How Nandan Nilekani seeded path-breaking initiatives for Digital India

He is among those who laid the foundation of India's information technology services industry, and seeded several path-breaking initiatives for Digital India

Nandan Nilekani needs no introduction. He is among those who created a strong foundation for the $194-billion Indian information technology services industry and, moreover, has been aptly hailed as the technocrat who sowed the seeds of several path-breaking initiatives for Digital India.

The BS Jury’s decision to confer on him the Lifetime Achievement Award was an apt one.

Nilekani’s biggest trait has been that of a problem-solver. N R Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys, who brought Nilekani to Infosys, had said in an interview a few years ago that his strength was simplifying complex ideas.

Murthy had made the comment when Infosys was going through one of its most turbulent times. In 2017, Vishal Sikka, the then CEO of the company, had left amid disagreement with the founders. The board and the founders were at loggerheads on the direction of the company, and finally, Nilekani had to be called back.

A graduate of Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Nilekani not only selected an ace CEO, Salil Parekh, but also helped the company clock among the fastest growth rates in the industry. Infosys reported revenues of $16.31 billion in the financial year ended March 31, 2022. In rupee terms, this amounted to Rs 121,641 crore, and represented year-on-year growth of 21.1 per cent — one of the fastest growth rates posted by the software services major in 11 years.

At the recently held Infosys@40 celebrations, which saw all the founders of the company on the same stage, Murthy thanked Nilekani and Parekh for bringing back Infosys to industry-leading growth.

Murthy is right. Nilekani is a problem-solver, whether for Infosys or for India, when the country took its first steps to becoming a digital economy.

It was under his stewardship that Aadhaar took form and almost all of India’s 1.4 billion citizens now have an Aadhaar or a Unique Identification number. Aadhaar has become one of the foundational digital platforms on which several other digital initiatives were started. Nilekani was the founding chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) with the rank of a Cabinet minister from 2009 to 2014.

He played his part in giving India a democratised digital payments platform in the form of Unified Payments Interface (UPI). The main achievement of this platform was creating financial inclusion.

His latest offering to the nation is ONDC (Open Network for Digital Commerce), and he is betting on the the Account Aggregator (AA) system to usher in a UPI moment for credit and lending. In his own words, ONDC and AA will democratise the digital transformation drive in the country.

At the start of the year, at an event where he was speaking with the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft Corporation Satya Nadella, Nilekani said: “We are half way on the journey. The big vision is to create a ‘digital first’ economy and society by leveraging the power of modern digital technologies, and to improve the lives of the people by bringing economic growth.”

When asked which role he preferred the most — being an entrepreneur or India’s chief technology officer, he told Business Standard in an email response: “I found both the roles very fulfilling and would like to choose both. Each role has given me the experience and mindset to do the other one better!”

In a career that has seen him criss-cross the globe and grace the halls of the government, Nilekani would be among the few who have balanced both roles with elan. Importantly, in both capacities he has managed to grab the attention of the world.

So in an illustrious career, what has been a defining moment for him? Apparently everything. “I have had multiple defining professional moments. The day Infosys was founded in 1981, and its going public in India in 1993 and in the US in 1999. The day it reached a billion dollars in revenue around 2004. Joining the Union government to lead Aadhaar in 2009. Completing my goal of reaching 600 million Aadhaar cards issued, and stepping down in 2014. And then, of course, recent ones like going back to Infosys as chairman in 2017, and working with NPCI to launch UPI in 2016,” he says.

It would not be far-fetched to say that he has been one of the crucial players in how the world perceives India. The success and ease of use of UPI is something that the world wants to replicate. ONDC, which is still in its initial stages, once fully operationalised, will be the first such initiative anywhere in the world.

Nilekani has also been a firm believer in India as a leader of digital transformation at population scale. In one of his talks during Startup India Innovation Week, he said that India has been on the journey of digital transformation at population scale for a decade, and a huge part of the country’s economy and social activity has been transformed by technology.

In the introduction to his book Rebooting India, written with Viral Shah, the writers say that the book is an attempt to see if technology can be used to solve some of India’s most pressing problems — to improve standards in health care and education, to cut wastage in government spending and increase revenue, to make tax collection citizen-friendly, and so on.

His efforts have indeed made some headway in solving some of these issues. For instance, Amitabh Kant, former CEO of NITI Aayog, said last year that Aadhaar had helped the government save Rs 2 trillion by eliminating fake and duplicate identities.

Nilekani has been one of the key people in the country working to ensure that technology is used to make every citizen of India a digital citizen. But then, how does he see privacy and governance impacting the technology landscape?

“The need for digital public infrastructure is very critical, as it leads to economic growth, inclusion and a more resilient and equitable society. What is also required is the guard rails — security, privacy, non-biased AI (artificial intelligence), governance, institutional arrangements, law, regulations, etc. So both go hand in hand,” he said in his emailed remarks.

In 2005, Nilekani received the prestigious Joseph Schumpeter prize for innovative services in the economy, economic sciences and politics. A year later, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan, one of India’s highest civilian honours. In January 2023, Nilekani was appointed co-chair of the G20 Task Force on Digital Public Infrastructure for Economic Transformation, Financial Inclusion and Development.

Despite reaching such heights of success, he has remained a humble person. While Infosys made him wealthy (his net worth is $2.8 billion, according to Forbes), he and his wife Rohini Nilekani have signed the Giving pledge, and both run separate philanthropic arms.