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in Delhi, ‘I would make it a point to meet him in his Bhavan and not make him come to my office. By doing this, I was signalling to them that I care about you and I am coming to you because I want your help in doing something nationally important.’ This small touch was enough to melt any resistance and get their support. Every chief minister saw a different value in the Aadhaar programme, depending on the specific needs of his or her state. For example, Nitish Kumar, then the chief minister of Bihar, appreciated the fact that Aadhaar was designed to address the needs of a highly mobile population, a major concern in a state from which people routinely migrate for education or employment.
    The same philosophy came into play to get other major players on board. In the financial sector, Nandan had started establishing contact with such organizations as the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the State Bank of India (SBI), the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) and others even before his official appointment as UIDAI chairman. He and members of his team met representatives of these organizationsand many others—the Indian Banks Association, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and India Post, to name a few. Simultaneously, he was also reaching out to all the central ministries, the railways and the defence establishment. Nandan reminisces, ‘A surprise for me was how stiff and hierarchical the system was. Information reached you only through “official” channels, levels of hierarchy were strictly observed and you were never supposed to go to an office of someone junior, or be on the line when he calls. I decided to break out of all that and reached out to everyone, from Cabinet ministers to their private secretaries.’
    Other stopping points on his evangelization tour were commercial organizations like telecom and oil companies, multilateral agencies like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, bilateral agencies like the Department for International Development, and various media outlets. This helped to create a powerful coalition that had a stake in the success of Aadhaar, and the value of these efforts was seen when Aadhaar enrolments finally began. State governments across the political spectrum signed up for their residents to be enrolled for Aadhaar, and a huge ecosystem with multiple public and private partners sprang into existence to leverage the power of the Aadhaar platform.
    Ranjana Sonawane’s Aadhaar enrolment in September 2009 signalled an entry into the phase where operations needed to be scaled up. After flagging off the first enrolment, the UIDAI raced to reach a run rate of one million enrolments a day. In order to do so, MoUs were signed with registrars, enrolment agencies were brought on board, operators were trained, a biometric device ecosystem was created, enrolment and de-duplication software was continuously upgraded and fine-tuned to function at scale, servers were procured, letters were printed and dispatched, and a multilingual call centre was set up to handle queries and grievances. It took a significant amount of time and effort right from the first enrolment to scale each of these processes to achieve the target of generating one million Aadhaar numbers a day, but when Nandan tendered his resignation as chairman of the UIDAI on 13 March 2014, he could do so with the knowledge thatthe UIDAI had succeeded in its goal of delivering over 600 million Aadhaar numbers in less than five years of its existence. In fact, over 900 million residents have been registered for Aadhaar in the five years since Ranjana Sonawane received her Aadhaar.
Opposing voices
    The UIDAI faced a number of challenges in its early days, as the accompanying diagram explains. Perhaps the biggest was from the home ministry, responsible for creating the National Population Register (NPR), a scheme that proposed to collect biometrics and issue a smart card to every citizen of India. 8 Aadhaar, on the