One of the reasons I tend to like Indian tech industry executives is that most of them seem to not just be in it for the money. Many of them care deeply about India and the welfare of their fellow citizens. So I was excited and gratified a few days ago when I learned that Nandan Nilekani, the co-chairman of Infosys, had been chosen by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to run the country’s national identity project. As co-founder and one-time CEO of Infosys, Nilekani helped build one of India’s most important tech companies--an organization with a well-deserved global reputation for quality work and integrity. Now he will run a massive program that could help improve the lives of hundreds of millions of Indians and break the back of the culture of corruption that has long hobbled the best impulses of government.

This is perhaps the largest information technology project ever undertaken. (In fact, when I interviewed Nilekani on the phone last evening, he jokingly called it, “The mother of all IT projects.”) At the end of five years, Nilekani hopes that most of the country’s 1.05 billion people will be listed in a huge database. They‘ll be identifiable via a variety of biometric data, including fingerprints and, perhaps, face imagery.

Indian leaders have been talking about some sort of national ID system for a number of years. The main elements they focused on were using identity cards to help track terrorists or turn them back at borders; or to improve the flow of social benefits to poor people. But Nilekani has a much grander vision. He sees the national ID system as a giant cloud computing service that can be tapped by the central and state governments and private industry to authenticate peoples’ identities--saving a lot of money, opening up banking services to the poor, and assuring that social welfare benefits get to the people they’re intended for. He believes the project could transform Indian society. But while Nilekani’s ambitions are huge, he’s taking nothing for granted. “It’s just a vision so far. I haven’t even taken charge yet,” he told me.

His mentor and co-founder at Infosys, N.R. Narayana Murthy, says Nilekani’s appointment marks a significant moment in the country’s history. “It demonstrates the coming of age of India,” he says. Murthy points out that while Indira Gandhi appointed a few business leaders to government posts in the 1980s, they were secretaries to   the cabinet ministers. Putting Nilekani in at the ministerial level is a big shift and an important signal about the changing relationship of government and the private sector. “It shows the confidence of politicians in the private sector and it signals that they recognize the importance of public/private partnerships,” Murthy says.

In the past half decade, there have been a handful of citizen identity projects in a number of states. TCS, one of Infosys’ tech industry rivals, has been instrumental in some of the early efforts. And the results of some of the programs it has been involved in show the potential of Nilekani’s initiative. For instance, since an ID project was launched in the state of Andhra Pradesh two years ago, individuals have established 2.5 million postal savings accounts--compared to only 600,000 in the previous 50-plus years. S. Ramadorai, CEO of TCS, wrote me in an e-mail that the national program will have much broader effects. “It will serve as a vehicle for uniting people in the country,” he wrote.

Nilekani will face many challenges. They’ll be technical, political, and cultural. But I believe the most significant challenge will be the desire of corrupt officials to thwart him. It has been estimated that only about 10% of the money that’s appropriated for social welfare in India actually finds its way to the intended recipients. The rest goes to administrative overhead and to so-called “leakage”--government officials and their cronies putting their fingers in the pot. Having a national ID system will make it easier see how the money flows and where it’s diverted--and to stop or slow down the diversions. The thieves will work hard to keep their scams going. But if Nilekani and his massive database get the support of the many willing-to-be-honest officials, the tide could be turned.

And if the tide can be turned in India, it can be turned elsewhere. The whole world will be to watching to see if the combination of technology, enlightened public policy, and integrity will win out.  

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. It took a big step toward universal accessibility today when it launched a program in Uganda aimed at bringing information to poor rural and urban dwellers via mobile phones. Working with Grameen Foundation and MTN, the big African mobile carrier, Google has begun offering a handful of services that combine text messaging, search technologies, and databases full of locally relevant information. "We believe that finding information shouldn't require a computer," says Joseph Mucheru, head of Google's operations in sub-Saharan Africa. Richard Mwami, public access manager for MTN Uganda, says: "This will help solve a great need at the bottom of the pyramid." This project is a prime example of smart people scoping out a problem thoroughly and coming up with a technology and service solution that fits the needs and economics of a poor community. Bravo!

The project got its start 18 months ago. Grameen Foundation has been operating a village phone service in Uganda, and had nearly 50,000 people offering pay-by-the-minute mobile phone services to the masses. Grameen wanted to broaden into information services and it sought out Google and MTN as potential partners. They did extensive ethnographic studies to see what kinds of services the Ugandan people wanted, and then did pilot projects in the field to test out early versions of the services. They're launching with a few services and hope to add more later. Eventually, they hope to branch out to other countries in Africa.

For starters, there are three clusters of services. 1) Google SMS Tips includes a health information service focusing on sexual and reproductive health and AIDS provention, and another that provides farmers with agricultural information. 2) Google SMS Search supplies sports scores, weather, foreign exchange rates, horoscopes, and the like. 3) Google Trader is a marketplace where people can sell and buy goods and services. To get information, people type in a free-form query, Google's technology identifies key words and searches a database for possible sources of information, and the system sends text questions back to the customers to narrow down the results--presenting the one that seems most likely to fit the bill.

There are a number of SMS-based services already in use around the world, but Google's techies insist that theirs is better in several respects. The health and agricultural information is truly local. The market and price information is fresh. Users can express themselves with questions rather than paging through series of menus to get the information they want. And here's a ingenious element: A merchant can explore making a sale at a certain price to a buyer in another city. Then he can use the SMS service to find the cost of hauling his merchandise there. So he can find out before he agrees to a deal if it will be profitable for him.

The cost of the services are relatively low. The standard cost in Uganda today for an information SMS message is 220 Ugandan Shillings, or about 10 cents, but the Google SMA services will be offered at 5 cents per message. Initially, they'll be free. The system uses English, but most of the population can get by in English or find somebody to help them send and decipher messages.

Uganda is a poor country with 30 million people, half of them below the age of 15. The country's literacy rate has risen dramatically in the past decade, to about 70%. The cluster of services empowers the population economically, and, thanks to the health information service, could save tens of thousands of lives. This is what technology can accomplish if it's put in service to the people.

What a sweet guy!

http://entrepreneur.virgin.com/2009/06/26/one-afternoon-in-nyc/

Sir Richard Branson has launched dozens of companies during his career, everything from banking to space travel, but it's his big non-business idea that may end up having the greatest impact. (Branson visited BusinessWeek and talked to writers and editors for an hour this afternoon) He and rocker Peter Gabriel came up with the idea of bringing together some of the most respected people in the world to act like the elders in a traditional village and help to solve the global community's most difficult problems.

They took their idea to Nelson Mandela and womens' rights advocate Graca Machel, and, with the help of Desmond Tutu, Mandela and Machel formed an organization to pursue that goal. The group formally began its activities less than two years ago. It now has a dozen members, including Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Muhammad Yunus, and former UN human rights commissioner Mary Robinson. In spite of its newness, the group has already made its presence felt, Branson told us. He credits Annan and Tutu for helping to head off civil war in Kenya last yaer, and says that though a group of The Elders was prevented from entering Zimbabwe, their combination of behind-the-scenes diplomacy and vocal public pressure helped broker the creation of a coalition government with the right guy in command. A group of The Elders is traveling to Israel and Palestine next month on a humanitarian mission. "It's early days, but they're quietly building a foundation for the future," Branson told us.

At a conference I attended recently, somebody asked Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO of the social venture capital group Acumen Fund, if it was realistic to think that extreme poverty can be eradicated some day. Her answer was an unequivocal "yes." The same goes for peace, too.  If you don't believe it, and work at it, it will never happen--and you won't even get close. This is the power of belief. Branson's got the right attitude, too, about business and about more important things.

I had lunch with Symantec's new CEO, Enrique Salem, yesterday. Looks like he will bring the global mindset to running the security software giant. http://tinyurl.com/lswg5w

I'm gradually establishing my own brand separate from BusinessWeek, where I have worked for 12 years and where I have a BusinessWeek blog, also called GlobeSpotting. Will see how this goes.