Only Nandan Nilekani can develop IT infra for Modicare: Mohandas Pai

IT veteran and tech investor T V Mohandas Pai on Friday said he cannot think of anyone else in the world other than Nandan Nilekani to assist the Centre in developing IT infrastructure for the mega National Health Protection Scheme in a short time. "Nobody else globally would be able to develop IT infrastructure for NHPS in a short time as Nandan and his team as public service to India," Pai told PTI here. According to him, it is a great move by the government as the scheme needs a massive IT infrastructure capable of handling one billion plus transactions a year. In his Budget speech earlier this month, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had provided an initial corpus of Rs 20 billion for NHPC which aims at providing medical cover of up to Rs 0.5 million to over 100 million poor and vulnerable families ,constituting 40 per cent of India's total population. Pai said Nilekani is eminently suited for this and has the ability to attract best of class global talent to work with him on conceptualisation, design, architecture and to make it work. Nilekani has the great track record of creating Aadhaar, the largest personal database in the world for any government and of designing the the Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN) network, he said. The IT infrastructure for the health care scheme will be of a huge scale as was required for Aadhaar and will have to be scaled up gradually in view of the massive range of the programme, Pai said. Nilekani, a former Unique Identification Authority of India Chairman, is also a member of GST return simplification committee.