Nandan Nilekani: the IIT engineer who built Infosys and Aadhaar

From Bengaluru to IIT Bombay

Nandan Nilekani was born on 2 June 1955 in Bengaluru. After school he earned a place at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, where he studied electrical engineering. He has stayed attached to the campus: years later he paid to rebuild the hostel where he had lived as a student.

His first job after graduating in 1978 was at Patni Computer Systems in Mumbai, where he worked under N. R. Narayana Murthy. Three years later, in 1981, he was one of the seven software professionals who left to start Infosys.

“Wealth comes with huge responsibility and is best deployed for the larger public interest.”

— Nandan and Rohini Nilekani, Giving Pledge statement, via Business Today

Building Infosys

Nilekani served on the Infosys board from the company's founding and held a series of roles there: chief operating officer, then president, and from March 2002 to June 2007 chief executive officer and managing director. After that he became co-chairman of the board.

Infosys grew in those years from a small Bengaluru firm into one of the world's largest IT services companies, listed on NASDAQ in the United States. The company's own press release notes that it had more than a hundred thousand employees in over fifty offices worldwide by 2009.

In 2006 the President of India, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, presented him with the Padma Bhushan. In 2009 he published Imagining India, a book about the ideas that could shape the country's future, and spoke about it at the TED conference.

Aadhaar: an identity for every resident

In 2009 Prime Minister Manmohan Singh invited Nilekani to lead the new Unique Identification Authority of India, in the rank of a cabinet minister. The Infosys board accepted his resignation effective 9 July 2009. The Times of India called it the biggest move from the private sector to government in living memory.

Leaving Infosys was not a small step. The board's statement thanked him for his service as a co-founder, chief operating officer, chief executive, managing director and co-chairman. N. R. Narayana Murthy, then chairman, said the company would accept his absence with a sense of duty to a larger cause, but with deep sadness at losing one of its most illustrious sons.

The authority's job was to give every resident of India a unique identity number. That system became Aadhaar. He led UIDAI until 2014, and in August 2017 he returned to Infosys as non-executive chairman of the board.

In 2017 he and his wife Rohini joined the Giving Pledge, promising to give away half of their wealth. He had earlier set up the Indian Institute for Human Settlements to work on the problems of India's cities.

The skills and habits that made the difference

The first is explaining. The writer Thomas Friedman called him a great explainer, and his TED talk breaks India's future into four kinds of ideas. Engineers who can make complex systems simple to others get to lead them.

The second is thinking in systems. Running Infosys meant organising a hundred thousand people across time zones; Aadhaar meant an identity number for every resident of the country. Both are engineering problems at national scale, and his IIT training in breaking big systems into parts served him in each.

The third is a sense of responsibility. In their Giving Pledge statement, the Nilekanis wrote that wealth comes with huge responsibility and is best used for the larger public interest. He left a comfortable position at a company he had built to take a government job because he believed the problem was worth it.