UIDAI appoints Amit Agrawal as CEO

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has appointed Amit Agrawal as its chief executive officer. Agrawal is the 1993 batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer from the Chhattisgarh cadre.

Agrawal takes over the reins from Saurabh Garg who was appointed in 2021. The Odisha cadre officer was appointed secretary of the Social Justice Department in April rejig.

Agrawal is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-K). Before joining UIDAI, he was the additional secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). He has also worked at the Ministry of Finance as both additional secretary and joint secretary and with the Chattisgarh government as the finance secretary and secretary in charge of commerce tax and technical education departments.

At the Mint Digital Innovation Summit held on June 9, Annie Joyce, UIDAI’s deputy director general said that the government authority is working on deploying multiple technologies in order to make the pan-India digital identification framework safer than now from cyber threats, and also more transparent. She said that among the key emerging technologies that the organisation is working with, is the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity)’s blockchain framework.

In March, UIDAI signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Society for Electronic Transactions and Security (SETS) under the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the government to do joint research for developing products in deep tech domain. This will cater to domains like cybersecurity, internet of things (IoT) security, and mobile device security, among others.