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

New Delhi: IT veteran and tech investor T V Mohandas Pai on Friday said that 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 (NHPS) 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 was quoted by news agency Press Trust of India as saying in an event in Bengaluru.

According to IT veteran Pai, it is a great move by the Narendra Modi government as the scheme needs a massive IT infrastructure capable of handling one billion plus transactions a year.

In his Budget 2018 speech on February 1, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had provided an initial corpus of Rs 2,000 crore for NHPC which aims at providing medical cover of up to Rs 5 lakh to over 10 crore poor and vulnerable families, constituting 40 percent of India's total population.

Pai said that Nandan 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 healthcare 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.

Nandan Nilekani, a former Unique Identification Authority of India Chairman, is also a member of GST return simplification committee. 

(With PTI inputs)