New Delhi: Tech billionaire Nandan Nilekani will assist the government in developing IT infrastructure for the mega National Health Protection Scheme (NHPS), which seeks to cover ten crore families, a senior NITI Aayog official has said.

The IT infrastructure for the healthcare scheme will be of a huge scale, as was required for Aadhaar, and will have to be scaled up gradually in view of the massive range of the programme, the official said.

Former UIDAI chairman Nilekani – the brain behind the Aadhaar – is also a member of the Goods and Services Tax return simplification committee.

“We have consulted Nilekani, we want to build Aadhaar-like model for the scheme (NHPS)…He has agreed to help us,” the official said.

The premium on insurance cover of Rs 5 lakh for every eligible household under the NHPS has been pegged at around Rs 900-1,000 per family annually, lower than the earlier estimate of Rs 1,000-1,200.

Under the funding arrangement, the Centre will provide 60% funds, while the remaining money would have to come from the states.

In case of special category states, the Centre will provide 90% of fund.

In his Budget speech earlier this month, finance minister Arun Jaitley had provided an initial corpus of Rs 2,000 crore for NHPS which aims to provide a medical cover of up to Rs 5 lakh to over ten crore poor and vulnerable families, constituting 40% of India’s total population.