Nandan Nilekani, the towering figure often credited as the chief architect of India’s digital transformation, continues to drive ambitious technological statecraft well into his seventies. His foundational achievement, Aadhaar—the world’s largest biometric identity system—was merely the opening salvo in an ongoing, decades-long project to construct a comprehensive digital infrastructure for the world’s most populous nation. This sprawling collection of interoperable, open-source technological tools, collectively known as Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), now underpins nearly every aspect of Indian civic and commercial life, from welfare disbursement to instantaneous mobile payments.
DPI represents a radical experiment in maximizing state capacity through technology, providing utility and accessibility that often surpasses the digital service standards of far wealthier, smaller countries. Built upon the bedrock of Aadhaar (which translates to "foundation" in Hindi), this architecture encompasses digital payments, secure data sharing, open credit systems, and digitized healthcare records. Yet, even as the scale of this domestic transformation is still being absorbed, Nilekani is not content with national success; his sights are now set on exporting this paradigm, seeking to "Aadhaarize" the global financial and energy landscape through two monumental new endeavors: stabilizing India’s chaotic energy sector and launching a worldwide digital commerce backbone dubbed the "finternet."
The Engineering of State Capacity
Nilekani’s initial foray into public technology was born from the frustrating realization that India’s vast, sclerotic bureaucracy and deep-seated corruption rendered traditional governance models ineffective for modernization. Before Aadhaar’s inception in 2009, nearly half of the country’s population lacked official identity documents, making access to bank accounts, state benefits, and even birth registration impossible for hundreds of millions.
The decision to base Aadhaar on mandatory biometrics (fingerprints and iris scans) was a strategic masterstroke designed to overcome the monumental challenge of identity duplication and fraud. This approach allowed the system to “leapfrog” traditional identification methods, bypassing the need for extensive paper trails and existing municipal records, which were often nonexistent or unreliable. The sheer logistical and computational challenge of deploying this system—registering over a million users daily at its peak, and cross-referencing these new enrollments against a rapidly growing database of hundreds of millions—was a feat of engineering deployed by a lean technical team and achieved at a remarkably low cost, estimated at less than half a billion dollars.
The success of Aadhaar catalyzed the creation of further layers of DPI, enabling a seamless integration of government services into the cloud. Today, welfare payments bypass corrupt intermediaries, flowing directly into bank accounts linked to the 12-digit Aadhaar number. Authenticated digital documents—from driving licenses to educational certificates—are accessible via secure digital wallets, fundamentally streamlining the administrative friction encountered by 1.4 billion people.
The UPI Revolution and Fintech Implications
Perhaps the most globally resonant layer of India’s DPI stack is the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). UPI is not merely a payment app; it is an open, interoperable, real-time settlement rail that allows any bank account or payment application to send money instantaneously to any other, without transaction fees.
The industry implications of UPI are profound. In mature Western economies, payment systems are typically dominated by private monopolies (Visa, Mastercard, SWIFT) or reliant on outdated Automated Clearing House (ACH) networks. UPI shattered this model, democratizing digital transactions and driving unprecedented financial inclusion. Small merchants, from high-street retailers to roadside coconut vendors, now routinely use QR codes for ubiquitous, seamless mobile payments, making cash increasingly obsolete in urban centers. This success is quantifiable: in recent financial years, UPI volume surpassed that of global giants, establishing itself as the world’s largest real-time payment system by transaction count.
For the domestic fintech sector, UPI acts as a powerful accelerator, reducing the barrier to entry for innovative financial services providers. Since the underlying rail is free and open, competition focuses on user experience and value-added services, rather than proprietary network access. This model has led to the rapid onboarding of over 500 million previously unbanked Indians into the formal financial system, proving Nilekani’s contention that technology, when deployed as a public good, is the only viable mechanism for rapid, mass-scale societal transformation in developing economies.
Grandiose New Visions: Energy and Global Finance
Despite his age, Nilekani’s focus has shifted from stabilizing the state’s identity and financial functions to tackling complex, large-scale industrial systems.
One critical new initiative is the India Energy Stack (IES), where Nilekani serves as "chief mentor." India’s electrical grid suffers from instability, fragmentation, and disparate data sources held by numerous generation, transmission, and distribution companies. IES aims to apply the DPI playbook to energy, creating unique digital identities for every asset—from massive power plants and battery storage facilities down to individual rooftop solar panels and electric vehicles.
This digital layer is essential for creating a "smart grid." By standardizing data protocols and sharing real-time information on device characteristics, energy ratings, and usage, IES seeks to give grid operators an immediate, granular view of supply and demand. Crucially, this system is designed to facilitate bidirectional energy flow, enabling distributed energy resources (DERs) like residential solar rigs to easily connect to the grid and sell excess power. This move shifts the energy market toward decentralization and resilience, a trend that developed nations are struggling to implement due to legacy infrastructure limitations.
Even more ambitious is the proposed global "finternet." Recognizing that the principles of DPI—interoperability, open access, and trustless infrastructure—are globally applicable, Nilekani envisions the finternet as a decentralized financial backbone for global commerce, particularly aimed at the financially marginalized worldwide.
The finternet concept integrates the identity mechanism of Aadhaarization with distributed ledger technology (blockchain). This fusion would enable the tokenization of assets—not just traditional financial instruments like stocks and bonds, but also real-world assets (RWAs) such as property deeds, commodities, or even jewelry. Tokenization provides verifiable digital ownership, allowing individuals in emerging markets to use their illiquid assets as loan collateral or trade them easily, thereby unlocking vast amounts of previously trapped capital and expanding credit access to populations traditionally excluded by formal banking institutions. With 30 partners across four continents already engaged, the finternet represents a significant attempt to challenge the Western-dominated financial architecture by offering a public, open-source alternative.
A Contested Legacy: Privacy, Security, and Exclusion
The monumental success of DPI is inseparable from the intense, ongoing controversy surrounding its implementation. Centralized, biometric-linked databases containing the personal information of 1.4 billion people present inherent security and privacy risks. High-profile data breaches, such as the reported sale of over 800 million Indian records on the dark web in 2023, severely undermine public confidence, regardless of official reassurances that the 12-digit number itself is useless without biometric verification.
Expert analysis suggests the risk is not merely theoretical. While the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) insists that the Aadhaar number is inert, the practical application often bypasses the mandated biometric security. Due to bureaucratic convenience, the official Aadhaar document (the "Aadhaar card") has been co-opted as a proof of identity in itself. Activists highlight that this loophole allows for the creation of multiple, valid identity documents by simply manipulating residential or birth details, leading to identity fraud—a problem compounded by the government’s lack of transparent disclosure regarding the scale of these misuse cases.
Furthermore, critics emphasize the problem of exclusion. The efficacy of Aadhaar relies entirely on the accuracy and reliability of its underlying biometric technology. For populations whose fingerprints or iris scans are degraded due to manual labor, age, or environmental factors, the system can fail, leading to the denial of essential government services, including food rations and pensions. The Internet Freedom Foundation and similar watchdog groups argue that the UIDAI’s refusal to publish transparent data on biometric failure rates and subsequent exclusions makes mitigation impossible, creating a dangerous trade-off between efficiency and equity.
While Nilekani defends the system by pointing to the overwhelming need it satisfies—arguing that technology was the only way to overcome pre-existing dysfunction—the challenge remains ensuring that the "digital dividend" reaches the most vulnerable. Initiatives like the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), designed to dismantle the "walled gardens" of e-commerce giants like Amazon and Flipkart, have struggled to sustain momentum after initial financial incentives tapered off, suggesting that the goal of open interoperability sometimes conflicts with the inertia and market power of established corporate entities.
Global Soft Power and the Demographic Race
Despite the criticisms, the India DPI model is emerging as a powerful form of technological soft power. Delegations from numerous developing nations, eager to replicate the success in financial inclusion and bureaucratic efficiency, regularly visit Bengaluru. Global institutions, including the World Bank and the United Nations, are actively promoting DPI principles as a viable, affordable framework for national digital transformation in the Global South. The Gates Foundation has invested heavily in propagating this infrastructure model.
This global diffusion is strategically vital. As the world fragments into competing technological ecosystems—characterized by state control in China and corporate control in the US—India offers a third path: a publicly owned, open-source infrastructure layer designed for competition and inclusion, not monopoly.
For Nilekani, the final challenge is intrinsically linked to India’s future demographics. He views his work as a race against time to ensure that India’s vast young population—the much-touted demographic dividend—does not become a demographic disaster due to persistent economic exclusion and high youth unemployment. Building the foundational digital infrastructure is seen as the prerequisite for creating the millions of jobs necessary to absorb this growing workforce.
The tireless push for the finternet and the stabilization of the energy grid are not merely professional exercises; they are an urgent attempt to complete the groundwork for a globally competitive, inclusive India. As Nilekani himself acknowledges, the future is always under construction, and for the man who digitized a nation, the work of building that future simply cannot stop.