With digital capital, users have power to bargain: Nandan Nilekani

Almost 100% of Indians have enrolled themselves in the identification system of Aadhaar

Nandan Nilekani, chairman and co-founder of Infosys, said on Sunday that India’s unique digital public infrastructure empowered citizens with their own data and achieved formalisation of society at an unprecedented rate while balancing innovation and regulation.

Speaking on the last day of the B20 Summit India 2023, Nilekani listed out the initiatives by the Centre after 2014, such as the Digital India programme, Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDU), and Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which accelerated digitisation and inclusive banking.

“The years 2014-16 had all these momentous events that led to a massive transformation. Just to give you an idea, India went on to do in nine years what would have taken 47 years by traditional means. We went from being one of the most unbanked countries in the world to one of the most financially included countries, using technology,” Nilekani said.

India has showcased the open-source architecture of Aadhaar, UPI and other digital platforms like DigiLocker on every forum of G20 during the year of its presidency.

Nilekani, who is also the founding chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), said the Indian model of proliferating the digital public infrastructure at population scale would be “more and more ubiquitous” in the next few years. 

“What is fundamentally happening is that India is going from an offline, informal, low-productivity and multiple set of micro-economies to a single, online, formal and high-productivity mega economy. And, this is the trend for the next 20 years. This has been enabled by a new approach to solving society’s issues, which we call digital public infrastructure,” he said.

Almost 100 per cent of Indians have enrolled themselves in the Aadhaar system.

Nilekani said that the Aadhaar-enabled online verification system undertakes 80 million transactions a day. Around 700 million bank accounts are linked with Aadhaar.

The three-day Business 20 (B20) meet in Delhi is the official G20 dialogue forum with the global business community.

The event saw the participation of over 1,000 global business leaders and chief executive officers (CEOs) of major corporations.

“Data is the by-product of usage of digital platforms. Historically, in the rest of the world, data is used by companies to sell their products to you. It is also used by governments to track you. But India has invented a unique idea, which is how individuals and small businesses use their own data. Fundamentally, we have an architecture in India now, where every individual and business can use the digital footprint and use that differently,” Nilekani said.