Dr Pramod Varma: The visionary who quit his own company to build Aadhaar, UPI, ONDC for India

Dr Pramod pioneered India's digital identity programme that has successfully covered nearly 1.4 billion people. He was also the chief architect for various India Stack layers such as eSign, DigiLocker, and Unified Payment Interface (UPI), all of which are now working at a population scale in India. He played an integral role in architecting India’s digital health infrastructure, vaccination and immunization infrastructure (Co-WIN & DIVOC).

He is currently the CTO at EkStep Foundation, a not-for-profit that helps build digital public infrastructure such as DIKSHA and ONEST networks in the education and skilling sectors. DIKSHA currently provides learning opportunities to 200+ million children and 10+ million teachers in India.

In addition, he is the Co-Founder of FIDE, and co-creator of the open-source Beckn Protocol. It is the base protocol for India’s new efforts such as Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC.org), Kochi Open Mobility Network, Namma Yatri, and ONEST.

Varma holds a Master’s and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science along with a second Master’s in Applied Mathematics. His interests include Internet-scale distributed architectures and intelligent systems. He is passionate about technology, science, society, and teaching.

The Aadhaar journey

Pramod quotes numerous anecdotes from his time building the world’s largest identity project, “There was a parliamentary discussion if Aadhaar is a card or not a card. And we were wondering if that is the real issue. But nevertheless it was a new idea. Two or three ideas were very, very new. No one has ever done it before, no one has thought about identity without border security and a citizenship control mindset. Sovereign identity was always associated with border protection, national security, who comes in? This is the first time somebody said no, identity is to survive, to just live. To join the economy, to join the formal system, identity for development, not identity for national security, was a very first, refreshingly first time anywhere in the world”.

He continues, ‘One thing we are very proud of is we never diluted the idea of security and privacy. For example, when we talk about the pen drive at the enrollment center, we wouldn't even save the data without public cryptography. That means by the time it went to the hard disk, it was already encrypted. So we used advanced techniques, knowing that India, the edges of India, is actually not a trust zone.”

“And privacy I think we were very clear that one day or another, as we digitize a society, people will start asking questions about what happens to my data? Who is protecting? Is there surveillance? Is it being sold? Does somebody else have access to data? You know all those questions are bound to come and should come in a democracy. And it came subsequently. But we were very prepared, very, very prepared for it. That extreme minimalism you know, four attributes, two optional fields and biometric two APIs really was the highlight,” Dr. Varma recalls.

A Decentralised world

Dr. Varma narrates a global trend shaping how society is operating, “ today in the world we are seeing a lot more decentralisation of execution, decentralisation of production, decentralisation of consumption. All this includes energy and everywhere. It was a very traditionally industrial model, it was produced in one place, distributed to the rest of the country. That's actually starting to hit the wall. You know, everywhere you will see now decentralised production, decentralised storage, decentralised consumption.

“So what is happening now we are seeing a trend of what we are looking for is an internet-like imagination where a set of protocols and standards like HTTP and HTML can hold a large decentralised network together and create economy of scale, because if everybody was silo then nobody scales, but scale together as a network topology like internet, and not as a platform topology. So that trend is playing out in every sector, every sector,” he said.

It’s decentralised because people are walking around with powerful devices, compute is on the edge. It’s important because anything centralized potentially can harm people and have resilience issues. Anything centralized potentially can get attacked” highlights Pramod. 

AI’s impact on India

Dr. Varma starts by sharing, “AI is going to be hugely beneficial for India. Partly somewhere, some sectors, it will be bad, but the majority of India is in a low performing blue collar, grey collar, agri environment. Given that much of India wouldn't even care if some high end programming jobs disappeared, we would care, probably.

AI is a continuum we are playing out and every once in a while you get a step function upgrade and at that time we go crazy as techies and entrepreneurs and say, okay, this has solved the world’s biggest problem. I think we are going to see AI playing out in what's called bringing the next 500 million people, or 300, 400 million people, into the transaction and interaction economy. For that you need voice, you need better interfaces, simpler mechanisms to reach and also significant cost reduction. The two areas if you want, if you are an Indian entrepreneur to think about, are AI for dramatic efficiency and dramatic improvement in user interface.”

Dr Varma signs off, “With traditional employer white collar job reducing, we'll have more entrepreneurs, a lot of micro-entrepreneurs that will drive the economy and they will need a lot more funding, a lot more tech support, environment support for them to go narrow, solve, solve, solve, solve and still be profitable. But not all of them will become 100 billion or 10 billion or whatever, but there will be a lot of 100 million, 50 million companies that emerge”. 

 You can watch/listen to the full episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Journey of Aadhaar's Chief Architect

10:45 - The Impact of Aadhaar on India

26:45 - India's Role as Global Leader in Technology

35:43 - The Role of AI in India

40:30 - Tips for Indian Entrepreneurs