{"id":16008,"date":"2026-01-07T11:32:55","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T11:32:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/07\/aadhaar-nandan-nilekani-india-digital-biometric-identity-data\/"},"modified":"2026-01-07T11:32:55","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T11:32:55","slug":"aadhaar-nandan-nilekani-india-digital-biometric-identity-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/07\/aadhaar-nandan-nilekani-india-digital-biometric-identity-data\/","title":{"rendered":"The man who made India digital isn\u2019t done yet"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Nandan Nilekani can\u2019t stop trying to push India into the future. He started nearly 30 years ago, masterminding an ongoing experiment in technological state capacity that started with Aadhaar\u2014the world\u2019s largest digital identity system. Aadhaar means \u201cfoundation\u201d in Hindi, and on that bedrock Nilekani and people working with him went on to build a sprawling collection of free, interoperating online tools that add up to nothing less than a digital infrastructure for society. They cover government services, digital payments, banking, credit, and health care, offering convenience and access that would be eye-popping in wealthy countries a tenth of India\u2019s size. In India those systems are called, collectively, \u201cdigital public infrastructure,\u201d or DPI.<\/p>\n

At 70 years old, Nilekani should be retired. But he has a few more ideas. India\u2019s electrical grid is creaky and prone to failure; Nilekani wants to add a layer of digital communication to stabilize it. And then there\u2019s his idea to expand the financial functions in DPI to the rest of the world, creating a global digital backbone for commerce that he calls the \u201cfinternet.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt sounds like some crazy stuff,\u201d Nilekani says. \u201cBut I think these are all big ideas, which over the next five years will have demonstrable, material impact.\u201d As a last act in public life, why not Aadhaarize the world?<\/p>\n

India\u2019s digital backbone<\/h3>\n

Today, a farmer in a village in India, hours from the nearest bank, can collect welfare payments or transfer money by simply pressing a thumb to a fingerprint scanner at the local store. Digitally authenticated copies of driver\u2019s licenses, birth certificates, and educational records can be accessed and shared via a digital wallet that sits on your smartphone.<\/p>\n

In big cities, where cash is less and less common (just trying to break a bill can be a major headache), mobile payments are ubiquitous, whether you\u2019re buying a TV from a high-street retailer or a coconut from a roadside cart. There are no fees, and any payment app or bank account can send money to any other. The country\u2019s chaotic patchwork of public and private hospitals have begun digitizing all their medical records and uploading them to a nationwide platform. On the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), people can do online shopping searches on whatever app they want, and the results show sellers from an array of other<\/em> platforms, too. The idea is to liberate small merchants and consumers from the walled gardens of online shopping giants like Amazon and the domestic giant Flipkart.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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In the most populous nation on Earth\u2014with 1.4 billion people\u2014a large portion of the bureaucracy anyone encounters in daily life happens seamlessly and in the cloud.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At the heart of all these tools is Aadhaar. The system gives every Indian a 12-digit number that, in combination with either a fingerprint scan or an SMS code, allows access to government services, SIM cards, basic bank accounts, digital signature services, and social welfare payments. The Indian government says that since its inception in 2009, Aadhaar has saved 3.48 trillion rupees ($39.2 billion) by boosting efficiency, bypassing corrupt officials, and cutting other types of fraud. The system is controversial and imperfect\u2014a database with 1.4 billion people in it comes with inherent security and privacy concerns. Still, in the most populous nation on Earth, a big portion of the bureaucracy anyone might encounter in daily life just happens in the cloud.<\/p>\n

Nilekani was behind much of that innovation, marshaling an army of civil servants, tech companies, and volunteers. Now he sees it in action every day. \u201cIt reinforces that what you have done is not some abstract stuff, but real stuff for real people,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

By his own admission, Nilekani is entering the twilight of his career. But it\u2019s not over yet. He\u2019s now \u201cchief mentor\u201d for the India Energy Stack (IES), a government initiative to connect the fragmented data held by companies responsible for generating, transmitting, and distributing power. India\u2019s grids are unstable and disparate, but Nilekani hopes an Aadhaar-like move will help. IES aims to give unique digital identities not only to power plants and energy storage facilities but even to rooftop solar panels and electric vehicles. All the data attached to those things\u2014device characteristics, energy rating certifications, usage information\u2014will be in a common, machine-readable format and shared on the same open protocols.<\/p>\n

Ideally, that\u2019ll give grid operators a real-time view of energy supply and demand. And if it works, it might also make it simpler and cheaper for anyone<\/em> to connect to the grid\u2014even everyday folks selling excess power from their rooftop solar rigs, says RS Sharma, the chair of the project and Nilekani\u2019s deputy while building Aadhaar.<\/p>\n

Nilekani\u2019s other side hustle is even more ambitious. His idea for a global \u201cfinternet\u201d combines Aadhaarization with blockchains\u2014creating digital representations called tokens for not only financial instruments like stocks or bonds but also real-world assets like houses or jewelry. Anyone from a bank to an asset manager or even a company could create and manage these tokens, but Nilekani\u2019s team especially hopes the idea will help poor people trade their assets, or use them as loan collateral\u2014expanding financial services to those who otherwise couldn\u2019t access them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It sounds almost wild-eyed. Yet the finternet project has 30 partners across four continents. Nilekani says it\u2019ll launch next year.<\/p>\n

A call to service<\/h3>\n

Nilekani was born in Bengaluru, in 1955. His family was middle class and, Nilekani says, \u201cseized with societal issues and challenges.\u201d His upbringing was also steeped in the kind of socialism espoused by the newish nation\u2019s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s tech capital. But Nilekani was at the time leery of being viewed as just another techno-optimist. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to be seen as naive enough to believe that tech could solve everything,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

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\"Nilekani
Nilekani demonstrates the biometric technology at the heart of Aadhaar, the system he spearheaded that provides a unique digital identity number to all Indians.<\/figcaption>
PALLAVA BAGLA\/CORBIS\/GETTY IMAGES<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Seeing the scope of the problem changed his mind\u2014sclerotic 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<\/em>. It was a manifesto for an India that could leapfrog into a networked future.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Nilekani\u2019s team made a still-controversial decision to rely on biometrics. A system based on people\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cWe built more and more layers of capability,\u201d Nilekani says, \u201cand then this became a wider-ranging idea. More grandiose.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2014no walled gardens.<\/p>\n

A contested legacy<\/h3>\n

Of course, another way to look at putting financial and government services and records into giant databases is that it\u2019s a massive risk to personal liberty. Aadhaar, in particular, has faced criticism from privacy advocates concerned about the potential for surveillance. Several high-profile data breaches of Aadhaar records held by government entities have shaken confidence in the system, most recently in 2023, when security researchers found<\/a> hackers selling the records of more than 800 million Indians on the dark web.<\/p>\n

Technically, this shouldn\u2019t matter\u2014an Aadhaar number ought to be useless without biometric or SMS-based authentication. It\u2019s \u201ca myth that this random number is a very powerful number,\u201d says Sharma, the onetime co-lead of UIDAI. \u201cI don\u2019t have any example where somebody\u2019s Aadhaar disclosure would have harmed somebody.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

One problem is that in everyday use, Aadhaar users often bypass the biometric authentication system. To ensure that people use a genuine address at registration, Aadhaar administrators give people their numbers on an official-looking document. Indians co-opted this paperwork as a proof of identity on its own. And since the document\u2014Indians even call it an \u201cAadhaar card\u201d\u2014doesn\u2019t have an expiration date, it\u2019s possible for people to get multiple valid cards with different details by changing their address or date of birth. That\u2019s quite a loophole. In 2018 an NGO report found that 67% of people using Aadhaar to open a bank account relied on this verification document rather than digital authentication. That report was the last time anyone published data on the problem, so nobody knows how bad it is today. \u201cEverybody\u2019s living on anecdotes,\u201d says Kiran Jonnalagadda, an anti-Aadhaar activist.<\/p>\n

In other cases, flaws in Aadhaar\u2019s biometric technology have caused people to be denied essential government services. The government downplays these risks, but again, it\u2019s impossible to tell how serious the problem is because the UIDAI won\u2019t disclose numbers. \u201cThere needs to be a much more honest acknowledgment, documentation, and then an examination of how those exclusions can be mitigated,\u201d says Apar Gupta, director of the Internet Freedom Foundation.<\/p>\n

Beyond the potential for fraud, it\u2019s also true that the free and interoperable tools haven\u2019t reached all the people who might find them useful, especially among India\u2019s rural and poorer populations. Nilekani\u2019s hopes for openness haven\u2019t fully come to pass. Big e-commerce companies still dominate, and retail sales on ONDC have been dropping steadily since 2024, when financial incentives to participate began to taper off. The digital payments and government documentation services have hundreds of millions of users, numbers most global technology companies would love to see\u2014but in a country as large as India, that leaves a lot of people out.<\/p>\n

Going global<\/h3>\n

The usually calm Nilekani bristles at that criticism; he has heard it before. Detractors overlook the dysfunction that preceded these efforts, he says, and he remains convinced that technology was the only way forward. \u201cHow do you move a country of 1.4 billion people?\u201d he asks. \u201cThere\u2019s no other way you can fix it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The proof is self-evident, he says. Indians have opened more than 500 million basic bank accounts using Aadhaar; before it came into use, millions of those people had been completely unbanked. Earlier this year, India\u2019s Unified Payments Interface overtook Visa as the world\u2019s largest real-time payments system. \u201cThere is no way Aadhaar could have worked but for the fact that people needed this thing,\u201d Nilekani says. \u201cThere\u2019s no way payments would have worked without people needing it. So the voice of the people\u2014they\u2019re voting with their feet.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"\"
A street vendor in Kolkata displays a QR code that lets him get paid via India\u2019s Unified Payments Interface, part of the digital public infrastructure Nilekani helped build. The Reserve Bank of India says more than 657 million people used the system in the financial year 2024\u20132025.<\/figcaption>
DEBAJYOTI CHAKRABORTY\/NURPHOTO\/GETTY IMAGES<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

That need might be present in countries beyond India. \u201cMany countries don\u2019t have a proper birth registration system. Many countries don\u2019t have a payment system. Many countries don\u2019t have a way for data to be leveraged,\u201d Nilekani says. \u201cSo this is a very powerful idea.\u201d It seems to be spreading. Foreign governments regularly send delegations to Bengaluru to study India\u2019s DPI tools. The World Bank and the United Nations have tried to introduce the concept to other developing countries equally eager to bring their economies into the digital age. The Gates Foundation has established projects to promote digital infrastructure, and Nilekani has set up and funded a network of think tanks, research institutes, and other NGOs aimed at, as he says, \u201cpropagating the gospel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, he admits he might not live to see DPI go global. \u201cThere are two races,\u201d Nilekani says. \u201cMy personal race against time and India\u2019s race against time.\u201d He worries that the economic potential of its vast young population\u2014the so-called demographic dividend\u2014could turn into a demographic disaster. Despite rapid growth, gains have been uneven. Youth unemployment remains stubbornly high\u2014a particularly volatile problem in a large and economically turbulent country.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe I\u2019m a junkie,\u201d he says. \u201cWhy the hell am I doing all this? I think I need it. I think I need to keep curious and alive and looking at the future.\u201d But that\u2019s the thing about building the future: It never quite arrives.<\/p>\n

Edd Gent is a journalist based in Bengaluru, India.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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