Rebooting India authored by Nandan Nilekani & Viral Shah released

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations: Nandan Nilekani and Viral Shah
The book titled Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations authored by Nandan Nilekani and Viral Shah was released on 4 November 2015.

The book talks about the demographic dividend of India, which is expected to be the world’s youngest country by 2020 with 64 percent (roughly 800 million) of its population of working age.

It also suggests that India may fail to become a global powerhouse, if it fails to resolve the contradictions and bridge gaps that distort our society.

Through the book, the authors Nilekani and Shah say that challenge before us is to enable every one of India’s 1.2 billion citizens to realize their aspirations. According to them, it can be achieved only by using technology to radically reimagine government itself.

Rebooting India identifies a dozen initiatives where a series of citizen-friendly, high-tech public institutions can deliver low-cost solutions to India’s grand challenges.

Based on their learning from building Aadhaar, the world’s largest social identity programme, the initiatives Nilekani and Shah propose would save the government a minimum of 100000 crore rupees annually, about 1 percent of India’s GDP – enough to fund 200 Mangalyaan missions a year.

It doesn’t take 10000 people or even a thousand, say Nilekani and Shah. All it would take is a small focused team of highly skilled, enterprising individuals, and a supportive prime minister.

Nandan Nilekani, co-founder and former CEO of Infosys Technologies, was founding chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (Aadhaar). He was twice listed as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME. In 2014, he was awarded The Economist’s Innovation Award in the category Economic and Social Innovation. He is chairman of EkStep, a non-profit literacy and numeracy platform.

Viral Shah worked at the intersection of policy and technology at the Unique Identification Authority of India, where he led the design of the government's payments and subsidy platforms using Aadhaar. He is a co-inventor of the Julia programming language, and co-founder of FourthLion Technologies. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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