AI, India & the Speed of Light — Nandan Nilekani's Bold Vision at Raisina | Rational Thinker

Welcome, welcome. Good evening to all distinguished delegates here for this dinner on tightening DPI and AI. I'm especially happy to welcome Nandan and Rohini Nilekani who will lead this discussion. My name is Arun. I'm a professor at Ashoka University, which is a private liberal arts university in Delhi. I'm also a non-resident senior fellow with ORF. My job here today is to really be the moderator of this dialogue. But also to sort of set the scene because I understand from the list that we have been given that many of our distinguished colleagues here come from their respective policy planning divisions of foreign ministries from your respective countries. We of course have significant participation in the room from the private sector, but also from civil society. So there's a good mix, but I'm conscious that this is a crowd that leans more towards the international relations arena as it were, as is expected with a forum like the Raisina Dialogue. So my goal for the next 2-3 minutes, please allow me to speak for a few minutes to introduce Mr. Nilekani and also Nandan and also introduce him in a way that hopefully contextualizes some of the discussions that we would like to have with you and to also perhaps set the scene for some of the things that we would like to hear from you about things that we as India should learn and maybe some of the developments that you have been following that are happening in India and in Asia in other countries in other economies of the world where digital public infrastructure is also really taking off.

Mr. Nilekani, Nandan is instantly recognized as one of the seven co-founders of Infosys. I don't think even to this crowd Infosys needs any special introduction. It is a consulting and offshore innovation giant that truly changed the way India thought about software and the digital world and the world thought about India and India in the digital world. So I'm going to divide my introduction and also sort of artificially segregate Nandan's career into three phases. The first involving his co-founding of Infosys and the advancement of Infosys into the giant as it is today was an important geopolitical moment for us. The rise of Infosys roughly coincides with a period of the late '90s and the early 2000s. A time that was otherwise marked by extremely frigid relations between India and the United States. 1998 was the year that the Clinton administration in the United States imposed sanctions on India following the second nuclear test by India in Pokhran. So it was very much a period characterized by minimal government-to-government engagement and an atmosphere of frigidity following the nuclear test. Infosys was among the wave of companies that broke through the bilateral relationship and offered India for the first time and also the United States a template that allowed for business to lead political relations and in fact guide the future template for one of the more important bilateral relationships that we have. The role that Infosys and other companies played to troubleshoot what were acutely relevant and time-sensitive concerns, I don't need to introduce or talk about the Y2K crisis to many of you in the room. But the role that Infosys and other companies played to troubleshoot the Y2K crisis in the United States and other jurisdictions of the world essentially broke the ice between India and the United States. And this I think Nandan would concede was not by design but by circumstance. But it's an important circumstance that led Indians at least to understand for the first time that business and societal relations, especially person-to-person relations can truly guide and transform an important and transformative geopolitical relationship.

The second phase of Nandan's career, I think it does not begin in 2017, but 2009 was when he was appointed the chairperson of the Unique Identification Authority of India, UIDAI. UIDAI was the now statutory body that helped institutionalize Aadhaar. Aadhaar was conceived as a biometrics-driven technology to address one of the acute governance problems that India faced for the longest time, which is that of identification of beneficiaries of public benefits and utilities. Plugged in most directly with the public distribution system, PDS as we call it in India. Aadhaar transformed the landscape of state-society relations by more effectively identifying the deserving beneficiaries of many state schemes both at the federal level and also the state level. So it's universally adopted in India. And of course you are more than welcome to ask Nandan about Aadhaar either from a technological perspective or from a policy perspective. But this identification problem that Aadhaar cracked in some respects, which is sort of institutionalized into the UIDAI setup, was also an important moment considering what was happening in international relations at the time. In the middle '90s and the early 2010s there were a couple of realities that were beginning to be realized by the states. One, states are the primary unit of international relations, but the debates on the sustainable development goals and the Millennium Development Goals reached a crescendo at that point and the SDGs and the MDGs were nothing but a reflection of the reality that states were accountable to their people but had not done enough to advance their socio-economic needs. The second development that was happening around about the same time particularly in the 2010s was that states were sovereign until they were not. You had a number of states that were characterized fairly or unfairly as failing or failed, their primary problem stemmed from their inability for reasons of capacity that had to do with history, legacy of colonialism, entirely just reasons, but ultimately to do with a lack of capacity to address the socio-economic needs of their citizens. And if you notice, it used to be the case that the countries that did not have this governance capacity to address the needs of their citizens, those are the countries that also had incursions of sovereignty. Sometimes there were overt incursions of sovereignty or sometimes their sovereignty was taken away by a thousand cuts. And so this development happened at a time when India was step by step modestly bolstering its own sovereign capacity and it is a big country. So this was a progressive measure whereby we were able to advance our state capacity primarily in the business of identifying and targeting beneficiaries of state schemes.

The third phase of Nandan's career if I can sort of frame it in the context of international relations is the work that he has done along with volunteer groups to set up what is called India Stack. And India Stack is a set of what are called application programming interfaces. APIs are nothing but lines of code that allow software to talk to other software. So you use an API developed by Amazon if your enterprise is running on Amazon Web Service, you use an API if you are an app developer who wants to be hosted on Google Play or iOS Store. But Nandan and his team developed India Stack, these series of APIs which include the most famous of them, I'm sure you've heard in your brief time in Delhi, is the Unified Payment Interface. This wildly successful and popular payment gateway interface that is used by millions of people and has millions of transactions every day. The innovation and the point of difference between how APIs were traditionally seen by Big Tech and how this was being developed in India by Nandan and his team at that time was whereas APIs were seen as developments leading towards a walled garden meaning if you were at AWS, you would always be at AWS. If you were in Google Play or iOS, you would essentially be beholden to a set of terms that were dictated by Apple or Google. APIs in India for the purpose of at least these public utilities and hence the name digital public infrastructure was essentially developed to create interoperable playgrounds if you want to call it that. Interoperability is today baked into the Indian digital ecosystem at least in the critical sectors. And the goal of such interoperability is to not keep foreign players out. Some of the most successful players in India's critical sectors such as payments have been foreign players, but to ensure everybody has a level playing field. And the idea is to break down in some respects the walled garden that we were seeing at that time pop up at least incrementally in different parts of the world. This is the third and I think the final phase of what I want to file as I describe it. I'm sure Nandan has many more innings left to play, but I want to cap it off by saying the work increasingly of Nandan and Rohini has turned towards artificial intelligence and you have already been baptized as it were to many conversations on AI in the one day that you've been here at the Raisina Dialogue and they have independently and jointly incubated several institutions and non-profit entities that use AI in sectors that adequately need addressing in India and still have a long way to go including education, health care, and so on. And so the final message that I want to say although I present a view of there were things happening in the international relations scene that India seemed to have come ahead of, I think nothing could be further than the truth. It just so happened that Nandan has been a key figure on many technological developments that have I think we can say with some humility placed us ahead of the curve especially on things that are important to you such as sovereignty and interoperability. And the hope is that we can have a fruitful discussion on how some of the DPI and AI leaning DPI today can help you embellish some of those themes that are important to you from a policy planning or foreign policy perspective. So with that brief introduction forgive me if I have spoken too long, I want to hand it over to Nandan to speak for a few minutes after which we will have open discussion. Thanks.

While you chew on that and also your food, let me start Nandan with a question because I think I mentioned to you that many of our colleagues here today are from the policy planning division of their respective foreign ministries. And one of the concerns that came up in one of the early sessions today is we can creatively develop uses for artificial intelligence, but we're still living in a world where there are these two powers who have a great deal of control over supply chains. And so, how is India thinking about deploying these use cases while navigating some of the challenges that invariably associate with you've heard what's happening with Anthropic and Open AI, and also at the infrastructure level?

Perfect. And this is also an issue that I'm happy that he brought it up that is of concern to a lot of our colleagues who are concerned about sovereignty. And the basic argument that you see not just from Nandan, but some of his colleagues that I have had a chance to interact with, it's fine to say that you invest in lower levels of the AI stack and perhaps you should. There is an argument for that, if it is possible. But, as long as you build use cases, it is possible for you to once strategically orient your economy towards those use cases, develop, advance, even if the use cases change. And when there is no vendor lock-in, there is no vendor lock-in because you're ultimately driven by the clarity of purpose in regard to your policy planning. Of course, there may be market factors and also geopolitical factors that sometimes create lock-in scenarios. But, I think we are at a point of time, and I'm specifically looking at my European colleagues, where we are acknowledging a bit more the challenges of being locked into certain technologies. We have one question here. Ma'am, please. Just introduce yourself. Yes. Of course.

Hi, my name is Anna Tonkel. I come from New York, and I'm not on the policy planning side, I'm on the private sector side. I run my own company called Sustainable Impact. I'm an entrepreneur. And increasingly my work is focusing more and more in the space of accelerating consequential innovations and especially in the deep and the clean tech space. And so, some of the broader themes that I'm seeing Mr. Nilekani, I think we're on the cusp of mass adoption for fusion energy. There will be breakthroughs within the next 5 years or so in fusion energy production and converting this to commercial space. On the other side, we're looking at BCI, the brain computer interface technologies that will allow at the consumer level people to control essentially computers with their thoughts. And so, as I reflect on an excellent introduction that was done on your illustrious career, I can't help but wonder, when you looked at mass adoption, so you were in charge of creating trust in Aadhaar and in many systems that required complex explanations for people who probably would not have had these before, how do you ultimately create on a societal level trust in new systems and create inherent buy-in and understanding of things that are not familiar, that have, as you've said, many positive but also negative drawbacks? And how do you do this across different cultures? So, it's maybe a bit of a more on the philosophical front, but I'm curious if you also have any practical reflections from your experience.

Hi, I'm Charlotte from North Star. Live in Australia. I'm also a private sector. And actually, my question was very similar to yours. So, great kicking us off. Nandan, I'm really curious to hear from you in addition to this question around change adoption, which we see to be a challenge in almost every industry with human behavior shift. I'm curious to hear what do you observe in other leaders having sort of being capable to horizon scan and see problems and challenges that aren't yet here. To be able to envision and create and innovate solutions that aren't yet available. What do you see other leaders could be learning or really need to start stepping into in order for us to really face the challenges that are coming down the pipeline next?

Thank you. My name is Steen Har. I'm based in Paris, but I'm going to speak under my previous capacity and I was the managing director of the Better Than Cash Alliance. India has really become the leader of the world in terms of not only technology, but inclusion. So, really looking at technology for inclusion and really put India on the map as the leader of the world. And you personally have also led this. So, it's not only India, but you personally and both of you as you know, your personality by taking time to inspire other countries. And having worked with 30 countries in the global south, many of them said, 'Well, if India can do it, I can do it.' And so that inspired because it allowed countries to project themselves with a development model that was not a Germany model or a Sweden model, but an India model. So, a model from the global south. But, very often when I was speaking to government officials in those countries, they said, 'If India can do it, we can do it. However, we don't have the talent that you just mentioned. India is a powerhouse of brainpower, of smart people, it's the Silicon Valley of the world, the biggest Silicon obviously.' So, how do you gap the talent? How do you bridge the talent gap in places like Ethiopia, like Senegal, like Mauritius, like Mozambique?

Thank you. I think I might be the first questioner from the public sector. I'm Song Han-de, director general for policy planning at the Korean Foreign Ministry. I was wondering what your perspective might be on the ongoing debate within Washington about the wisdom of selling H200 chips, Nvidia's chips, or advanced chips to China. The debate taking place obviously between whether or not the country should seek to make China continue to be dependent on US-based chips or whether it would be wiser to curtail altogether and curb the exports of advanced chips to China. Where do you sit on that argument, the debate between the wisdom of enhanced chips?

Thank you very much. Ruben Diaz Plaza, head of the policy planning unit also at NATO headquarters. Thank you very much for the invitation. And it's been really very enlightening to listen to you, sir. I had over the years heard about this India stack and what you've been building here and it's really truly a privilege to hear it from you in this sense. Being of course from the public sector, from the public policy planning variety, I am struck by the larger governance nature of this issue. And when I look at what China for instance is doing on smart cities and exporting its technologies through the means of technology but also exporting a governance model. I sort of see there are elements, this is not just pure technology. You're clearly also helping to export a way of dealing between the state and the citizen, between the way that the social contract and how it's embedded in the technology. And I'm wondering, you mentioned a number of countries that have been now picking up on your work and are taking it up. Is that geopolitically, is that ideological dimension a valuable point for them that they see what they like in the Indian model and not say the smart cities that you see in China?

I'm Kevin Baron. In my previous life I was a Pentagon reporter covering the military for 15 years and the biggest story in AI right now in the United States is Anthropic and the war with the Pentagon. And I wonder if what you're saying or how what you're saying applies to the world national security and exquisite technologies where there are only a few vendors who can provide the type of AI that the Pentagon or the CIA may need. You know, that the whole argument was Anthropic was the best and that's why they were the one and now they're not in a world where we have major political figures battling over a few companies who are the only ones able to provide what they provide.

I'm Rajiv Mantri. I work in the private sector in India. So my question was more on where does DPI go from here in the AI era? So you explained the different layers that enabled first identity layer, then the payments and the lending and then few other things which have now come on top of even that lending. So as we see more AI diffusion, what types of DPI could emerge? I guess we're looking at fifth, sixth, seventh derivative now in terms of if you look at the first foundational derivative as Aadhaar.

Can I ask a related question? What would if a country wanted to embark on this DPI journey, maybe they'll be, for lack of a better term, AI native. What should they do differently from India that learns from the drawbacks that we faced?

Hi, my name's Alexandra Sedal from the Australian Foreign Ministry. You, I have a question about scale because you're talking about millions and millions and millions of people. The countries in our region are often microstates. And I'm interested in whether what you propose that works for billions of people can work in countries that are micro in nature.

Yeah, I'll start by saying I'm not a techie, okay? So I firmly believe that we have to be technology enabled and not technology led. So my job in the team is usually to figure out whether that's what's happening or something else is happening because the technology can really be quite sexy and then you go down that rabbit hole. So my job is to look at people, citizens and look at whether are we really enabling more dignity, agency and choice in the design of whatever we try to develop for people. So we've come up with, so when you look at countries around the world, it's not about we are not a solution chasing problems. We're genuinely doing some forms of deep listening to say what are the problems that have to be solved and then whether these frameworks that the team has developed together with under Nandan's leadership over so many years, will they apply or not and whether incoming technologies like AI will really help to accelerate the diffusing of solutions as we call it. So there are three of our principles that we think we rely on. We try our best. One of them as I said is please be technology enabled always but not technology led. When you design for something, ask are you distributing the ability to solve or are you pushing for your solutions down some nice fancy pipes? Can people learn to be part of solving rather than buy or take your solution? We keep asking ourselves that. We're very careful to say we want to have a unified vision and it's true all of us want a better planet. We want better families. We want good things in life. So unified vision but not a uniform way of applying that vision because diversity matters and as we have seen, I've been doing work in the social sector for 35 years that problems are best solved in their own context. So how can we scale up diversity and contextual problem solving? And we have learned through many, many mistakes. Some other dinner we can talk about all the failures and mistakes but that when you're designing, when Nandan talks a lot about speed, scale and sustainability also that we have learned that small pilots, if they are designed very intimately, they always succeed as a pilot and fail when you scale. So we have learned that just scaling what works at the pilot is not what we are chasing now. We are designing for what works at scale and we find those are two very different things. So these are some of the lessons that we've learned but always in anything we do, whether it's education where we are seeing that AI is helping many of our children and it's true all over the world, children are falling back because the teacher in a class cannot pay attention to all 40 children and then you can't catch up. So we're giving people AI enabled tools to help them catch up on their own time at their own speed with a personalized tutor who doesn't scold them but allows them to see progress. That's working. It's being deployed in the state of Tamil Nadu and a couple of other states. We're doing work in agriculture which is very exciting where farmers will get in their hands, in their language answers to questions they ask because all over the world, agriculture is changing so fast that farmers who really knew what to do with the soil and the crop don't know anymore because of climate change and other things. So that's how we are looking at diffusing this technology that Nandan talks about. So if we keep our people in our countries first then we know what are the right problems to solve. Sorry, I sound like a non-techy social sector type which is what I am.

Yes, ma'am. I have a question. Have you stumbled upon the lack of political will in the countries where you suggested your technology? For example, with AI, there might be a risk of showing the corruption that is going on, for example, in agriculture and so on.

Yeah, I'm Nikos Tsafatin from Munich, Germany, Penguin Capital. The past couple of weeks there have been so many doomsday stories about how AI is going to kill the workforce across the entire industry. And you employ some 300,000 people at Infosys. What's your take on that?

Can I ask you somewhat provocative? What does AI mean for elites across the world? Elites, people who are representative of this room, heading important positions in foreign policy, domestic policy, heading companies, founders, think tanks, intellectuals. What does it mean for elites in terms of their say in the running of the international order?

I'm from the head of policy planning in Spain. I would like to ask one question. I was reading this book and certification about the platforms, how they start from being so open and doing a very good job and how little by little in social networks, search, and I don't want to mention by name but almost every platform at some point gets incentivized, meaning that commercial interests are more important. This information is quite, many of those social issues you were mentioning they were not taken into account. And if we think that the huge investment that those companies on artificial intelligence they need and they're not receiving huge income. Do you think that in a few months or years we are going to face the same problems for artificial intelligences? We are going to debate more about disinformation or commercial interest or the quality of the output of those is going to be worse. Thank you.

On the point of framing in policy debates. May I ask you to perhaps weigh in on one aspect of that framing which on the question of inevitability that we've seen and that's the notion of AGI, artificial general intelligence. I understand that amongst experts there's still a range of opinions on this and how likely it is. But in my sector policy makers and policy experts are already thinking about a breakthrough moment, a Sputnik moment of what arrival of an AGI capability could look like and what it would mean for geopolitics. Is that a credible framing? Is that perhaps always hype in your opinion?

Maybe I have time for one or two questions at the most. So, most recently at the AI summit that India hosted there were some claims or guess extrapolations that GDP growth will have to be rethought. And even almost like the current GDP metrics to measure growth are irrelevant with the advent of AI. So, could you extrapolate in terms of how you see the world in 10 years and how we're going to be measuring the economy? I know you hold the crystal ball and everything.

All right. Last, maybe I have time for last question. I'm really hoping somebody can push back on Nandan's optimism.

Okay, I'm going to jump in now. It's not a push back. It's actually I just wanted to say to you both thank you so much. It's been such generous offering this evening. I had a question for both of you. I find it fascinating talking to leaders across their journey how much one evolves their philosophy, right? If you could go back and look at yourself as leaders 10 years ago and really refine perhaps one to two key learnings that are now part of your leadership practice that you try to teach those that are your successors. What is it that's been most important for you that's refined in your leadership approach?

Thank you. I think because I work in the social sector, I think two things. One is in my philanthropy and together with our work as well, try to see as the Americans say where the puck is going to be? Yeah. So, what's coming, you know? And I think you do, I try to do that by deep listening to our partners. What's happening in society that is going to come and therefore through philanthropy or technology, how can we start to build a field so that more and more people can take cognizance of it? For example, I started work on longevity and mental health etc. The second thing is the one thing that has stood by me all through is if you start to entrust, you end up with more trust. And if you start with distrust, you tend to end up with even more distrust. So, I think as a leader if you are saying that we are, then you know, learn to trust other people. And don't be modest at all in your ambitions any of you. But be very humble yourself because it's very hard to make change whether you're in government or anywhere else. So, carry a pocket mirror and even men can carry mirrors even though they don't have purses because mirrors come in all sizes.

Ineffable. I'm an optimist. What else can I say? But it has been a long day, but that has not prevented you from asking some tough questions to the both of them. So, first of all, thank you to you for joining us for this dinner, sharing your insights and your valued inputs and queries. And thanks very much to Nandan and Rohini Nilekani for sharing your insights from your experience. And also crystal gazing occasionally, although you said that you don't do it, you did crystal gaze. And thank you, I should say, for the dose of optimism that both of you have given because I think sometimes the mood of geopolitics can sometimes overtake us. With that, I wish you a very good evening.