Nandan Nilekani - Firing India’s Growth Engine

By Nandita Singh

Far from retired, he likes to grapple with big problems that challenge his thought process, take several years of meticulous execution, and have a high impact on economy and life of at least a few hundred millions at a go.

Nandan Nilekani, 61, the unanimous choice of the Jury for Dataquest Life Time Achievement Award 2016 is at leisure and busy at the same time, quite enjoying what he does at a re-defined pace. An illustrious technocrat career behind him, this co-founder of India’s IT behemoth Infosys, and chief architect of Aadhaar (unique identification), is not just one of the founding pillars of the ‘digital India ecosystem’ which will eventually use Aadhaar as a base platform for connecting citizens across service delivery platforms, but also continues to fuel fire in India’s growth engine and is set to have an impact on the next generation as well.

Ek Step, one of his latest passions, is a social enterprise co-founded in early 2015 with wife Rohini and Shankar Maruwada, a technologist who has been a part of his core team at Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) that developed Aadhar, and supported him during the last Lok Sabha hustings as well. Maruwada now bears the CEO responsibility at Ek Step.

EK Step is essentially, a not-for-profit, learner centric technology-enabled platform for literacy and numeracy skills for children below 10. It develops tools that marry digital technology with scientific learning to improve learning outcomes at the very basic language and numeracy skills and is expected to positively impact learning outcomes for over 200 million children in India. “By the age of 10 major part of the brain development is through. Intervention is required before that age barrier,” says Nilekani.

Going by the trend data published in the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), a non-governmental survey of rural India facilitated by Pratham Education Foundation, that tracks elementary education outcomes since 2005, it is quite clear that keeping children in school is not enough. In general, almost 50% of class V children in public schools are unable to read text meant for class II. Improving the learning outcomes is required in varying degrees, in a personalized manner, as language and arithmetic skills are dismal in spite of schooling. And Nilekani is harnessing his ability to think scale with Ek Step, which is now ready with a number of initiatives to be launched in 2016. “The overall approach uses smartphones/ tablets and is app-based with rules for building apps on Ek Step backbone enumerated and encouraged in the larger ecosystem ranging from sensing to content distribution,” informs Nilekani.

Scale Mastermind

Nilekani is no stranger to managing execution at scale. His mastery of scale had a play in taking Infosys global during his 28-year association with what is now the iconic IT major - Infosys. And, when he stepped down after his five-year tenure as chairman of UIDAI he had delivered on his commitment with 600 million Aadhaar enrollments. Today, Aadhaar enrollments stand at 940 million. The project has acquired a life of its own and is now popularly known as Aadhaar or India Stack.

India Stack is a complete set of open Application Programming Interface (API) for developers and includes Aadhaar for authentication, e-KYC documents (safe deposit locker for issue, storage and use of documents), e-Sign (digital signature acceptable under the laws), unified payment interface (for financial transactions) and privacy-protected data sharing within the stack of API. It enables and empowers technology start-ups and developers in creating businesses around this digital infrastructure allowing them to tap into the digital economy, opening to them opportunities in financial services, healthcare and education sectors among others. “Aadhaar stack allows you to build a lot of interesting applications. By December 2016, the full stack will be available to build products on top of it. This will leverage smartphone led economic growth,” says Nilekani.

A learning that he has internalized after his failure at the Lok Sabha elections is that he should play to his competitive advantage and focus on what he does best – that is, grappling with complex problems and conceptualizing solutions, getting all stakeholders in. And he has done quite a bit of that within the government already. His influence extends to a number of key defining projects.

As an honorary advisor to National Payments Council of India (NPCI) that works on the mobile payments interoperability he has worked on the Unified Payment Interface, slated to go operational in April of 2016.

He has been instrumental in the creation of Goods & Service Tax Network (GSTN), a not-for profit company set up by the government in 2013. GSTN is tasked with IT infrastructure roll out that connects center to all the states and brings efficiencies in the country’s indirect taxation system.

He has worked informally on a number of concepts and reports involving financial inclusion, electronic cash transfers… and others that take several years to show measurable impact.

Entrepreneur Forever

Nilekani is a volunteer at iSpirit (Indian Software Product Industry Round Table), which is a volunteer group led by Sharad Sharma. It evangelizes product development. Nilekani participates at iSpirit to further adoption of the Aadhar stack helping and mentoring companies that are building applications on top of this stack. “Over time, I would like to see the Aadhaar ecosystem grow with more and more applications,” he says.

Living and working at Kormangala, a locality in Bengaluru that bustles with start ups, has eased the time constraint for him. Close proximity of residence and office allows him to focus on projects in his own time and space. In his individual capacity, he is passionate about working with a few select start-ups that have transformational capabilities, in areas other than fintech or those related to Aadhar stack adoption. He invests in a few and mentors some start-ups to help them think scale. “How to use technology to organize India’s disorganized markets interests me,” he says talking about Fortigo, a start up that he recently invested in and how it is focusing on solving fundamental challenges in trucking and logistics space.

He also devotes a significant amount of time in issues related to urbanization. He contributes quite a bit of time and energy at the Indian Institute of Human Settlements (IIHS) which is literally a manifestation of Nilekani’s interest in building sustainable, habitable cities given that urbanization graph will be steeper in the coming decade and “the country needs to be ready,” he states sharing that IIHS will ultimately be a full fledged university and at this point it operates as an educational institute, think tank and a consultancy.

So, what does it take to realize ‘a billion aspirations’ of India?

“The toughest part is always the on ground execution and getting multi-stakeholders in,” he says. Nilekani has co-authored “Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations” along with Viral Shah where he advises using technology to radically re-imagine a new India that delivers on the aspirations of each of its citizens. “It’s doable,” he says more so now with technology being a great leveler.

He continues to do his bit to solve India’s grand challenges.

(Nandan Nilekani is the recipient of Dataquest Life Time Achievement Award 2016)