Good afternoon, sir. A warm welcome to the National Academy, sir.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Hi, sir. How are you? Nandan.
Sir, with your permission, shall we begin? There is a small event introduction. After that, I'll request both the panelists to get into the conversation with you, sir.
Good afternoon, everyone. It's a rare privilege to welcome you all to the seventh edition of the Priyan Lecture Series. The series reflects the academy's commitment to bringing officer trainees into direct engagement with eminent personalities who have shaped institutions and transformed governance. It is our distinct honor to welcome Sri Nandan Nilekani, sir, the architect of India's ambitious digital public infrastructure project. As we begin this edition of Priyan, we warmly welcome Sri Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder and chairman of Infosys and founding chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India. Miss K. Ganga, IAS officer of 1981 batch, retired and former deputy director general in UIDAI and also the financial adviser of the project. And Sri S. Alok, 1993 batch IAS officer. And all the distinguished senior officers of the Indian Audit and Accounts Department, all IAS officials, NAA faculty members, staff, and officer trainees of the 2020, 2022, and 2025 batches. As the founding chairman of UIDAI, Sri Nandan Nilekani led the creation of Aadhaar, an identity platform of unprecedented scale and ambition. In doing so, he helped establish the foundation of India's digital public infrastructure, transforming how the state establishes identity, delivers services, and reaches citizens. What makes this achievement particularly remarkable is that it was not merely the creation of a technological system but the building of a trusted public institution designed to operate at a population scale. Sri Nandan Nilekani was awarded Padma Vibhushan in 2006. He has been awarded with multiple awards during his distinguished career journey so far and has been recently named among the 100 most influential people in AI 2024 by Time magazine. Sri Nandan Nilekani's commitment to institution building was evident from the outset when Miss Ganga was invited to join UIDAI. She did so with the understanding that she would be part of building the institution itself. This reflected Sri Nandan Nilekani's recognition that systems of such scale must rest not only on technological excellence but on strong foundations of governance, credibility, and public trust. On behalf of the academy, it's our privilege to welcome and extend a respectful regard to Sri Nandan Nilekani. Sir, this conversation will be in two parts. I now request Sri S. Alok, National Academy of Audit and Accounts, to begin the first part of the conversation with Sri Nandan Nilekani.
Welcome, sir, to this virtual interaction. We are indeed very delighted to have you with us, and I'm privileged to introduce the National Academy of Audit and Accounts. This is the premier training institute for the Indian Audit and Accounts Service officers after they pass the civil services examination. Sir, the audience before you today comprises our officer trainees, senior leadership, and officials under the CAG of India. As we move towards IT auditing, we are excited to get your insights on digital public infrastructure and many other related issues. Sir, so the opening question to you is this: From being the co-founder of Infosys to chairman of UIDAI to championing the UPI and DigiLocker, what principles and values do you think drive large-scale innovations?
Thank you very much, Alok, and it's great to be here. I think I have been involved in this kind of large-scale transformation now for many decades. And I think first of all, your intent has to be very good in the sense you have to do it for the right reasons. If India has to transform, if India has to provide services and capabilities for a billion-plus citizens, if India has to grow economically strong and so on, it needs strong population-scale institutions to make that happen. And therefore, that's what inspired me to join the government in 2009 to be the founding chairman of UIDAI and all the other things that have happened. So I believe that technology, wisely used, can be a force of good, can accelerate development, can accelerate inclusion, and can make a difference to the lives of the common man and woman. So I think that's what really inspired me to do what I do. And it's really after beginning this project 17 years back, it really makes me feel happy that it's now widely used and it's actually making a difference to the lives of people. And that over the last several years, we have built layer and layers of capability on top of the original ID like UPI, DBT, and so on. And all these things have made a big difference to people's lives. So I think I'm driven by the need to bring in change but also in an institutional way. It's not just about doing it but about leaving behind an institutional structure. That's why when I set up the UIDAI, Ganga was one of the first persons. She was part of the founding team and she was very, very strategic to our organization to bring together not only the financial side but also the whole strategic thinking that we had.
Then come to this aspect of inclusion a little later. But talking about large-scale innovations, these are not possible without a very strong team. And in the context of Aadhaar and many other such big projects which you have steered, how did you do team building? How did you bring consensus? How could you blend diverse talent including some from the highest functionaries from the Government of India, sir?
Yes, I think that's a very good question because when I joined the government, I myself had never worked in government before. It was the first time in my life that I was working in the government and therefore I was not at all aware of how government works, how the government processes are, and so on. So I decided that I should assemble a team of people who are of the highest caliber from within the government and also across services because I felt that if I bring officers from different civil services, I will get different experiences and different vantage points that they have. So as you know, my DG and close friend Ram Sewak Sharma was an IAS officer from the Jharkhand cadre. Much later on, he became Chief Secretary of Jharkhand, he became IT Secretary, he became the TRAI Chairman. So he had a distinguished career. So he was the CEO. Ganga was like the CFO on the financial side and also designing a lot of things as a financial adviser. Then I had other officers apart from the IAS. I had people from the Indian Revenue Service, from Defence Accounts, from Railways, from the Indian Postal Service. So it was a very diversified group. I did it deliberately to create a much more whole-of-government approach to the project because this could not be done by just one arm of government. Also, I had a lot of private sector people too because a lot of the technological developments, I needed people from the private sector. So we had a private sector team in the group and I had to bring all these people from diversified backgrounds to work together to a common goal of building the transformation. So for me also, it was a good learning in team building, institution building, and getting people of very different backgrounds to work to a common goal.
Sir, your life and accomplishments offer a classic glimpse of learning, relearning, adapting, collaborating, looking ahead. Now I have many officer trainees sitting beside me in this room. Sir, all of them come with very good degrees. They have cracked the UPSC examination and some of them may think that's it. Now what advice do you offer to them considering that the learning ecosystem is changing very rapidly, sir?
Well, you know, cracking the exam is just the beginning, not the end. And I believe that one should live a life of continuous learning. We are in a world which is changing rapidly, dramatically, very volatile. We can see that every day, many things that we took for granted are no longer there. So it's a very, very different world. The pace of knowledge is increasing dramatically. Things like AI are coming which are disrupting the way we work and our fundamental value adds. So I think being a constant learner is very, very important, which requires us to be always curious about new things, about learning from different people and different sources of knowledge, combining them, and being ahead of the curve. So I think this is a great time to be in the Audit and Accounts Service. I think India is changing rapidly, growing rapidly, and the country relies on you to really make sure that the way the government is run, the way accounting is done, the way the money is spent are all very well taken care of. So I think it's a very good time to be in the service, but what you do will change every year because as things like AI and software come, many of the things that you do will be done by agents and other things. But what you cannot give, what you can do is what only human beings can do, which is really to figure out among all the various developments, spotting what is going wrong and so on. So I think human talent will always have a big role, but many of the things we did ourselves may be done by software agents. So things are going to change quite a bit, but I think by being on top of things, by being willing to learn, by being humble, and by being curious, that's the way to go.
Sir, coming to inclusiveness, sir, it's a lesson you have offered to the entire world, sir. So what is the architecture of inclusiveness? How do you make models work at scale, sir? How did you overcome the digital divide and ensure inclusiveness?
Well, inclusion was very much part of the thinking right from day one at Aadhaar, at UIDAI. And I'll give you a few examples. We wanted to... India had hundreds of millions of people who had no documentation whatsoever because they were born without a birth certificate. They were born in a village, nobody could go and get the birth certificate, and so on. Nobody saw the need for a birth certificate. And in many states, more than half the babies born had no birth certificate. Now this was all right if you lived your entire life in the same village, but as Indians became people who were migrating and coming to cities and so on, lack of an ID was a huge impediment. They could not get a job, they could not board a train, they could not explain to the policeman who they were, and so on. So fundamentally, ID became an impediment and we had to do this and give people who had no ID, IDs. And so we had to come up with innovative ways of allowing inclusion. For example, if people did not have a birth certificate, they could choose their date of birth. If people could use the name that they wanted. We said people could give an address that I live under the flyover. So we made a lot of things to make it very inclusive. But we said once you enter the system with this, then that becomes your source of truth. So if you come with a name, then that name is your name thereafter, or if you have a date of birth. So these are all very simple ideas and we limited also the fields only to name, address, date of birth, and sex, and so on. That was one example. Second is we had to solve the problem of uniqueness. How does only one person get only one number? Because there's no root document like a birth certificate. So if the same person enrolls under multiple numbers, multiple names, then it'll game the system. So we came up with the idea of biometric deduplication which nobody had done at the scale of 1.4 billion people. So there was a lot of technological innovation there to make that happen. But we wanted to make sure that everybody was included, which is why we set up an enrollment system which went to 1.5 million enrollments per day across 35,000 enrollment stations. In every nook and corner of the country, there was somebody doing enrollment. So a lot of these things was to make sure that nobody was left behind and this was a very important design criteria for us that inclusion was the name of the game.
Sir, you have been talking about diffusion pathways, sir, some 100 of those, and you have also said that if diffusion doesn't happen, there will be serious consequences. Could you please elaborate on that?
Yeah, so this was in the AI summit two weeks back, Alok, and basically I was talking about the fact that this AI diffusion, if it does not happen, then you will have, as it is, you have a society of inequality and digital divide and all that. AI has the potential to make it even worse. And if the only use of AI is creating addictive technology or job loss, then people are going to turn against it. And I gave the example of globalization. One of the reasons why the whole globalization has sort of gone into a different gear is because many middle-class people in the West felt that they were not benefiting from globalization. And now if the only argument of AI is that it'll reduce jobs and every white-collar person thinks his job is under threat, then they will all turn against AI. And the only way to really, if AI is as good as it is, you should use it for good things, to help farmers improve their farming, dairies to improve the way they look after their cows, children to learn better. So my argument is that positive, good use of AI is critical for AI to be acceptable to society. That was my argument. And 100 diffusion pathways is a way to think about 100 different areas where AI can be used at scale.
Thank you, sir. May I now invite Ganga ma'am to carry forward the conversation.
Hi, Nandan, it's great to be talking to you at this forum. One thing we've been seeing is that in the past, administration was mostly being done through physical files and a lot of decision-making and approvals have to go through, meander through a long chain of command and a lot of face-to-face interaction. Now with digital public infrastructure, we have actually changed that quite a bit. And my question to you would be that do you think that the bureaucracy at all levels, not just at the higher senior management level, right from the clerk and the babu below, do you think they have accepted this change of scenario wholeheartedly? And do you also think that this will stay or they'll find some ways of being relevant again in some other way, in a positive way, or also it could be in a negative way. They could do things to systems which will negate all the efforts of technology. What do you think about this?
So I think, Ganga, if I look at the last 17 years when we started, I think definitely people have accepted this. It's now become a way of life. I mean, look, the fact is that if you remember during COVID, we created an infrastructure for which Ram Sewak was running at UIDAI where everybody got a vaccination certificate instantly and that vaccination certificate could be kept in their DigiLocker or it could be printed out or it could be kept on their phone. And the vaccination was portable, so you could do your first vaccination in your village, next vaccination you can do in the city. No other country had built that and Indians took to that very well. And in fact, when foreigners came here and they showed some small hand-printed note saying they got vaccination, our chap said, 'What kind of a certificate is this?' So I think Indians have taken to this well. I think today when I enter the airport, I just show my ID on my phone and that's perfectly acceptable. You know, millions of people are going through DigiLocker. So I think both the people have of course taken to technology well, but even the system, the government, the security guard, the chap at immigration, everybody has, I think, taken to digital very well. Now obviously, being digital does not mean that it puts people out of doing work. I mean, there's many things to do. You're raising the level of work. Judgment becomes more important and so on. So it's not that it is making people out of work, just raising the work they do. So I would say by and large, people have accepted, the government employees have accepted technology very well. People have definitely accepted for sure.
Yeah, that's true. The people have definitely accepted that, I think is very obvious. It's just that one feels that again, you know, those who are used to paper systems and those who are used to being important and trying to render services face-to-face, whether they are happy to become faceless and...
No, I don't think it's becoming faceless. I think, see, the thing is, the scale of India, we actually have a bureaucracy which is quite small compared to the scale of India. So we have to serve 1.4 billion people, 140 crore people. So if you can serve most of them through paperless means, then you have more time to spend on those who are the exceptions to that paperless system. So I think there's no shortage of work just because you have streamlined one part of it.
Right. In this kind of a scenario where more and more digital public infrastructure, most of the state governments for instance are also becoming very, I mean, their governance systems have all become highly done on technology platforms itself. So in this kind of a scenario, what do you think the IAS officers, what kind of advice would you give to them as to how they play their role? What do you think they should be doing?
Well, I think they will have to be both good at auditing in a purely paper world because there will still be a lot of systems across the country which will be on paper, and some which will be purely digital from day one like what we built, or systems that are partly paper and partly digital. So in their work as they go around the country doing all their job, they're going to find all kinds of patterns. So they have to be very flexible in what they see. Also, I think finally, it is about seeing whether processes are being followed, if money is being spent wisely, if fraud is happening. These are all things that you learn from experience and being able to... it's a skill that you learn by doing it over and over again. So I think they will learn from experience and they also should be, in my view, proactive in suggesting improvements, which they do. So I think your audit reports are not only about auditing what is going wrong but also in suggesting, and given their diverse experience, suggesting how things can be done better because we have to think of government as a continuously improving organization. It's not a static organization where we just implement rules that some, you know, designed in British Raj or something. It's about continuously evolving because our citizens are evolving. They are changing. We are becoming a more literate country. Incomes are going up. We are bringing a lot of people into the common society. So lots of things are happening and the IAS officers have to be aware of this and see how they can play a role in improving the quality of life for the citizen which can come from better systems which they can recommend.
Yeah, that actually was what you said is bringing me to my next question. We auditors are generally first told to look for compliance to all the rules and regulations. So even when technology platforms are being built, when lots of digital public infrastructure is being created, we are looking to seeing whether all the rules and regulations are embedded in the software properly, that the processes are all intact. But at the same time, our auditors are also told to examine whether the very basic objectives for any scheme, any thing which is set up, whether that is being met or not. So sometimes there are, despite all efforts to build in all the rules and regulations into embedding them into your code and your software, we still find cases of exclusion and inclusion, wrongful inclusions and wrongful exclusions, right? So in such kind of systems, what do you think that the auditors should do? I mean, what signals should they look for to know that something is going wrong in what has been built?
Yeah. So I think it's a very important point. I think obviously, when you have systems, you have deterministic systems that do every time what they're supposed to do. But if they're badly designed or if they have loopholes, then the outcomes that were meant for that system do not happen. So you both have to look for compliance and also for what are the gaps that are there which are preventing them from giving the desired outcomes. And so we have to look for both. And I think in the world of AI, it is going to become even more complicated, Ganga, because AI is non-deterministic, so it can give different answers at different times, right? So I think we have to prepare. This generation of auditors are going to be in the career for the next 30 years, that they will have to also understand as government systems start using AI, you'll have the same issues, you know, what are they doing and what happens if they give wrong answers and so on. So there's a lot of stuff ahead as we go forward.
Is there some scope or need to build in some kind of discretion and flexibility also into such kind of systems?
Yes, I mean, look, it's a balance. You obviously want some basic compliance of protocols and processes that are non-negotiable. And they have to do with making sure that everybody's included, making sure that inclusion and exclusion is handled properly, making sure that the financial help, because at the end of the day, you are the trustees or the custodians of public expenditure and making sure that public expenditure is done in the right way. So that we cannot walk away from those things. But beyond that, I think if the requirement to meet the needs of citizens is much more nuanced, then you may need to allow some kind of discretion. So I think it's, but these are balances that you have to figure out as you go along.
Right. Right. Yeah. So also I was just wanting to understand that when the auditors are looking at this, like trying to look at whether the basic objectives have been met, whether the rules and regulations are all intact, and they find something, the system is not delivering, let us say, all the time correctly as it were meant to be. I mean, any kind of suggestions as to how they should look for what went wrong, whether it is the policy, whether it is in the implementation, or whether it's in just the designing of the platform itself?
Oh, absolutely, Ganga. I think root cause analysis is very important because, you know...
So some kind of suggestions as to how they can look as to what went wrong, I mean, because...
It seems simple to say that this went wrong, but point responsibility...
No, I think root cause analysis itself is a technique which we have to teach. That when you do the auditing of a system, being able to figure out what is broken, you know, whether it's the process, whether it's the goals, whether it's whatever, I think is a very important skill that auditors will have to have. I'm not saying they don't have it, I'm saying this will become more important in the future as these systems become more complex and AI-enabled and all that. So definitely we have to make sure that there is a way to figure out what is going wrong. So this diagnostic capability is very important.
Yeah, that's right. But also, the systems which are put in place, government takes time for them to make changes and constantly they have to keep making changes. So even the auditors have to be constantly looking out for why the institutions, why the governance systems have made certain changes and try to understand whether they were warranted or not warranted. So in that context, what do you think about, like for instance, from your experience of what Aadhaar we started and what Aadhaar is today, they have brought about some changes in the processes. I mean, sometimes it looks like they've become more rigid or more rule-bound and introducing new checks and balances. What do you think, I mean, necessary, not necessary?
No, no, it's inevitable. I think in a live government system over, I mean, now we're talking about a 17-year journey, you know, and everybody, and the number of officers working on this has changed some five times, so institutional memory keeps getting reset. I think we tried as far as possible to streamline the Aadhaar system not only for that day but for the future, which is, remember, we put a lot of things in our principles, in our documents. But you know, the world is changing and there's something which, you know, somebody comes in with a different point of view, then something can happen. But I would say by and large, if I look at the systems we have put in, by and large they have stuck to their original mission and value. And I recently met with the current Director General of UIDAI and he was telling me what all they were doing and he was thinking about, you know, in the right way about the future in the right way. So I think the fact that we have had a succession of officers and leaders, and by and large, I would say much more than many systems, the fact that they stuck to the knitting of Aadhaar is actually a credit to the way we govern.
