I met Nandan Nilekani at the BATF meeting(he talks about it in the video below) in 2003 in Bangalore. Previously, I had met the Commissioner of Bangalore, Mr. Srinivas Murthy, to offer my tech assistance, and he had requested help in creating an online property tax system. Here, Nandan was hosting a public event to review the city's scorecard by its various stakeholders. The common theme we seemed to share was - improving governance in our cities. We immediately connected and, within a few days, came up with the idea to start the eGovernments Foundation.
After a 16-year stint in the US, largely in Silicon Valley, California, my wife Sunita and I decided to move back to India with our two children, aged 6 and 2 at the time, to work on social impact projects. Although we had funded numerous NGOs from California, we were eager to return to India to work on large-scale societal impact.
I vividly remember one Saturday morning, Nandan and I went to the registrar’s office in Koramangala, Bangalore, to register the eGovernments Foundation as a charitable trust. I had a California startup with a small software team(w Manu Srivastava) in Bangalore; all of them transitioned to eGov, along with the computers and other resources we donated. Nandan wrote out a check(the first of many) to get us started, and we set up a small office in Indiranagar.
The Karnataka Government appreciated our work with the Bangalore corporation and asked us to work on Municipal Governance for 57 cities in Karnataka. We developed six modules: Property Tax, Financial Accounting, Public Grievance & Redressal, Birth/Death Registration, Civic Works and City Website, which went live in all the cities. Soon, other regions like the Andhra Pradesh state, Delhi, Kanpur, and many other cities followed suit.
Looking back, we had created an open-source digital platform for municipal governance as a public good. This was the beginning of the idea of “Digital Public Infrastructure”, which led us to the Aadhaar project and many others. The rest, as they say, is history.
Today as eGov turns 20, we are extremely pleased with the current team of Viraj Tyagi(CEO), Gautham Ravichander, Chandar Muthukrishnan, Jojo Mehra, Varun, Elzan Mathew and the entire team, who have taken eGov not only across thousands of cities in India and around the world but also expanded the scope to areas such as Public Finance, Sanitation, and Health.
Nandan, was not only generous with funding eGov all along, but more importantly gave his time. Even as a super busy CEO of Infosys at that time, he would talk to me on almost a daily basis, about our Municipal Governance modules, or the cities we were working with, attending many a public launch across the country.
Sometimes, a single idea, a single meeting, and 20 years of effort can result in a hugely impactful organization. I’m glad I met Nandan that day!
"It all started with a vision to bridge gaps in governance," reflect our founders, Nandan Nilekani and Srikanth Nadhamuni.
In their own words, our founders share how eGov's saga began. Spanning two decades, this is the beginning of eGov's story — a journey not just of technological advancement, but of fostering hope and crafting human-centric solutions.
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#20YearsOfeGov
#eGovT20
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