Crumpled paper vs Covid certificate on cloud: Nandan Nilenkani on India’s digital transformation journey

Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder of Infosys and a key architect of India's digital identity system Aadhaar, has highlighted India's progress in digitising its healthcare system while speaking at the BT MindRush 2023 conference.

Nilekani noted that India has issued over two billion vaccination certificates, which are available on the country’s citizens' phones as well as on the cloud.

"Today India has issued over 2 billion vaccination certificates, both first phase, first low, second dose, booster and all that, and that's very, very, it's not very common that you know in India you get the vaccination certificate, it's on your phone, it's on the cloud, it's in DigiLocker," Nilekani said.

It is worth noting that the certificates are stored on the DigiLocker, a digital platform that enables citizens to store and access official documents, including Aadhaar cards, driving licenses, and education certificates. The certificates can be accessed through a unique identification number, making it easier for citizens to provide proof of vaccination status when required.

Nilekani highlighted the contrast between India’s approach of storing essential documents as compared to that which is prevalent across the world. He gave the example of vaccination certificates, which, in the case of Indians, are stored in the Digilocker, while many foreigners coming into India have to bring their vaccination certificate in the form of a “crumpled paper.”

"When foreigners come and they have this little crumpled piece of paper, you know, they start wondering what happened," Nilekani said.

The former chairman of UIDAI also noted that digital identity systems like Aadhaar have paved way for further innovation, like DigiYatra, UPI, etc.

"I think the benefit of digital systems like Aadhar it is that everybody can innovate on top of it," Nilekani said.

The co-founder of Infosys also shared his views around the privacy concerns that loom around Aadhar.

He said, “"If you're opening an account in a bank, the data is in the bank and the bank is under privacy regulations under the RBI. If you use it for a health application, it's in the health system, so it's all distributed. It's not like stored in one central place, that's when the risk is.”

"If you use it to open a bank account, the other system does not know what you did with it, and we call that as optimal ignorance. We don't want the system to know more than it should know, and so all these design principles have made it pretty secure from a privacy point of view,” he added.

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