TRUST ME I KNOW WHAT I'm DOING

Abhay chats with Pramod Varma, the visionary technologist who helped architect India’s digital transformation, enabling over a billion people to access digital identity, banking, payments, and verifiable credentials, fundamentally reshaping India’s social and economic landscape. 

(0:00 - 3:41) Introduction
(3:41) Part 1 - Describing what he does, transforming India into the transaction economy
(20:34) Part 2 - Verbs not nouns, connecting tech to everyone, lessons in equity, personal learning
(42:28) Part 3 - leading for magnitude and scale, art and aesthetics, prioritizing equity
(1:00:59) Conclusion

Pramod is currently the Co-Founder and Chief Architect of FIDE.org leading global efforts such as BECKN Protocol and FINTERNET.

He has been the chief architect of most of India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) efforts starting with Aadhaar - India’s unique ID system that covers 1.4 Billion people; eSign - an interoperable digital signature protocol; DigiLocker - digital credentialing and wallet system having over 9 billion verifiable credentials and over 400 million users; and UPI - the unified instant payment system that was launched in 2016 currently doing over 18 Billion transactions a month.

He also played a key role in designing and architecting India’s indirect tax (GST) system, national toll collection system, digital health infrastructure, digital agri infrastructure, and digital education infrastructure.

Intro:
The world needs more heroes, so let me thank you first for your heroism in an effort to engage here and choose TRUST ME I KNOW WHAT I’m DOING as a part of your day and even a small part of your life.  I appreciate you watching and subscribing on YouTube, listening on all of the podcast platforms, rating and writing reviews, following on those good old social media places, and sharing this with all your friends and family. 

Now if I really think about heroic feats in this digital age we live in, I can’t think of a better person who effectively embodies it than Pramod Varma.  Pramod is a computer scientist and for over the past decade and a half, he has been the driving designer of tech inclusion, equity, and connectivity to India’s entire population.  He is the chief architect behind many of India’s digital public infrastructure initiatives like Aadhar - the digital identity system covering 1.4 billion people that enabled banking access from almost nothing to above 80% in just a decade, and similarly e-sign, account aggregator for open finance, and of course the UPI or Unified Payments Interface that is now processing over 18 billion transactions in India every month.  Staggering is a word that comes to my mind, but still doesn’t do justice to the scale and scope of work that Pramod has designed and is continuing to lead.  He grew up in a small town in Kerala, earned his PhD in computer science and a masters in applied mathematics. Pramod is highly driven by curiosity and equipped with an insatiable thirst for broadly understanding humanity through art and knowledge.  After journeying successfully through the early days of the internet in a variety of entrepreneurial  and tech leadership roles,  Pramod made a deep pivot in 2009 to volunteer on a national digital identity project, and the rest is as they say history.  And for those keeping score at home, Pramod’s initial success in harnessing a team to do this at scale and at the cost of about 70 rupees per person, was all open sourced and unbundled, so that you could build iterative and supplemental layers on this important foundation for years to come.  He is currently the co-founder and chief architect of “Networks for Humanity” creating universal technology infrastructure for the AI driven digital economy and for the tokenization and exchange of all forms of assets across geographies and sectors. A few of the visions that he has co-created are the Finternet, an initiative to build infrastructure that empowers individuals and businesses to unify, verify, and transact their assets seamlessly, enabling billions of people to actively participate in the global digital economy, and also the Beckn Protocol, a vision for peer-to-peer, agentic native, open networks that enable exchange across the global value chains.  As you can guess, while most are playing checkers, I feel like Pramod is playing 4-dimensional chess… while keeping a grounded lens on disciplined equity, education, and inclusion.  We caught up to chat about it all, but with so many descriptors of his work and accomplishments, especially for people who are getting to know him, I wanted to first simply hear how Pramod tends to describe himself.

Cheers to INDIASPORA for the spark!