Jharkhand IAS officer is Nandan Nilekani's CEO

Nandan Nilekani will have an award-winning IITian and IAS officer of Jharkhand cadre as his CEO at the National Unique Identification Authority of India (NUIAI).

Jharkhand’s Principal Secretary (Public Health and Engineering) Ram Sevak Sharma on Wednesday joined NUIAI chairman Nilekani in the national capital in a bid to give a new identity to every Indian.

Sharma was not available for comment.

Sharma, who received the Prime Minister’s Award for Excellence in Public Administration, has a Master’s in Mathematics from IIT Kanpur and Computer Science from the University of California. During his 30-year stint as a bureaucrat, he has served as Deputy Development Commissioner in Saharsa, District Collector in Begusarai, Purnea and Dhanbad, Joint Secretary in the Department of Economic Affairs of the Union Ministry of Finance.

The IAS officer is credited with charting the e-governance course in Jharkhand, a state known for backwardness. According to his profile, as IT secretary he created infrastructure for e-governance, complete with programmes for public grievances, treasury and transport.  JharNet is now a success story, attaining a national e-governance ranking in 2007-08.

Among the several projects implemented by Sharma include payment gateway agreements with commercial banks to accept online payments of taxes, digitisation of land revenue and mutation records, information for ST/SC/BC students, release of scholarship money online and development of a software to register public grievances and address them within a time-frame.