Turning capability into impact

HOW INDIA CAN DO FOR AI ADOPTION WHAT UPI DID FOR PAYMENTS

- NANDAN NILEKANI Co-Founder and Non-executive Chairman, Infosys

SING A BASIC feature phone, a Marathispeaking farmer can now consult a chatbot for advice on soil, seeds, and irrigation in his own language. In government schools across several states, an artificial intelligence (AI) tutor helps children learn to read in their mother tongue. The potential is clear. So is the challenge: how do you move from these promising examples to systems that work reliably, every day, across thousands of institutions with vastly different capacities?

India has answered this question before. Over two decades, we built shared digital rails through public-private collaboration that now reach more than a billion people. Aadhaar has authenticated identities over 164 billion times. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) processes around 20 billion transactions every month. These systems succeeded because they created trusted, reusable building blocks. A small bank could offer digital payments because the UPI existed. A rural hospital could verify identity because Aadhaar worked. We didn’t ask every institution to reinvent the wheel. We gave them the road.