BENGALURU: Former Aadhaar chairman and Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani is expected to shortly quit the Congress to focus on a nationwide education initiative — EkStep — he has been working on for a while now, according to sources.

Nilekani, perhaps the biggest non-political name to join the Congress ahead of last year’s Lok Sabha elections, had lost from Bangalore South to H N Ananth Kumar (BJP). Nilekani, who spearheaded UPA-2’s Aadhaar project, which aims to provide every Indian with a 12-digit unique identity number, has neither been used by the Congress government in Karnataka nor by the central leadership since the party’s stunning loss in 2014.

He didn’t respond to text messages and calls about the move.

While the UPA government sort of dumped Aadhaar — after launching and backing it — ahead of the general elections, the Narendra Modi government adopted it and made it the linchpin of its direct benefits transfer scheme.

In the initial days of the NDA government, when Aadhaar was on shaky ground, Nilekani had sought a meeting with Modi and convinced him of the benefits of retaining the scheme. He reportedly highlighted the enormous savings that would accrue to the government by plugging leakages in the delivery of various subsidies by dealing directly with the beneficiaries of the state’s burgeoning welfare programmes. Today, it’s a firm part of the NDA’s JAM (Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile) strategy.

EkStep, Nilekani’s primary education initiative, aims to help children in the 5-12 age group, especially first-generation learners, in reading and maths using technology. “The goal is to create a learning tool that will be available on devices such as smartphones and tablets for millions of children in their environment, be it home, school or tuition centre,” says the not-for-profit’s website.

Nilekani believes “a social problem at scale requires a collaborative approach and technology is a necessary enabler”. The solutions provided by EkStep will complement and augment existing education resources. The approach is to build an open source technology platform and a collaborative ecosystem of parents, teachers, educationists, technologists, content developers, scientists and researchers to solve a specific problem of learning, at scale.