Nandan Nilekani has spent nearly 30 years driving India’s experiment in technological state capacity, beginning with Aadhaar, the world’s largest digital identity system. Built as a foundational layer, Aadhaar underpins a broader set of free, interoperable tools known as digital public infrastructure, which now support government services, digital payments, banking, credit, and health care at a scale that would stand out even in much smaller wealthy nations. In a country with 1.4 billion people, this digital backbone enables a large portion of daily bureaucracy to occur seamlessly in the cloud, from welfare transfers authenticated by a thumbprint in remote villages to digital wallets holding licenses, certificates, and educational records in big cities where cash is increasingly rare.
At the center of this system is a 12-digit Aadhaar number tied to biometric or SMS-based authentication, which grants access to government services, SIM cards, basic bank accounts, digital signatures, and social welfare payments. The Indian government says that since its inception in 2009, Aadhaar has saved 3.48 trillion rupees (?.2 billion) by boosting efficiency, bypassing corrupt officials, and cutting other types of fraud. The UIDAI enrolled people at peak rates of more than a million new users a day, supported by a technical team of just about 50 developers, and in the end cost slightly less than half a billion dollars. On top of identity, Nilekani and collaborators designed open, interoperable platforms such as the Unified Payments Interface and the Open Network for Digital Commerce to avoid both state monopolies and private walled gardens, enabling anyone to plug into shared rails for payments, data sharing, and online commerce.
Nilekani’s new projects extend this playbook into energy and global finance. As chief mentor for the India Energy Stack, he is backing a plan to give unique digital identities to power plants, storage facilities, rooftop solar panels, and electric vehicles, with all related data standardized, machine-readable, and linked via open protocols to give grid operators a real-time view of supply and demand and to make it easier and cheaper for households to connect and sell power. In parallel, his proposed “finternet” would combine Aadhaar-style infrastructure with blockchains by turning financial instruments and real-world assets into digital tokens that banks, asset managers, and companies could issue and manage, with a focus on helping poorer people trade assets or use them as collateral; the finternet project already has 30 partners across four continents and Nilekani says it’ll launch next year.
The scale and ambition of this infrastructure has sparked intense debate. Aadhaar has been dogged by privacy concerns, with several data breaches, including a 2023 incident involving hackers selling records of more than 800 million Indians on the dark web. While officials insist the random number is harmless without biometric or SMS checks, in practice people frequently use Aadhaar paperwork as a de facto identity card, creating loopholes and enabling multiple valid documents with differing details; a 2018 NGO report found that 67% of people using Aadhaar to open a bank account relied on the verification document instead of digital authentication. Activists also highlight biometric failures and exclusion from essential services, and say the lack of transparency from UIDAI makes it impossible to gauge the true scale of harm. Meanwhile, open platforms such as ONDC have struggled for traction, with retail sales declining since 2024 as incentives fell away, and hundreds of millions of users across payments and documentation still leave many in India’s vast population outside the digital fold.
Nilekani counters that critics overlook the dysfunction that preceded these systems and argues that in a nation of 1.4 billion people, technology is the only viable way to tackle corruption, exclusion, and bureaucratic inertia. He points to outcomes such as more than 500 million basic bank accounts opened using Aadhaar, many by people who were previously unbanked, and notes that earlier this year India’s Unified Payments Interface overtook Visa as the world’s largest real-time payments system; the Reserve Bank of India says more than 657 million people used the system in the financial year 2024-2025. Foreign governments now regularly visit Bengaluru to study India’s digital public infrastructure, while multilateral institutions and philanthropies are promoting similar models abroad. Nilekani acknowledges, however, that both he and India are in a race against time: the country’s demographic dividend could yet become a demographic disaster if growth remains uneven and youth unemployment high. For now, he shows little inclination to slow down, describing himself as someone who needs to stay curious and focused on the future, even as that future keeps receding over the horizon.
