Ideas
Ideas drive a nation
Imagining India sorts the ideas shaping India into those already accepted and those still in dispute. He argues that ideas lead policy. He counts India’s young population and its English and IT skills as strengths. At TED in 2009 he set out four kinds of ideas that would decide whether India’s growth continued.
Publishers Weekly: Review of Imagining India (19 January 2009) · TED: Nandan Nilekani’s ideas for India’s future (TED2009) · Wikipedia: Nandan Nilekani
An identity for every resident
Aadhaar gives each resident a number tied to fingerprints and iris scans. He held that the poor were shut out of banks and benefits because they could not prove who they were. The system logged more than 27 billion authentications in 2024–25 alone. He says it was built to include.
Aadhaar includes, it doesn’t exclude.
On X after the Supreme Court verdict (September 2018)
ThePrint: Aadhaar has undergone the ultimate scrutiny, says Nilekani (26 September 2018) · Construction World: Aadhaar authentications cross 27 billion in FY25 (29 April 2025) · Business Today: Why Nilekani remains India’s go-to architect for nation-scale reforms (28 July 2026)
Digital public infrastructure
He argues that the state should build open shared rails and let markets build on top. India Stack bundles Aadhaar authentication, e-KYC, DigiLocker, eSign and consent-based data sharing. UPI and the Account Aggregator framework follow the same open model. UPI processed 25.47 billion payments in October 2026.
Business Today: Why Nilekani remains India’s go-to architect for nation-scale reforms (28 July 2026) · Entrepreneur India: UPI hits record 25.47 bn transactions in October (3 November 2026) · Nikhil Kamath: Nikhil Kamath x Nandan Nilekani, People by WTF Ep 3
Open networks and unbundled commerce
The Beckn Protocol lets any app find and transact with any seller without one platform in the middle. Its genesis author is FIDE which he co-founded. ONDC is a Beckn-enabled network for small retailers. He describes Beckn as decentralised transactions infrastructure.
CXOToday: Beckn and Finternet together for global climate impact (26 October 2024) · Beckn Protocol: Beckn vs ONDC, what’s the difference? · Business Today: Why Nilekani remains India’s go-to architect for nation-scale reforms (28 July 2026)
The Finternet
With Agustín Carstens of the BIS he proposed a financial system of unified ledgers and tokenised assets. Users would hold human-readable addresses and control their own data. Rules would be built into tokens so that compliance runs automatically. Banks keep their present roles.
policy would exist as code
Finternet paper with Agustín Carstens (2024)
YourStory: Nilekani releases paper proposing Finternet (April 2024) · BIS: Finternet working paper by Agustín Carstens and Nandan Nilekani (2024) · BIS: The Finternet, a giant leap for the financial system (18 April 2024)
Rebooting government
Rebooting India proposes a dozen high-tech public institutions to deliver low-cost solutions. It suggests these could save at least ₹100,000 crore a year. The model is a small skilled team with start-up speed and a supportive prime minister. He chaired the 2019 RBI panel on digital payments in the same spirit.
Penguin India: Rebooting India · Business Standard: Mihir S. Sharma reviews Rebooting India (7 November 2015) · PRS Legislative Research: Committee on Deepening of Digital Payments (2019)
Privacy by design
He says Aadhaar collects only name, address, sex, date of birth and contact details. He calls this privacy by design. He says biometrics cannot be shared even for national security. He has long called for a data protection law. The Art of Bitfulness asks people to reclaim time, privacy and attention from their devices.
I’m all for a very modern and robust data protection and privacy law.
FactorDaily interview (April 2017)
FactorDaily: Nilekani on privacy, security and Aadhaar (19 April 2017) · ThePrint: New book lists ways to break out of a toxic relationship with gadgets (14 May 2022) · Business Standard: Srivatsa Krishna reviews The Art of Bitfulness (18 January 2022)
AI diffusion and the use-case capital
He argues that India should not race to build the biggest models. It should put AI to work for a billion people in learning, health and farm incomes. He backs voice access in Indian languages and open models from AI4Bharat. He warns that AI which brings only deepfakes and higher power bills will face a white-collar backlash.
diffusion of technology is a different ballgame.
India AI Impact Summit (February 2026)
Business Today: White-collar worker resentment could wreck AI (19 February 2026) · DQ India: Nilekani and Amodei on India as the use case capital of the world (19 February 2026) · Rest of World: Nandan Nilekani interview on India and AI (21 July 2025) · Business Standard: Nilekani commits second multi-year grant to AI4Bharat (6 June 2025) · Analytics India Magazine: Perplexity CEO says Nandan Nilekani is wrong (21 January 2025)
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