s head was an unpredictable thirty-four-year-old with a dim view of the company, who preferred fishing and going off to the mountains instead of doing whatever consultants did. When she thought of him decades later, she remembered his excitement at the work. I flew to Delhi twenty years later to meet that thirty-four-year-old.