India to lead in frugal engineering, AI to resolve real issues: Nilekani

Infosys Chairman Nandan Nilekani says India will be the hub for applying AI and frugal engineering, citing Aadhaar, UPI and small language models as key to mass-scale adoption

Infosys Chairman Nandan Nilekani on Friday said that  India will be the source of applying artificial intelligence (AI) and frugal engineering to solve real-world issues, asserting that it was critical for mass adoption of any technology like AI. 

The application will be across three verticals, companies having their global capability centres in the country and building AI transformation programmes which cuts across the parent enterprise, IT service providers assisting their clients on their AI transformation journey and digital public infrastructure which is the foundation for AI capabilities. 

“If a farmer in Bihar is able to speak into his phone in his version of Hindi and gets real time information from his agent on best farming practices and market access, then we have done it,” Nilekani said at an event hosted by Walmart Global Tech, the technology arm of the world’s largest retailer. 

Nilekani said that India gives companies the opportunity to innovate at scale. He cited the examples of Aadhaar, India’s unique identification programme, and UPI payments, the largest real time payment system globally under the National Payments Council of India (NPCI). “The idea of Aadhaar was that everybody should have a digital ID, which shall be the entry point of everything. For UPI, it was to create a population-scale transaction with frugal engineering which was inclusive and provided an equal opportunity for all to participate. It is interoperable, scalable, and privacy protected,” he said. 

For Aadhaar, he said, the real innovation lay in the minimalistic design with four identification fields. That helped create scale in a system which had to be equipped to enrol about 1.5 million people daily across millions of stations. 

“The UPI and API design were both of a single page. Simplicity of design gives you scalability,” explained Nilekani.

He reiterated that large language models (LLMs) will become commodities going forward with so many companies such as OpenAI, Meta, Google, Anthropic, Mistral and Deepseek building those in the US and China. 

“They will become faster, better and cheaper. But for India, it will be better to make small language models (SLM) which are cheaper. We should train them to provide the AI experience,” Nilekani said. 

Walmart’s chief technology officer, Suresh Kumar, said the retailer remains deeply invested in India and sees it as a place of great talent and innovation hub. His comments come even as the company cut about 1,500 jobs earlier this year across its technology unit, e-commerce fulfilment centre and advertising segment which also impacted the India centre.