Nandan Nilekani
- Founding chairman of UIDAI from 2009 to 2014, with cabinet rank, creating Aadhaar
- Co-founder and chairman of Infosys
- Advocate for digital public infrastructure as a development model
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 and the regulations hub.
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