DIGITAL INDIA HAS BEEN A SPECTACULAR SUCCESS

Nandan Nilekani, Chairman and Cofounder, Infosys and Founding Chairman UIDAI (Aadhaar), gives a bird's eye view of India's digital initiatives and how they will all contribute to smart governance. Excerpts from the video interview...

- Nandan Nilekani

Can you tell us what was the status of Digital India in 2019 and what kind of transformation happened during the pandemic era?

Many of the building blocks of Digital India had already been laid out in the last few years. During the pandemic you had to do everything digitally. You met people digitally, you did your work digitally, you ordered products digitally, you got your food delivery done digitally and so on. What the pandemic did was accelerate existing trends. Digital India has really been a spectacular success. For the first time we have things like the JAM trinity (Jan Dhan-AadhaarMobile). The mobile phone success is well known. We have over a billion phones and maybe 600-700 million smartphones. We have the cheapest data rates in the world that has allowed people to use unlimited bandwidth on their devices.

But we also had the Aadhaar project which I led for 5 years and today we have 1.3 billion people on Aadhaar. That's also the basis for linking bank accounts. There are more than 700 million Aadhaar-linked bank accounts. That provided the fundamentals for the largest cash transfer in the world. All these pieces of the puzzle had been laid in place. What the pandemic did was show the power of these kinds of tools. For example, the government was able to use the DBT (Direct Bank Transfer) to give funding to vulnerable population running into hundreds of millions. Essentially Digital India came in very useful and was strategic when the pandemic struck.

How do you look at the long journey of Aadhaar from inception to where it has reached today?