Investors are banking on Nilekani to restore Infosys' faltering culture

Nilekani's return as non-executive chairman is second time a co-founder has returned to help Infosys

With the Supreme Court ruling on the right to privacy, Nandan Nilekani, the czar of the Aadhar database that led to this case, would have been in the limelight for his opinion on the subject. Yet, this week, his credentials in conceptualising and building the Aadhar database are not the reason he finds himself the cynosure of all eyes.

Instead, it is what others expect of him that makes him headline news — to step into the breach at Infosys, the company he co-founded in 1981 and headed from 2002 to 2007, following the ructions caused by the abrupt departure of the IT giant’s first professional CEO. 

Nilekani’s return as non-executive chairman on Thursday marks the second time a co-founder has returned to help manage Infosys after N R Narayana Murthy did so in 2013 at the request of the board. Ironically, it is Murthy who has played the lead role in the exit of Vishal Sikka, his hand-picked choice. 

Nilekani, 62, has declined to answer questions on his plans for Infosys. But given the challenges he will be up against, it is fair to say that he will have less time to devote to the considerable philanthropic interests he has built with his wife, Rohini, since he stepped down from stewardship of the Unique Identification Authority of India in 2014 and relinquished political hopes after losing from the Bangalore South constituency in his maiden run as a Congress candidate in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.

His principal interests lie in education and information. For instance, he set up EkStep, to build an ecosystem of apps that will help students learn basic math skills involving “gamification” (basically using mobile games to teach concepts and improving them as they learn). The impulse for this came from the findings of the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) surveys, conducted by the NGO Pratham, which showed a majority of children even in class 5 or 6 lack basic math skills. 

His interest in urban governance, which he started as the head of the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF), has led to investing in a non-profit to build software to help municipal corporations go digital; the Indian Institute for Human Settlements — a think tank to understand, research and find solutions for India’s urban challenges. 

With Rohini, he has donated to the Economics and Political Weekly as well as to the Independent and Public Spirited (IPS) Media Foundation, which extends financial help to independent media companies.

By instinct, Nilekani is known to be a big picture man. He gave the prolific New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, the heading for his bestselling book, The World Is Flat, and certainly, his vision for Indian IT and its future has attracted global attention. In April 2015, for instance, Nilekani announced that India is seeing its WhatsApp moment in financial services. The combination of Aadhaar-enabled bank accounts and the unified payments interface would allow anyone to pay or collect even small amounts of money on their mobile phones, he predicted, which would disrupt traditional banks. 

That is yet to happen, of course, but his ability to tell a compelling story has powered him to the centre of India’s unfolding if controversial, digital revolution. Ironically, it was he who managed to convince Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the need to continue building on the Aadhaar database, recording the biometrics of over a billion Indians and catapulting India into its first major public discourse over the right to privacy, on which the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday.

Privacy activists have questioned the entire programme saying it impinges the rights of citizens and can be used by the government for surveillance. The Supreme Court is hearing cases on the validity of Aadhaar. The Thursday verdict of the constitution bench of the Supreme Court ruling that privacy is a fundamental right will have a bearing on the Aadhaar case. 

Nilekani, whose unshakeable affability masks a razor-sharp intellect, has weighed in on both sides of the arguments. He has argued that there should be a consent layer that allows users to own the data, which he claims Aadhaar has built in its design. He warns of “digital colonisation” — the domination of a handful of internet companies such as Google and Facebook that offer free services in return to leveraging user data to deliver advertisements.  And all of this data is not stored in India, but in the US with neither the user nor the Indian government any control over it, he says. 

In July, Nilekani launched a $100 million venture fund, The Fundamental Partnership, with venture capitalist Sanjeev Agarwal, to invest in long-lasting companies. 

He would know something about that, having been one of the six co-founders of Infosys in 1981 and contributed to making it one of India’s best known and, until recently, reputed companies. As he steps in again, his main challenge at Infosys will be to restore its corporate culture and bootstrap the company to the next level of IT services.