When Nandan Nilekani graduated from IIT Bombay in 1978 with a degree in electrical engineering, he opted for a job. It was an interesting decision. In that era, if you were in your early 20s and armed with a degree from a top institute, going to the US for a Master’s was the norm. A large part of those who stayed back in India chose to do an MBA.

Nilekani did neither.

“Serendipity has played a big role in my career,” confesses the 67-year-old, sitting in his office in the lush green Infosys campus in Bengaluru. On the day of the entrance examination to the Indian Institutes of Management, he fell sick. “Plus, there was no money to go overseas,” says Nilekani, dressed in a blue blazer as he sits down for a chat with Business Today on a warm February afternoon. 

At that point, mini-computers were the buzzword. IBM had left India and Patni was reselling the computers of Data General (DG). “That meant a career in mini-computers was exciting,” he explains. It was a decision that would lay the foundation for a remarkable career spanning over 44 years and eventually pave the way for the great Indian IT story. The young man’s incredible journey was all set to start, one which would traverse the private sector, the government, making a huge societal impact and then returning at the helm of the company he co-founded. Nilekani is a multi-faceted personality and his contribution is what has led to him being conferred the Business Today Lifetime Achievement Award. He played a key role in ushering in the IT revolution, putting India on the global IT map and, later, had an enviable body of work that would become the solid foundation for Digital India. Today, as Co-founder and Chairman of Infosys, he is still in the thick of things and is also involved in the next round of the digital revolution in India. Clearly, Nilekani has no intention of slowing down.

By his own admission, going back to the past is somewhat tough for Nilekani, a man known to be ahead of his time. However, when prodded, he quickly rattles off a few important milestones. “From my professional career point of view, [one milestone] would have to be joining Patni in early 1979 and [later] setting up Infosys in July 1981,” he says. The first was also driven by the iconic N.R. Narayana Murthy, whom he describes as “charismatic”. In that sense, when Murthy made the offer to join him as Infosys Co-founder, it was an easy decision to make. “You just go when Murthy calls,” he says.

There is always a gap between reality and potential and I have the urge to bridge that gap

Nandan Nilekani
Chairman
Infosys

Murthy, on his part, has a clear recollection of Nilekani coming to Patni for a job. “He had just passed out from IIT Bombay. I gave him a set of puzzles to test his learnability and he solved them,” he says. Nilekani was hired as software engineer trainee and when Infosys was founded in 1981, Murthy invited him to come aboard.    

In Nilekani’s own mind, Infosys was an early change agent. “It was not just about profit but being a pathbreaker and an innovator,” he explains. The India of 1981 was a far cry from what one sees today. “It was not conducive for business and the concept of the first-generation businessman did not really exist,” he says. Three kinds of companies existed—the public sector undertakings, large multinationals like what was then Hindustan Lever, and families like Mafatlal, Birla and Walchand that owned large businesses. “In that sense, Infosys was the original start-up,” he points out. Without batting an eyelid, Nilekani says the boom in IT was completely unexpected. “We knew tech will become important and that software would grow since the talent pool was here. The global opportunity existed but the industry hitting $227 billion with 4.5 million employees was nowhere on our horizon.”

Murthy sees Nilekani as a good project manager, someone who can lead well when given a competent team. “He brings in innovative ideas and completes a project on time within the budget and with quality,” he says. He cites the instance of Nilekani in 1984 re-engineering the CAMP (Comprehensive Apparel Manufacturers’ Package) software package—that ran on the DG MV/8000 platform—to run on the IBM 4341 platform with enhanced functionalities for Infosys’s client, New York-based Data Basics Corporation. “Nandan is good at a 50,000-ft bird’s eye view of any large project and leaves the ground level worm’s eye view to his assistants. He brought in several innovative features in the CAMP products, which had not been seen in any application on the IBM 4341 software till then,” explains Murthy. This  convinced him to get Nilekani as director-in-charge of Finacle in 1988, the first globally recognised core banking software product from Infosys, and India. The same year, Nilekani became one of the founders of NASSCOM.

In many ways, the base for a well-rounded personality was laid during his five years at IIT Bombay. Nilekani thinks it was a defining time not just academically but also from a social and navigational skills point of view. “It was a time of high energy with things like Mood Indigo [the institute’s annual festival]. I recently met [tabla maestro] Zakir Hussain, whom we had invited to perform on campus,” he says with a smile. The experience on campus taught him more than a thing or two on how to get things done. “I learnt how to work with people for a common goal.” It is a skill that he has put to very good use. In fact, Murthy too calls Nilekani intelligent and pleasant. “He is easy to work with and fun to spend an evening with. Nandan is a committed team member who plays his role well and will always put the interest of the company ahead of his own.” 

While the Infosys success story has been an inspiration to several entrepreneurs both in India and abroad, Murthy says Nilekani’s contribution was “seminal”. He terms Nilekani as a person who can be “a compelling communicator in English” with the ability to express an idea succinctly in simple sentences. “Nandan’s memory is prodigious and his rolodex is inexhaustible. These attributes are important for a successful sales leader,” says Murthy. That was good enough for Murthy to be convinced, and in 1993 he assigned Nilekani a board-level responsibility at Infosys for sales and marketing. “Nandan seeded the idea of a ‘flat world’ in the mind of the celebrated journalist, Tom Friedman,” he points out. In 2002 and at just 46, Nilekani took charge as Infosys CEO after Murthy voluntarily stepped back. “I chose Nandan to succeed me and the company grew by a CAGR of 38 per cent during his five-year tenure, which was a good performance by any standard,” says Murthy. 

Rivals in the IT business are as effusive about Nilekani. One view comes from tech veteran Ashok Soota, Executive Chairman of Happiest Minds Technologies, who has known Nilekani from his stint at Wipro and later when he started Mindtree. “We overlapped in many forums and situations but the most bizarre was in the negotiations for GE’s five-year offshore development contracts,” he recalls with a smile. It had potential partners locked inside a hotel for two to three days, with GE having successive rounds of individual negotiations. There was no question of conversation between the interested parties. “So, we got a lot of time to share other issues when we met for a drink in the evenings. Nandan was very cool, calm and relaxed with no tension that Infosys might lose the contract to a lower bidder,” says Soota. The calm demeanour was again evident when the two of them were a part of a Lufthansa flight that was offloaded in Frankfurt because of a bomb threat. “The process to get us back on the plane took six arduous hours. Right through, Nandan was cool and unflappable, while we were made to sit in a separate terminal and go through individual security checks on deplaning and again emplaning,” he recalls with a laugh.      

For Nilekani, companies outgrow founders. “In that sense, Infosys is unique since it is rare for the founders to be there. I think we constantly reinvented ourselves and had to be on our toes,” he says. On his own longevity, he is forthright and speaks of the biggest risk being irrelevance. “It is important to be in touch with what is happening. I don’t think of yesterday and am constantly excited about the possibilities. There is always a gap between reality and potential, and I have the urge to bridge that gap.”

For many years, the notion of a digital identification intrigued Nilekani. When the government reached out to him for the project, a few goals, including the need for every citizen to be able to be identified, were set. The government had the basic idea but the challenge was in execution given how complicated India was. “The concept of inclusion was important since there were many without a birth certificate. The value-add we saw in digital identification was in online, cloud and future-proofing through what would later become the UPI [Unified Payments Interface],” he says. It turned out to be one of India’s biggest projects ever and one that was hugely satisfying for Nilekani. Aadhaar, the unique ID, is today an integral part of an average Indian’s life.

Nandan is forever etched in my mind as the intelligent, positive and idealistic young man I recruited in 1979

N.R. Narayana Murthy
Founder
Infosys

Inevitably, in a project of Aadhaar’s scale, the challenges were multi-fold. Nilekani, then the founding chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), candidly explains how there were “forces trying to stop it”. This is when his navigational skills came in handy to cross many a hurdle and triumph in the face of adversity. The shift to the government from the private sector was, in reality, not done overnight. “I understood how the government worked thanks to being on the Bangalore Action Task Force (from 1999-2004), which was at the state level. Later, I worked with Sam Pitroda in the National Knowledge Commission (2004-09) and that exposed me to the workings of the central government,” he narrates. 

The grounding in Infosys imbibed some key principles in Nilekani: “If you have the vision, you can rally people around it,” he says. The second is the belief that simplicity always trumps complexity. “The other part was in being strategic and not tactical. You must know the endgame and be tactical to get there but never lose sight of the endgame.” 

For all the success Nilekani had in the government, he has not missed some of the obvious differences between working there and being in the private sector. What does he view as the key difference between the two? In the latter, one does not always spend time in building coalitions and consensus. “You are largely in charge of a situation. But in the government, there is a need to navigate and that is time-consuming. Someone from the private sector will not have the patience for all this.” To Murthy, Nilekani’s success in completing the Aadhaar project (he terms it “highly impactful”) on time and within the budget is very significant. “It is a good indicator of his leadership and project management abilities even in the government.”

Dwelling on the project, Nilekani candidly speaks of several moments of frustration. After all, he was in a new environment, and in a leadership role, but at the end of the day, this was still government. “For instance, dealing with forces who didn’t want the project was tricky, but one had to spend time in explaining why it was critical,” he says. He had to dig deep into his reserves of conviction at each stage. “One cannot take an adversarial approach. The person on the other side of the table needs to be assured that you are not taking his job away. It is not an easy position to be in but we needed to get past many challenges,” explains Nilekani. Looking  back at the success of Aadhaar, one that is a case study across the best business schools globally, he admits things could have been done a little faster. “Maybe, some of the features like the tokenised version of Aadhaar should have been out earlier.”   

Soota is extremely familiar with Nilekani’s success at Aadhaar. “Mindtree, the fledgeling company I was heading then, won the contract for the biometric engine, which was at the heart of the Aadhaar solution and Nandan was now my customer,” he narrates. According to him, Nilekani could have just created the world’s second largest database. “Instead, he architected a platform with app extensions for the many solutions that now ride on it. Nandan was hands-on and demanding as, indeed, a customer should be. If there was even a suspicion of a delay, our leadership would be summoned. But he was extremely fair,” points out Soota.

Even in the case of the digital payments platform UPI—where Nilekani played an important role as Advisor-Innovations and Public Policy at National Payments Corporation of India—the 8 billion transactions per month, or 300 million people using it, makes Nilekani happy. “Now, it is a playbook for change,” he says quite simply. The Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) story—where he is Member of the Advisory Council for the open e-commerce network launched by the government—enthuses him and he calls it “a force of inclusion”. With most of India’s retail business dominated by small merchants, that segment finds it difficult to get the best out of what digital can offer. “The bigger businesses will do it easily. ONDC is about enabling the smaller ones participating in an ecosystem. To me, its value is in making make all of commerce e-commerce,” he stresses.  

In the West, where the countries were economically rich before becoming data-rich, modern internet began two decades ago. At high levels of per capita income, a lot of money was spent on advertising. “India has not really been an advertising story and the challenge is to figure out how data can improve your life. There is a lot that the small and medium businesses can do with the digital footprint,” Nilekani says. 

In the life of a successful entrepreneur, failures come and go. Nilekani says there were plenty of setbacks but two come to his mind immediately. “Professionally, Infosys’s foray into hardware manufacturing was something that did not work. At a personal level, standing for the Lok Sabha election [in 2014, when he lost] was the biggest failure,” he says, attributing that to hubris. “I had been successful at Infosys and later with the government. There was a sense of invincibility in me and this defeat brought me back to earth,” he admits. That episode allowed him to reflect on where his real strengths lay, and to play to them. 

“My value-add is in being a change agent and leveraging what I know well. That came down to technological transformation and I will continue to double down on that,” he says candidly. Besides, being non-partisan was a smarter way of going about things. “I am a plumber and I fix things,” says Nilekani in all seriousness.

His colleagues would say that he personally knows one in every six potential customers on the planet

Ashok Soota
Executive Chairman
Happiest Minds Technologies

This talent of fixing things was again on full display when he returned to Infosys in 2017 following the acrimonious exit of Vishal Sikka as CEO. “I was not involved in the company between 2009 and 2016 and did not even visit this campus,” he points out. There was no plan to get back either, but given the situation [Sikka fell out with the Infosys founders, particularly Murthy], Nilekani felt “a moral obligation” to take charge at the company he co-founded. There was a battle to be fought, with the company’s market capitalisation taking a hit, together with a lot of uncertainty on the way forward. After a thorough search, current CEO Salil Parekh was brought on board from Capgemini. “We managed to create an organisation with a robust strategy. Today, we are well-placed and the board is solidly behind us,” says Nilekani.

In the process, his own role has changed. “[Earlier], it was about being an executive and now that has moved to governance. It is different [now] and I look at it as reinventing oneself.” The experience of being outside the company for a period, too, helped since “it gave me distance, an insider-outsider view and in the process, a fresh pair of eyes”. The “founder’s clout”, he admits, was an add-on. “A different experience [working with the government] had toughened me and I could be a lot more decisive and handle dissent better.” Nilekani sees Infosys as being at the cusp of a different opportunity now with artificial intelligence (AI). “The last five years were about digital-first and now it is about AI.” Taking a moment to assess himself, Nilekani says he has no negativity. “I don’t waste my time bemoaning or brooding. I use my energy for positive things.” 

Getting the lifetime achievement award, says Murthy, is a well-deserved honour on Nilekani. “It is also a startling reminder to me on how much time has gone by. Nandan is forever etched in my mind as the intelligent, positive and idealistic young man I recruited in 1979,” he says.         

The Indian—and the pride of being one—is impossible to miss in a conversation with Nilekani. “The next 10 years will be our golden era. I clearly see the emergence of three or four big ideas, among which are ONDC unbundling commerce, the account aggregator and the democratisation of credit, a revolution in logistics and AI being a big story,” he outlines. In many ways, Nilekani epitomises many societal changes that India has undergone at a tech transformation level. Not only does he love it, but he thrives on it as well. That is indeed a rare combination and the reason for Nandan Nilekani being the change agent that he is.