Nandan Nilekani: The Technocrat Who Rewired India’s Governance and Digital Economy

Few Indian business leaders have shaped both corporate success and national governance as profoundly as Nandan Nilekani. Best known as the co-founder of Infosys, Nilekani’s legacy extends far beyond boardrooms into the very architecture of India’s digital state.

After steering Infosys during its formative growth years, Nilekani took an unprecedented turn—entering public service to build the Aadhaar identity system as the founding chairperson of UIDAI. What began as a controversial experiment evolved into the world’s largest biometric ID system, enabling financial inclusion, welfare delivery, and the digital verification backbone for modern India.

Under his leadership, Aadhaar became the foundation for India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI)—powering platforms such as direct benefit transfers, e-KYC, and the fintech explosion that followed. Combined with innovations like UPI, this ecosystem dramatically reduced leakages, lowered transaction costs, and unlocked entrepreneurship at scale.

Despite criticism over privacy and state overreach, Nilekani consistently argued for technology as a public good, emphasizing transparency, open APIs, and minimal friction between citizens and the state. His vision helped position India as a global reference point for digital governance—studied by governments, multilateral institutions, and policy thinkers worldwide.

Today, Nandan Nilekani stands as a rare archetype:
a corporate builder, a policy architect, and a systems thinker whose work reshaped how a billion people interact with money, identity, and the state.