The man who made India digital isn’t done yet

It sounds almost wild-eyed. Yet the finternet project has 30 partners across four continents. Nilekani says it’ll launch next year.

A call to service

Nilekani was born in Bengaluru, in 1955. His family was middle class and, Nilekani says, “seized with societal issues and challenges.” His upbringing was also steeped in the kind of socialism espoused by the newish nation’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

After studying electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, in 1981 Nilekani helped found Infosys, an information technology company that pioneered outsourcing and helped turned India into the world’s IT back office. In 1999, he was part of a government-appointed task force trying to upgrade the infrastructure and services in Bengaluru, then emerging as India’s tech capital. But Nilekani was at the time leery of being viewed as just another techno-optimist. “I didn’t want to be seen as naive enough to believe that tech could solve everything,” he says.

Seeing the scope of the problem changed his mind—sclerotic bureaucracy, endemic corruption, and financial exclusion were intractable without technological solutions. In 2008 Nilekani published a book, Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation. It was a manifesto for an India that could leapfrog into a networked future.

And it got him a job. At the time more than half the births in the country were not recorded, and up to 400 million Indians had no official identity document. Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, asked Nilekani to put into action an ill-defined plan to create a national identity card.

Nilekani’s team made a still-controversial decision to rely on biometrics. A system based on people’s fingerprints and retina scans meant nobody could sign up twice, and nobody had to carry paperwork. In terms of execution, it was like trying to achieve industrialization but skip a steam era. Deployment required a monumental data collection effort, as well as new infrastructure that could compare each new enrollment against hundreds of millions of existing records in seconds. At its peak, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the agency responsible for administering Aadhaar, was registering more than a million new users a day. That happened with a technical team of just about 50 developers, and in the end cost slightly less than half a billion dollars.

Buoyed by their success, Nilekani and his allies started casting around for other problems they could solve using the same digitize-the-real-world playbook. “We built more and more layers of capability,” Nilekani says, “and then this became a wider-ranging idea. More grandiose.”

While other countries were building digital backbones with full state control (as in China) or in public-private partnerships that favored profit-seeking corporate approaches (as in the US), Nilekani thought India needed something else. He wanted critical technologies in areas like identity, payments, and data sharing to be open and interoperable, not monopolized by either the state or private industry. So the tools that make up DPI use open standards and open APIs, meaning that anyone can plug into the system. No single company or institution controls access—no walled gardens.