The government has reportedly appointed retired IAS officer and former DEITY Secretary J Satyanarayana as the Chairperson of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).Satyanarayana succeeds former Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani who was the first chairman and had stepped down from the post in 2014, ETreports.
Satyanarayana, a 1977 batch IAS officer of the Andhra Pradesh cadre, has been appointed as a part-time chairperson of UIDAI. The present CEO of UIDAI, Ajay Bhushan Pandey is a serving IAS officer.
The government on Tuesday appointed two private persons as the part-time members — Rajesh Jain, founder and managing director of netCORE solutions, and Anand Deshpande, founder and CEO of Presistent Systems.
Satyanarayana, who has an MBA and MSc in Physics, was DEITY Secretary from 2012 till his retirement in 2014, a department which has been closely associated with the Aadhaar project.
He is known for his contributions to the e-governance sector and was the founder of the e-seva, a one stop shop for citizen services. He has also been part of the Passport Seva project of the External Affairs Ministry and various e-governance projects in Karnataka. He served as special chief secretary in Andhra Pradesh.
Rajesh Jain, the netCORE solutions founder is a well known Mumbai enterprenuer who graduated from IIT Bombay and has a Masters in electrical engineering from Columbia University.
Jain has been the conveyner of the ‘Friends of BJP’, a network of professionals on social media, which worked with the BJP during the 2014 campaign.
Anand Deshpande, the chairman and MD of Persistent Systems, is a BTech from IIT Kharagpur and a Computer Science MS from Indiana University.
Both Jain as well as Deshpande will work as the part-time members of UIDAI .