How Nandan Nilekani built India's digital public infrastructure
In a free-flowing conversation with Uber's global CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, the Infosys chairman talked about his journey of building Aadhaar
Infosys Chairman, Nandan Nilekani. Image: Hemant Mishra for Forbes India
At an event in Bengaluru on Thursday, Uber’s global CEO Dara Khosrowshahi spoke to Infosys Chairman Nandan Nilekani on ‘Building Population Scale Technology’. The candid conversation between the two revolved around how India’s ‘tech visionary’ has played a key role in building India’s digital public infrastructure (DPI). Edited excerpts from the conversation:
On building India’s digital infrastructure
It began 15 years back when I was invited by the government to give every Indian a unique ID. It was a very pathbreaking idea way back in 2009. So I said, let’s do it. I quit my job in Infosys, joined the government, became employee number one of this startup. So the government had this idea of doing an ID, our value add was let's make it a digital ID.If there is something more difficult than a startup, it's a startup inside the government. I had to put the team together and I said we’re going to give 600 million IDs before I stepped down. It was a crazy commitment but I needed to give the team a unifying goal. So that’s how I got into the Aadhaar world. Today 1.3 billion have an ID and it is used and it is used 80 million times a day for authentication, KYC and so on.
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We asked ourselves, what are the use cases of this ID which make it compelling? We came up with authentication, verify who the person is. That's a very useful thing in many applications, and we gave it as an API, because we realised that innovation has to happen outside. We had to have built the rails on which innovation happens, just like the Internet or GPS happened.
