 "Nandan Nilekani's master key to help unlock India's $8 trillion future")
Nandan Nilekani, the architect of Aadhaar and co-founder of Infosys, proposed the structural shifts required to fast-track India's path to becoming an $8 trillion economy by 2035. On Wednesday night, Nilekani unveiled The Great Unlock, a bold roadmap for India’s economic future, in collaboration with Arkam Ventures.
Over the past decade, India has grown from a $2.1 trillion to $3.8 trillion economy, however, this growth has been accompanied by critical challenges including income disparity, lack of formalisation, low productivity, and inconsistent market access remain significant hurdles. To overcome these barriers and drive India’s next phase of economic growth, Nilekani introduced The Great Unlock, a multi-pronged approach to overcoming these structural bottlenecks and enabling a more inclusive, innovation-driven economy.
“Today I will talk about four unlocks, which can change the trajectory of growth from 6 per cent to 8 per cent and GDP to go from $6 trillion to $8 trillion by 2035,” said Nilekani at the Arkam Annual Meet 2025, while addressing an audience of entrepreneurs, investors, and business leaders. “Those four unlocks are technology, capital, entrepreneurship and formalisation.”
Nilekani explained four major shifts that will play a defining role in India’s transformation in the next decade. This includes ‘Technology Unlock’ which is about harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to drive productivity, innovation, and global competitiveness across industries. The other shift is ‘Capital Unlock’. This deals with leveraging tokenisation of illiquid assets and the Account Aggregator framework to improve capital efficiency. This ensures broader financial inclusion and access to investment opportunities.
The third structural shift is ‘Entrepreneurship Unlock’. It is about enabling the creation of one million startups and ten million modern MSMEs. It also deals with fostering a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem that generates employment and fuels innovation. Lastly, Nilekani proposed ‘Formalisation Unlock’ – DPI (digital public infrastructure) for worker credentials and benefits. This includes simplification of regulations to improve ease of business to allow more companies to enter the formal economy.
Reflecting on the insights shared by Nilekani, Bala Srinivasa, managing director, Arkam Ventures, said, for start-ups and investors 'The Great Unlock' is a window into the largest pockets of innovation potential. He said it is an amazing outline into the accelerators that can propel India for the next decade.Srinivasa said that the Arkam team is supporting founders who are eliminating friction to consumption for hundreds of millions of Indians, providing tools to enhance MSME efficiency, and boldly reimagining enterprise value chains for both domestic and global markets. “This is where we see the next set of transformative start-ups emerging. There has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur in India,” said Srinivasa.
Rahul Chandra, managing director, Arkam Ventures, added that the ‘Four Unlocks’ by themselves and their outcome present an opportunity for Indian entrepreneurs to create hundreds of mega sized companies. He said Digital public infrastructure (DPI) has already reshaped businesses in India. He said tokenization of illiquid assets and frameworks like Account Aggregator will be game changers in bringing more businesses into the formal economy. “At Arkam, we believe the opportunity lies in opening up the market to enable startups and MSMEs to grow and formalise,” said Chandra. “Founders who can bridge the gap between technology, regulation, and financial access will shape the next decade of innovation. We will be dedicating our resources and capital to find winners who will leverage or help create these transformations,” said Chandra.
Challenges
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At the Arkam Annual Meet 2025, Nilekani pointed out these ‘Great Unlocks’ are not about broad policy recommendations but about specific actions that can impact the trajectory of the next decade.
He said that India’s growth at 6 percent is a good deal, noting that many countries with no growth get excited after hearing about such economic expansion. However he emphasized that to raise the standard of living and grow wealthier, India needs to take action to elevate growth to the next level to 8 per cent and reach an $8 trillion GDP by 2035, instead of $6 trillion.
“When you look at the future, there is no real strategic plan on how we go from 6 per cent growth to 8 per cent growth,” said Nilekani. “It's quite shocking to know that only 13 districts out of 788 districts contribute to half of India's GDP. The per capita GDP of Bihar is one-sixth that of Telangana. In the same country, you have such wide spatial disparity, which is really an issue that we have to deal with.”
Furthermore, real estate continues to be the largest asset class for Indians, but it remains difficult to effectively monetize. Landowners in India often struggle to use their land as collateral for loans. This challenge is particularly significant in rural areas, where 50 percent of the country’s wealth is tied to land.
Nilekani noted that India is also a country of low-productivity.India is also one of the smallest formal economies, with just 15 percent of its population participating in the formal sector.
He said that ‘informality’ is not only about individuals but also businesses. He highlighted that while India is supposed to have 63 million small and micro businesses, only 8 million of them file goods and services tax (GST), which is a symbol of formalization. He pointed out that only 1 million businesses contribute to Employee’s State Insurance (ESI) and provident fund (PF), which are part of a defined benefits system. Additionally, only around 29,000 businesses have a paid up capital of over Rs 10 crore, representing a small group of people. He emphasised the lack of formalisation in the business sector and huge shortage of capital for small businesses.
He referred to an RBI report, which identified a $530 billion gap between the demand and supply of capital for small businesses. “The combination of lack of access to capital and lack of access to markets essentially leads to stunted growth,” said Nilekani. “Clearly, we have to fix this to get the real economy going in a big way.”
AI to 1 billion people
Nilekani highlighted India's technological progress, noting that over 500 million people now have smartphones, with WhatsApp and UPI-PhonePe reaching millions of users. He emphasized the need to extend this reach to a billion people, which will be possible as smartphone costs decrease and networks evolve to 4G and 5G. With AI enabling language accessibility across India's 22 official languages and dialects, technology can now cater to the country's diverse needs. Nilekani believes the combination of AI, affordable smartphones, and expanded networks will help unlock digital access for all Indians.
He also pointed out that India’s unique challenge of 22 official languages and hundreds of dialects made it previously difficult to provide universal access. Before AI, it was nearly impossible to build interfaces in every language. However, with advancements in AI, particularly for language processing, it’s now possible to make technology accessible in every Indian language and dialect.
“We think the combination of AI for language and spoken language (when the computer speaks back), and contextualization, along with more widespread networks and cheaper phones, is the way to extend the reach of what we have today to a billion people,” said Nilekani. “This is a big unlock where we use technology, digital public infrastructure (DPI), plus AI to the billion Indians.”
Nilekani explained that building low-cost, population-scale AI is crucial, a concept India has already demonstrated with DPI. He highlighted that Aadhaar was created for 1.3 billion people at a fraction of the cost compared to other countries. It handles millions of authentications and know your customers (KYCs). Similarly, Unified Payments Interface (UPI) processes millions of transactions free of charge.
“We are the only country in the world where you can transfer one rupee to somebody without paying any transaction fee,” said Nilekani.
He said the principles of high-volume, low-cost infrastructure used in DPI will also be applied to AI at a population scale, utilizing open datasets.
“We know what it means to build population scale, frugal, high volume, low cost infrastructure. And the same thing can now be applied to AI,” he said.