# Founding Chairman, UIDAI (Aadhaar)

Source: https://startwithidentity.com/experts/nandan-nilekani/
Last updated: 2026-09-21
License: content by Start with Identity. Cite the source URL.

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## Bio

Nandan Nilekani co-founded Infosys and left it in 2009 to serve as founding chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India, with cabinet rank, through 2014. UIDAI built Aadhaar, which now covers over a billion people.

Profile built from public government, company, and press records.

## Where their work shows up

Aadhaar is the largest identity system ever built and the most contested. It demonstrated that population-scale biometric enrolment and authentication is technically achievable and financially viable, and it generated the serious objections that any such system attracts: exclusion when authentication fails for someone with worn fingerprints, function creep as more services require it, and the concentration of risk in one national database. Both halves of that record inform every national scheme since. See [digital IDs by country](https://startwithidentity.com/digital-ids/) and the [regulations hub](https://startwithidentity.com/regulations/).