Minus One Nandan Nilekani | On Building Digital India, and the Next Population-Scale Opportunity
Dec 4, 2025
Nandan Nilekani, an influential Indian entrepreneur known for architecting Aadhaar, shares his insights on leveraging AI for social impact across India. He discusses the intricacies involved in Aadhaar's creation for 1.4 billion people and emphasizes the importance of curiosity and expert vetting for impactful projects. Nandan envisions a million startups in India by 2035 and highlights the potential of AI in areas like agriculture and education. He advocates for a digital energy grid and open networks to facilitate commerce, driving innovation and ease of doing business.
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Bulletproof Ideas In Your Head First
- Nandan Nilekani first bulletproofs ideas mentally and only then commits to execution in the real world.
- He builds a clear endgame map before plunging into large projects to ensure plausibility and paths to success.
Building Aadhaar: Rapid, Massive Engineering
- The Aadhaar team built version one in 14 months and designed enrollment for 1.5 million IDs per day.
- They created 35,000 simultaneous enrollment stations, 100,000 operators, and offline quality controls across India.
Deduplication At Uncharted Scale
- Unique deduplication at population scale required unprecedented parallel biometric matching overnight.
- They architected thousands of servers and parallel processing to handle hundreds of trillions of comparisons.