Meet the man who built the awesome online attendance system for India’s government officials

Ram Sewak Sharma is a silver-haired, straight-talking bureaucrat who spent much of the last five years working out of an office near New Delhi’s Connaught Place. Next door to him sat Nandan Nilekani, the former Infosys CEO.

Together, the two men built the world’s largest biometric identification programme, Aadhaar. Nilekani was chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) till he left to join politics, while Sharma served as director general and mission director.

Now, 59-year old Sharma is building an attendance system for India’s central government employees that is inexpensive, publicly available on the internet—and potentially, a simple tool that could revolutionise governance in the country.