TRUST ME I KNOW WHAT I'm DOING

Speaker 2 (00:00)
Hello, my name is Pramod Varma. I'm a digital architect building changes at population scale. And you are listening to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing.

Speaker 1 (00:12)
My name is Abhay Dandekar and I share conversations with talented and interesting individuals linked to the global Indian and South Asian community. It's informal and informative, adding insights to our evolving cultural expressions, where each person can proudly say, trust me, I know what I'm doing.

Hi everyone, on this episode of Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing, we share a conversation with digital architect Pramod Varma. Stay tuned.

Well, the world needs more heroes. So let me thank you first and foremost 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 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's 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 Aadhaar, 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, eSign, 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 it still doesn't do justice to the scale and scope of work that Brahmod has designed and continuing to lead. He grew up in a small town in Kerala.

earning his PhD in computer science and a master's in applied mathematics. Brahmod 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, Brahmod made a deep pivot in 2009 to volunteer on a national digital identity project. And the rest is, as they say, history.

Now for those keeping score at home, Bromode'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. Bromode 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. Truly a world-based global effort. 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 Becken 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 of us are playing checkers, I kind of feel like Bromod is playing four-dimensional chess while keeping a grounded lens on disciplined equity, education, and most importantly, 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 Bromod tends to describe himself.

Speaker 2 (04:06)
Yeah, that's a good question. That's hard. But normally I introduce myself. I'm a technologist and the last 15 years been spending time, my time applying technology to transform societies at scale.

Speaker 1 (04:23)
You know, when you describe that and the fact that you're a technologist, it almost has an incredible general application to so many things. And yet the specificity of what you do is so profound. do you have to, when people ask you the second question of really, what does that mean? Do you have to dig a little bit deeper?

Speaker 2 (04:42)
Yes, yes, of course. Then I tell them that in the last 15 years, we managed to, I had the privilege of architecting.

India's what we now call digital public infrastructure that has transformed the lives of a billion people repeatedly, multiple times, starting from everyone having a digital identity, 1.4 billion people through our project. And then have a billion people having a bank accounts and then half a billion people doing fast payments and

half a billion people having all their credentials verifiable in their hands. So variety of things that we did that allowed very rapid formalization of a billion people who were very informal outside the normal economy in an informal world. Last decade, we completely formalized a billion people into giving them access to

financial services, education opportunities, work opportunities, then of course now healthcare and agriculture.

Speaker 1 (05:46)
Sure,

energy. mean, you name it. So, you know, again, that goes from this great, incredibly sort of general and humble statement of being a technologist to, in fact, things that are probably so much more profound. First off, I have to tell you that if aliens actually did land on the planet,

Speaker 2 (05:49)
many.

Speaker 1 (06:04)
I probably would want you to be among the first people that they would actually talk to and perhaps we'd be solving problems together. But that being said, we certainly appreciate the generalities of what we do. And then we are sparked and ignited by the technical specificities of what we do, especially when those specificities land at high scale. I can think of hundreds of examples.

where you describe the story and even I think of different tech solutions that are accelerators and they create ladders and they create buoys for success. hear, you you listed all the things that creating this kind of, and designing these kinds of systems actually made such impact. And yet, you you talk to the average person and all things tech can sometimes be frustrating and burdensome and create gaps and people feel frustrated, cascades of

learned helplessness, if you will. So for someone like you, who lives and breathes in this space, especially both tech at the grassroots level and at this very, very stratospheric level of what you just described, do you actually get frustrated by tech? And if you do, like what frustrates you, if at all, about technology?

Speaker 2 (07:20)
You know, I don't have time for frustration. are very, very, I'm an extreme, I'm an optimist. I believe in continuously attempting and doing what we can do to push the boundaries and not the person who sits around gets frustrated or broods in any way at all. And I have no time for it. So we are busy making sure what's the best we can do and we just have to do it. So I think we are very, very focused on doing.

And these doings normally in a large society like India, it takes a decade long journey. So we have a lot of patience capital to be able to navigate multiple political ⁓ parties, multiple administrative shifts, bureaucrats, know, every three years, come and go. So I think it teaches you to be patient, very optimistic and focused on what we can do, actions that we can do. Everything else is...

irrelevant.

Speaker 1 (08:20)
that I think mindset has probably come with lots and lots of iterations. And like you said, you to be incredibly patient with those around you. And yet the speed at which you operate in a zero frustration mindset does not always match the people around you. how do you, how do you grapple with that? Because the person who, again, you're explaining your work to who

is perhaps an investor or a rural villager or somebody else, maybe someone who is profoundly frustrated by tech.

Speaker 2 (08:51)
Indeed,

indeed. So I think first point, no one cares about tech at the societal scale. Remember, no one who is a villager out of a billion people in India picking up her phone and trying to access something on the phone does not give a damn about how the tech works. It's about unlocking value in their life. So if tech

meets them where they are, not force them to come to tech, rather tech meeting them where they are, and actually unlock value in their life, everyday life. Indians, especially very young population, an average age in India is less than 35, took average age 29. So it's a very young country. So Indians have consistently demonstrated that Indians, young India, aspirational India,

adopts technology if it makes their life better. Not how the tech works. No one needs to know what's behind it. All they need to know is does it change my life today? If it changes, they embrace it. And we have seen that with mobile revolution, banking, and everything else over and over again.

Speaker 1 (10:08)
over and over.

So in that way, again, thinking of this from both the personal level of the end user and at the, stratospheric level of someone who is thinking about this and designing, has that also impacted the speed of adaptation, especially as the user goes and transits from into a transaction economy?

talk about what someone personally cares about when it comes to tech and what you care about. They're both, of course, so intertwined and yet you have to be able to quickly and rapidly adapt that, especially for those who are paying attention to this at that very large, large level and deep level. ⁓ Why is that speed or at least that negotiation so important for India, especially as you get to these quantum leaps over and over again?

Speaker 2 (11:10)
And maybe we need to rewind a little bit to understand and, know, global audience who are listening, may not fully appreciate the India's complexity. India's 1.4 billion people, which is the most pop, today most populous nation on earth. Second, we are extremely diverse. So India is like a continent with a single constitution binding it, but

every state, you we have 22 official languages, all of them constitutionally equal. So very high chance you and I don't speak a common Indian language or my friend and I won't speak the common Indian language. And the only binding language is at least at our level, mostly English or at most other people's level, broken local languages. You know, they just somehow manage. And this is not only language every hundred miles in India, you will see

The weather changing, food habits changing, culture changing. So we have linguistic diversity, cultural diversity, food and weather and other diversities, religious diversity, name a religion, we have them. We have very, very large populations of all religions actually in India, including, know, religions that you wouldn't even think that they're actually here. Imagine a combination of this.

scale and diversity. The scale at the, you know, those diversities at that scale and that creates significant challenges when you combine a federal political structure. It's not a centralized structure. You know, we have central government making some, you know, quite like your US federal government having some.

control, especially military or other things, and some budget and other things, but a lot of programs and lot of like healthcare, education, agriculture, manufacturing or industrial development, properties, you know, other assets. They're all very local. And this creates, imagine the complexity and quite like in the U S you have two parties, we have many parties. So our States could be completely at odds.

politically at odds with the center. Now imagine that's the complexity we live in. Okay, so that's point number one. People who don't understand India, this is really crazy. And second, when we began our digital transformation journey in 2009, precisely when I quit my commercial professional career from a starter world and volunteered to plunge into building something for the society.

Speaker 1 (13:32)
us.

That's right. Plunge is the right word.

Speaker 2 (13:59)
Right. Plunge is the right word because we were clueless what we are going to get into. How you saw Musk getting into the bureaucracy. And it's not easy. It's a complex. It's complex how the system works. And in India, it's even more complex. But we were, in one sense, naive optimists. we thought we'd continue to jump in and figure it out. In 2009, only 17 % of Indians had access to bank accounts.

banking, anything to do with banking. Only 20 % of 20 or 20 % or maybe less than 20 % had a nationally portable ID. So it's mostly, it's the same sort of a 10, 15 % and mostly 10 % of the country in pretty good shape. Another 10 % is not so bad and everybody 80 % is, know, godless. They're completely living in a parallel economy.

Where do they save? We don't know. Where do they get money from? A local roadside moneylender who might be giving money lending, not from a formal system. Where do they invest? Not into a formal system. know, local, informal, and they get cheated, you know, they're taken for granted. It's a high cost, low trust, informal environment. That's 80 % of the country living in there. Like that is...

thrice the population of US, right? Roughly living in that condition. Yes. So the question we were asking is that how can we use leverage technology in the digital world? And why is it important? 2009, we already had iPhone launch and Android launch. And we were already 15 years into the commercial internet. So while the world was cruising along,

India was still struggling to formalize much of our society. Yeah. And this rough study, rough for example, in the case of banking, estimate was that India would have taken five decades. If you start in 2010, in 2016, 60,

We would have been barely reaching to 80 % days banking penetration. Right. Then look at that. Look at you guys are talking AGI. You guys are talking robotics going to Mars. You know, India is still as a developing economy struggling to even open a bank account because KYC norms are getting stricter. You know, KYC cost of KYC, know your customer in banking world or capital market is very expensive. So a low

revenue customer, customers who can only put in $10 in the bank account or $5. Banks don't want them. When you can put only $10 in the capital market, capital market don't want them because it's not economically viable for any industry to target low value customer at all because the cost in the system is very high. Compliance cost, onboarding cost, verification cost.

Everything is so high, it makes no sense to have these as customers. So the banks loved us as customers and they were happy in that 10, 20 percent of the world. in 2010, not only banks were only 17 percent penetration, our capital market, very well regulated capital market, by the way, in India, mutual fund stock industry, only two percentage of Indian adults to participate in the capital.

Yeah. Nobody could even get it right into the system because the cost of KYC was $25. And you know, and most people can't, and with the margins, nobody wants to sell any of them to low value, know, low revenue customer. This is, this answers your question. Why speed matter? Yeah. If we took each of these industry and spend five decades each,

Speaker 1 (18:11)
Thanks.

Speaker 2 (18:19)
to bring the society, we would have been dead and gone in 2100. Maybe when robots have taken over, has taken over, India would be still barely struggling to include large section of the society into the formal system. So we had to compress. We had to compress that formalization of the society and giving them basic access, access to

capital, access to banking, access to savings, access to investments, access to market opportunities, access to learning and other job opportunities. This access was broken, right? Completely shut off. So there's no front door access at all. And we had no time to be taking 100 years to do so or 50 years to do so. So India, actually, when you look back, what happened in the last 15 years is that India compressed.

five to ten decades or eight to ten decades of development cycles across these sectors into a less than a decade. All of them. In one decade, a billion people can digitally authenticate themselves. In one decade, a billion people plus can do an electronic KYC to a bank or to a mutual fund at 10 cents instead of $25 cost.

At 10 cents is the cost of electronic AYC in India today. In one decade, banking penetration went up from sub 20 % to 90, near 90%. Almost all women have bank accounts at one shot. We got gender parity done. And today, capital market exploded into a 6 to X growth in the last eight years. All in one decade.

Speaker 1 (20:10)
in one decade, right. And you know, quantum sort of orbits that you jump, you know, in that decade, in that 15 years plus now are staggering. You're listening to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing. Let's take a quick break and come back to our conversation with digital architect Ramod Varma. Stay tuned.

Conversation. It's the antidote to apathy and the catalyst for relationships. I'm Abhay Dandekar and I share conversations with global Indians and South Asians so everyone can say, trust me, I know what I'm doing. New episodes weekly wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Speaker 2 (20:59)
Hi, I'm Vivek Murthy. I'm the 21st Surgeon General of the United States, and you're listening to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing.

Hi everyone, this is Chef Vikas Khanna

Speaker 1 (21:18)
Hi guys, I'm Indra Nooyi.

Speaker 2 (21:21)
Hello

everybody, this is Vani Kola. Hi, I'm Saurabh Netravalkar here, athlete from the USA Cricket National Team. And you're listening to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing.

Speaker 1 (21:34)
Hi, I'm Anand Deshpande. I'm the founder of Persistent Systems Limited. And you're listening to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing. Welcome back to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing. Let's rejoin our conversation now with digital architect, Pramod Varma. I've read how you've, and even heard how you've talked about focusing on some of those actions, right? Focusing on the verbs, not the nouns. And as you actually are,

building and you're getting banking and not the bank or teaching and not the teacher or in some cases even the sort of health care delivery and not necessarily the doctor, right? I mean, you can apply this just about anywhere. And yet, you there was some kind of, you can call it luck, you can call it magic, you can call it the ingredients that were all there at the time. But why has that philosophy of using the verbs instead of the nouns, right? That I imagine is a frame shift for

structures and institutions that were still stuck in the kind of decade long approach as opposed to the like quantum approach. So, you know, for you, did you have a lot of reframing to do for people around you and evangelizing why that speed is so critical? I mean, in a way, I guess I'm wondering like, why had this not been that philosophy not necessarily been, you know, approached much sooner?

Speaker 2 (22:50)
Of course.

Yeah, so I think, again, this is our perpetually optimistic, action-oriented mindset answering you, where there's always time for everything. You can't force speed to a society. And we see this difference between sectors in India. Financial sector, for example, has cruised in a group.

really went ahead, whereas healthcare is still, even though we have laid our digital infrastructure for healthcare, society's readiness, medical professionals readiness, and the general conservatism compared to a financial sector.

in adopting technology in the healthcare has made healthcare much lower in India adoption. it might be 2030 that we see healthcare upgrade and not 2020. Whereas financial sector went ahead. But when you even stretch this to judicial sector, we see even behind our judicial sector is living in like, you know, 1800s. mean, literally, really that all British style. Yeah, only now. Yeah, no, only now. Last actually last five

Speaker 1 (24:04)
lord.

Speaker 2 (24:09)
decade or five years or eight years, can see significant push from the judicial leaders, Supreme court, know, the chief justice and so on. Sure. Pushing to say technology is a tool that India cannot not afford to adopt because our ability to provide services, the verbs to people will come from dismantling the old physical

people driven, institution driven service delivery to a lot more tech driven service delivery that allows low cost, high reach, automatically allowing 600,000 villages, 1.4 billion people, all speaking different languages, different cultures, different conservativism to actually start participating and accessing these services, whether it's healthcare services or financial services.

Speaker 1 (25:04)
Right. Right.

Speaker 2 (25:05)
So

it's very, very clear to everyone in India today that technology is the only means that we have to actually extend the verbs to everyone in an affordable way. And is it been challenging? Of course, it is regulatory challenge, political challenge. But what is interesting is that everyone cares. It's not that they don't care. Yeah. But everyone also has concerns, risks, perception.

So if you ask a central banker, you know, can we just launch high velocity lending programs? They will evaluate based on the perceived risk versus perceived benefit. Perceived risk could be a subprime like crisis in India, right? That over indebtedness, people taking money and they can't pay back and people suiciding or...

You know, and this could backfire on the society. they were this risk versus value and they slowly navigate to that. So one thing we learned about is very interesting is that we cannot force the speed on the society. But if you can convert a 10 year long or 15 year long goal into a yearly plus one steps, each step

allows the society to move forward in a comfortable, low risk manner. And then one more year, one more year, we get 10 years later, we see this macro effect. But micro steps, calibrated micro steps are needed to actually get to the macro.

Speaker 1 (26:46)
I'm hearing you say that and it makes me think of the idea of the sort of philosophy that you've in a way had to evangelize where you go from, cut the macro into those slices as you've just outlined, right? And you've been someone who's been so keen to evangelize access and capacity building and really sort of tokenizing and decentralizing and finding ways to get that.

power and that focus at the, local level so that you can in fact address all the diversities that you just mentioned. And we do this on a global value level, right? And you have value chains and you have the Finternet and you have Beckin protocol and NFH and you know, you're, trying to address all the things you just mentioned and some of humanity's, mean, just deepest current problems. And you just mentioned something that was so striking. Those institutions that are craving this, right?

whether they be because they're behind or they feel they're behind, or those institutions that are craving it because they're constantly trying to move ahead, right? Silicon Valley, governments, financial institutions, they're looking for that next sort of step. So those stakeholders are incredibly ready and they're really hungry for this. And yet, again, the person who really needs those micro slices as well is that rural farming woman in Karnataka or...

the person who's at the, perhaps not at the top of that infrastructure rule. So how do you in fact message this to that person? I mean, does he or she, who's that farmer actually like, again, know what questions to ask? The same guardrail questions that, and risk questions that those other institutional people are asking. mean, the skeptic in all of us wants to ask those questions.

How have you been able to address that?

Speaker 2 (28:44)
Yeah, so again, it is important while we create few abstractions as a designer. Yeah. Abstractions based out of principles, principles that

Individuals should own have the agency and control of their own decisions. They should have the control of their data. Today's world data is an asset. It's an economic asset. It's not an oil to extract. It is a soil to build people's lives on. So it's important. So we have principles like people should own their own data streams as an asset. People should have an agency to participate and access without low friction.

low cost mechanism. But while we have these principles and abstraction as we design this infrastructure, we also know the second point that technological infrastructures that we lay are only necessary condition and not sufficiency.

So for example, laying just because you laid highway doesn't mean people will drive, right? In the sense that there are not enough cars, there's not enough people who can own a car, and people don't know how to drive well. There might be many reasons why you have good highways, but hardly any economic activity. Same thing happens in the digital world. You could lay a digital infrastructure or technological interventions, but people barely are actually using the bank account.

People are using that opportunity to actually invest well. So sufficiency come from many, many laid programs. Awareness programs, use case driven communication. That means when I speak to an SME on the roadside, who has a small shop and selling bananas or small pieces of the biscuits or anything else that they're selling, she or he doesn't care.

about technology, they care about use cases. So when we speak to them, say, how do you get your capital from? For example, by 20th of a month, you might run out of money and you might not get until the next payment. You might have a cashflow gap. Where do you get it from? And they would say, I get it from my local money lender. Then we ask them, how much interest do you pay? Then they would say, it's quite high. ⁓

100 % days, 80 % days, sometimes 200 % days, know, ridiculous interest, right? It's like daily interest. It's not even annual interest. And then somebody asked them, then why are you not going to the bank? Then they would say, sir, banks don't want me. I can't go to bank. don't know. I don't know how to do it. Or banks are not interested in giving me loan because I don't have any paper to show them.

So then we sit with them and actually make them understand what if you could do either a mechanism that you can actually access to capital in a faster way lending. Lending is a use case which they relate to. So they can say if I do this and if I do this and I get access cheaper, access to loan for example, capital, they very clearly get it.

And this is one of the stories. In fact, we were at Stanford last week and one of the people who asked is how did Unified Payment Interface, UPI, India's fast payment system, launched in 2016, barely launched in 2016, today doing 18 billion transactions a month with 500 million people, nearly 500 million people participating.

How did that lady who's selling bananas on the roadside actually prefer to use fast payment with a QR code than cash? Yeah. Very unintuitive. Yeah. Because for her, was less worry about tax payment. It was more worry about cash handling. Yeah. She knew if I keep my cash, keep collecting cash, end of the day, very high chance, maybe my husband or maybe a corrupt cop.

will come around and pick up money forcefully from me. Whereas if the money is kept in the cloud, I have nothing physically. And if you can earn a small interest, I would rather prefer that, even if eventually I end up paying some tax.

Speaker 1 (33:09)
Well, and there's a daily value to that, right? There's a daily value, there's a tangibleness, even with something being in the cloud and it actually fulfills problem solving on that level. Do you ever worry then about sometimes the vacuums that those create? I mean, in any kind of capitalist democracy, there's still going to end up being someone who has the haves and those who are sort of the have-nots.

Speaker 2 (33:37)
We care deeply about what's digital divide. people who are unfamiliar, we have nearly 800 million smartphones, but most of them are not maybe unique. So maybe half a billion people have smartphone. Definitely another half a billion people have feature phone.

But we still have another 300 million people who have no phones. 300 million. That's a population of barely almost a population of US. Yeah. A whole country population who have no access to phone. At the same time, education levels, Matt, is different. For example, including my grandmother or my mother, I'm not a digitally savvy banking person. She would prefer to walk down to the bank, write a check.

Give it to the teller. Maybe say hello to the teller for us. And then continue to live in that world. We see that even in older section of the society in the US who prefers to write a check and we see this across the society that there is differences of adoption, differences of awareness and education that allows them to access it. And of course, lack of devices, lack of everything else. So it is important.

that when we design digital infrastructure, we build inclusion at the core. And I'll give you two examples. One, when we build the identity program, we called it, it is a digital ID. India was one of the early ones who did a one billion people digital ID program. But if you are retained digital ID and say, like in the Europe, for example, right now they're doing, it will be available in your wallet, Apple Wallet or a...

Android wallet, Google Wallet. In 2012, we could have easily done that because we were barely starting then. By then, 3G was there, cheap Android phones were there. But this would have left maybe 200 million people at that time. And later, 500 million people could have access to a wallet. What happens to another billion people? So one of the things when we did, although it was digital ID, it was available to people who have no phones.

in a printed manner with a cryptographically signed QR code. That means the paper they walk around still makes them makes it verifiable and allows them to use their verifiable identity without having a phone. Second thing we did is that the same authentication or identity usage is available as self-service for people who like us who prefer self-service.

And it's also available as an assisted service. So many people go to an assisted terminal and someone else on the other side of the terminal actually helps them out with authentication. This is like a point of sale system, right? Where you have the card and you have a merchant on the other side. So we have assisted models and self-service model. We have physical instrument or mobile identity. have mobile identity and physically printed identity.

Speaker 1 (36:38)
That's right.

Speaker 2 (36:50)
When we did payment, did the same thing. UPI, Unified Payment Interface is available to people who have smartphones. Same UPI is available to people who have feature phones, by the way. And same UPI, Fast Payment System is available to 300 million people who have no phones. They can use UPI using their fingerprint in India. do 120 to 150 million transactions every month by people.

who have no phones, transacting, sending money to their spouses using their fingerprint. So you can actually build an infrastructure that is... Now you can layer, assist it to it. You can create a Indic language interface for the people who wants to read a local language instead of an English app. So you can create a lot of layered innovation and diverse innovation provided.

your underlying infrastructure is designed to be multi-channel inclusive architecture, which is what we managed to do, which is why we don't care whether you, while we deeply care about digital divide, we design it to accommodate people to have all spectrum. It's very, very key part of our design.

Speaker 1 (38:07)
No, and that's incredibly powerful. I mean, I can hear the pride in your voice where you know that there's a foundational concept and a philosophy in the design, and yet the layers are there to actually make sure that everybody can get under the tent at some point, no matter what version of this you do. And so it brings me to think a little bit about you in that, you you're from a very small town in Kerala. And then you went to Delhi and Hyderabad and...

Boston, course, and now in Bangalore. And if I'm thinking of how you connect all those dots and the experiences and you're iteratively learning and succeeding and again, manifesting these great philosophies into products and innovations and layers, as you mentioned here, what are some of the things that you've actually had to shed or unlearn or even let go of?

or for that matter, even deprioritize as you have, again, successively built on and iterated on some of these successes.

Speaker 2 (39:15)
Yeah, no, again, coming from a middle class family in a small town, never speaking a sentence of English until, you know, 16, 17, 18 years old. I didn't even speak English and it was very different. And that humbles you, you know, that you have such strong value system.

in us and we can relate to what it means to be a middle class in India. we do mean an Indian middle class is rising, very aspirational rising, but struggle to access access. Whereas the top of the pyramid, top of the pyramid has very high privileged access. Yeah. Much of India struggles with access to basic services and products and services and opportunities that we all take it for granted.

And I've been a living example of how I have struggled myself to even to show up in a city without even speaking the language, without knowing English and without even going to a top college and then having to compete. You know what it taught me? It taught me one, never leave your core value systems and principles to be able to apply that every time. And second, be hungry.

and like a childlike learner because I didn't come learned, you know, when I came out of graduation, I came out of a very small town place. So that meant every day, you know, as I built my career, showed up in Boston, showed up in a startup in the U.S., you know, you had to be only that thing that rescued you is sheer optimism and ability to learn.

ability to learn. means I'm a, I'm even today, I'm a childlike learner. People know when I meet people, I, I am like asking so many questions. How does this work? How do you do you do? So because of that, it allowed me to this simple value system. Yeah. Plus ability to learn wanting to learn childlike learning curiosity allowed me to actually surround myself with

Speaker 1 (41:16)
that

Speaker 2 (41:34)
smarter people than myself all the time. Without having my ego coming in the way saying I should be the smartest, no in the good kind. No, I would rather have smarter people surrounding me because that means I'm learning every day. Yeah. That rather than, you know, playing chess with a, you know, person who I can beat every day. Right. It's useless, right? So you never become a learner.

Speaker 1 (41:57)
You know, that maturity and even that perspective takes a lot to, especially in as a leader, as someone who's been an executive, as someone who's had to form teams, know, the checking your ego at the door can can sometimes be very difficult. You're listening to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing. After a quick break, we'll come back to our conversation with digital architect Pramod Varma. Stay tuned.

Every story told is a lesson learned and every lesson learned is a story waiting to be told. I'm Abhay Dandekar and I share conversations with global Indians and South Asians so everyone can say, trust me, I know what I'm doing. New episodes weekly wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Hi, this is Vidya Balan and you're listening to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing.

Speaker 2 (43:06)
Hi, this is Madhuri Dixit. Hi, this is Farhan Akhtar.

Speaker 1 (43:10)
Hi, I'm music recording artist, Sid Sriram. Hi I'm Kani Kusruti Hi, I'm Krish Ashok, author of Masala Lab, the Science of Indian Cooking, and you're listening to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing. Hi there, I'm Abhay Dandekar, and you're listening to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing. Let's come back now to our conversation with digital architect, Pramod Varma. When we were at the Indiaspora conference, I was just kind of listening and

and observing as people were around you and making their introductions of who you are when you were speaking. And I remember some of the words that were being thrown around were like, my God, Bromwell, he's a hero. He's, you know, the courage that it took to design these things. I mean, obviously accolades that people are very proud of the work that you've done. They've described you this way, but when you think of the mood that you have to cultivate in teams.

to tackle these kind of very, very big problems, whether that's Adhaar or UPI or many of these kinds of tasks. Do you ever have to, because you are also helping to coach some of the people around you to kind of lead up, right? Do you ever have to remind yourself that sometimes people who are equally curious and equally don't want to necessarily have their egos involved, that you have to actually temper

perhaps even the hesitance or the fear around the sheer magnitude of the problems that you're dealing with. I mean, there's when we as physicians, right? We're dealing with a single patient and perhaps there's, know, boy, we're worried about a mistake, but okay, it's a low, you know, risk mistake. And we can learn from that when you're dealing with high, high.

population-based problems, when you're dealing with humanities problems, when you're dealing with economies of entire governments and systems here. I mean, the sheer magnitude of the things that you and your teams are dealing with is just, it's profound. So do you have to, in a way, coach people through some of that?

Speaker 2 (45:19)
all the time. I think first of all, when you have an audacious, unreachable goal, mean, it's like a almost seemingly unreachable goal. Yeah. It actually does both positive and negative. Positive is that it inspires people to say, if we do, if we pull this off,

we will change the face of a society as a whole, right? And today, UPI, when you see, even today I get goosebumps every day when I see millions and millions of people's QR codes everywhere, people scanning it and actually, and raving about it. How fantastic it is. And you get very proud of what we managed to achieve. But three things work for me. One, always take up very large audacious goals that allows us to break away

from our egos because no well-known pathway or standard pathway will get you to that goal because the goal is so high. That means you have to be childlike because you don't know. You simply realize, I don't know. My boss don't know. Not everybody knows what the answer is. So it's not an incremental, right? It is a very, so large that it allows everyone to humble ourselves to say, unless we work together.

unless we really were out of the box thinking and be a perpetual optimist, we will not be able to crack this problem because it's not an incremental problem we are asking. It is an exponential problem that we are after. But it also creates fear. It creates fear in people of fear of failure, fear of not having to achieve it. So

One of the things that we always coach people is to be, we normally in these projects, especially early days of the project, normally these projects span a decade and first three years, next three years and last three years. First three years, almost always we tend to pick people who are very naively optimistic.

Speaker 1 (47:28)
They don't know what they don't know.

Speaker 2 (47:30)
Yeah, tend to brood less and the sky is not falling for them. You know, if the sky is falling down, I'll still find a way to. They're so optimistic. They'll say, okay, we'll figure out something. Right. So I think the first three years of such audacious goals, recruiting very positive people who are inspired by the goal and not at all afraid to attempt, afraid to attempt. guarantees success. But

Speaker 1 (47:35)
Right.

Speaker 2 (47:58)
Attempting is what we are good at. And then every day we have to wake up and attempt today's tasks to be able to actually get that.

Speaker 1 (48:08)
Fail or not, right?

Speaker 2 (48:09)
Fail

or not? And so we allow them to fail. We allow them to say, don't be afraid of the unknowns. Be very aware of the knowns and keep doing the action specifically and collaborate like crazy. The best way to learn is to ask non-technologists, anthropologists, socialists, societal folks, economists, when you're working in a medical profession like you. And we can ask shamelessly questions. What do you think? And how will you view this? ⁓

What is your view? And we keep hearing views, both positive and negative, or potential dangers. And we constantly learn. So once you know it, you can incorporate that into the design. We do a few things very well. Audacious goals, recruit optimistic people, and then focus on today and not focus on 10 years into the future.

Speaker 1 (49:01)
Which is tough, right? mean, everyone wants to be a futurist and they want to sort of like dream big and yet you still have to keep your eyes on the prize that's in front of you. I wanted to ask you because I read that you're someone who absolutely loves art and drawing. And how much of this work in digital architecture and project managing and again, tackling some of the...

Speaker 2 (49:13)
best.

Speaker 1 (49:30)
biggest of the big problems that are out there and really harnessing the best for so many people. When you're working on problems like human machine interface and living in this incredibly tech rich ecosystem, is there actually an importance that problems get actuated or even solutions get sustained because of the art and the aesthetics and that

kind of love that you have for that? Is there a value to the art and beauty part of it?

Speaker 2 (50:04)
I think so. And many people have told me actually that your ability to visualize, your ability to the finesse in your work, the deep care about even when we present things, I deeply care about the font and the curves and you know, everything else that I think there is that artistic way of thinking. allows my right brain and left brain to work together.

pure mathematical or computing logical side of the brain versus beauty and art and aesthetics part of the brain working together. Many people have said, you have definitely harnessed both well to be able to do. And then on top of that, you know, I come from a teaching family. My grandma's a teacher. My mother is a teacher. You know, have a lot of teachers in our family.

And teachers have this peculiar good or bad, but they love to explain. love to mentor. then if you get a student, they are happy with even one student hours. It's excited about having students, you in front of us. Yeah. I think that is also added as a third dimension for me. That my ability to articulate, explain, mentor people, not as a managed people. So I'm not a traditional manager. You know, I'm a mentor.

Speaker 1 (51:08)
Excited.

Speaker 2 (51:27)
Mostly I manage through mentorship, not managed through occasionally. Of course you have to take hard calls, you know, when you really have some bad apple in the picture, but then I'm quite strict about it. But other than that, mostly I'm a naturally a mentor. I care deeply about my people, team. It comes naturally as a teacher. So if you combine artistic left, right brain and the teaching articulation capability, I think it all three have worked out well.

Speaker 1 (51:57)
Frankly. Again, it's a matter of balance and harmony. The person who sees the product will perhaps only see the finish line or the bottom line. Yes. Yes. Yet there's a contour and there's a shape and there's aesthetics to it too. That actually is something that is of deep value to you. Of course. course. I'm thinking about the nationalism.

part of this for a second and even just sort of like the importance of pride in a nation like India. India, course, if you think about the role it played in the industrial revolution, it was a colonized resource or a colonialized resource during that industrial revolution. And it's been a sort of world resource now for the intelligence revolution and the intelligence era.

Speaker 2 (52:31)
Thank

Speaker 1 (52:51)
And I wonder now if we are in the sort of awkward adolescent years of a new machine augmented era. And maybe we're in the adult phase of that machine learning era. But I'm wondering and so curious what you think about this. What does India need to prioritize as far as, again, safeguarding what you said is so valuable when it comes to equity ⁓ and that human equity?

Given the speed and the scale and the wealth and power dynamics that have been entrenched for so long, and that divide of course is only getting bigger and bigger. I mean, in a way there's great pride in rapid growth and development, especially on a global world stage with also some potential great costs to it. Are there safeguards to this new era of AI and machine human interface that

that we, you as someone who has been at, you know, had a front row seat to this that you have to remind people about.

Speaker 2 (53:57)
One thing is very clear, humans are always being, that's how we differentiated us from monkeys, enormously curious and perpetual quest. Nothing can stop humanity from attempting to do things that maybe we should look at and say, you really need to do this. you know, I think that's who the species we are. Given that, think there is no stopping.

There is no stopping of this human crusade towards the evolution of the species and evolution of technology driven advancements and space travel and bioengineering and you know, engineering our bodies today CRISPR and so on. It's amazing. This morning I was working looking at some of the cancer treatments that are just going into just unbelievable amount of that.

Speaker 1 (54:50)
Unbelievable.

Speaker 2 (54:54)
the perpetual crusade to push the boundaries. Correct. You can't stop it. what do we then care about? We care about equity of that distribution. That means is it, whether it's wealth, whether it's knowledge, whether it's opportunities, whether it's, you know, agency, is it all so concentrated with small few people that large section of the society become second class.

Speaker 1 (55:22)
You probably.

Speaker 2 (55:22)
It is

an eventually as a species, but they are just they don't know what's going on. A few people are controlling all resources in one sense and decision making equity. Equity is a very key part of my thinking. So I keep thinking about how do we spread the knowledge, spread the wealth, spread the opportunities, spread the possibilities, not beyond the top, very top of the society into much more equitable way to spread it.

Speaker 1 (55:33)
So.

Speaker 2 (55:51)
Not everything is possible, but we think about it constantly. And the second thing we could think about it is I think humans always have been, always we create identity driven cohorts. Identity could be national identity. Or inside the country, could be a linguistic identity as you see in India. When you stop fighting other nations, we fight among ourselves, you know, inside, right? Or it could be skin color based, skin color based tribalism. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:06)
I

Speaker 2 (56:21)
probably is never going to go away. It also talks about, in one sense, casual word or a word like sovereignty comes in play. That means, do these identity cohorts of the tribes, different tribes in India or Indian states or in Africa, in Ethiopia or South Africa or in Peru or Argentina, do they all have control of their own destiny?

Some at least reasonable control of their destiny not all control but it is reasonable chain What what their society ought to be? Yeah, so we asked about that question So we're in 18 months and question or agency question, right agency slash sovereignty question for people large section of the population who are actually mostly recipients of this and Consumers of this not a producers and decision makers third we actually say competition

It's a very, very important part of bringing equity and agents sovereignty is that you want to create what not monopolistic control structures. Lots, lots. So how do, because this comes from our India's own learning is that our strength comes from our diversity. Yeah. This is why Indian attacking India or destabilizing India will be the hardest to do.

Because India is so diverse and hence resilient. Yeah. Very resilient because we are diverse. You you sort of survive irrespective of... Unidimensional. Yeah. Unidimensional societies, extremely uniform societies tend to have less resilience. You can shape them up very easily, by the way. So I can apply the same thing to tech as well. So we want diversity of innovation, diversity of competition.

hundreds of companies to coexist, hundreds of innovators to coexist, hundreds of choices to coexist in the system and not collapse all of them into one company, one choice for the world. So this is the third dimension I actually think about.

Speaker 1 (58:29)
Does that compete directly with those who currently have amassed so much wealth and power?

Speaker 2 (58:36)
It

but frankly, I would also think, you know, while they have amassed the power, at some point in time, ⁓ they would also realize that eventually if you want the world to use them, because actually they have a revenue model, they want their customers to be happy.

And if the world is their customer, they can't screw their own customer. So I think, so eventually I think whether it is open AI or any of these companies, I think they will have to think about, you know, how to care about what their consumers care. And not care about only their investors care. Eventually they have to care about it. And if you amass the wealth, amass the control fully, then you are destroying your consumer base.

Speaker 1 (59:01)
True.

That's a great point.

That's right.

Speaker 2 (59:27)
So obviously they'll have to think about it. So I think it's okay. And this is how the cycles will work. And we just have to be at it thinking about these three things, agencies like sovereignty, equity in distribution of knowledge, opportunities and everything. And the third is having diversity of choice, competition and a plethora of solutions and so on. If you have three of them playing around, generally it should be okay balance for us.

Speaker 1 (59:55)
love how you put that because again, that the idea of decentralizing really adds such richness to that diversity. Let me get you out of here on this. We started this out with aliens coming to meet you and your eternal optimism kind of coming through. I'm curious now about for anyone who is learning about this for the first time and the incredible work you're doing at any scale, whether it's at the grassroots level again, or at the

Speaker 2 (1:00:01)
the

Speaker 1 (1:00:21)
sort of supernova level. And when they're coming to learn about your work or even meeting you for the first time, how do you hope they feel? And for that matter, what questions or curiosities do you hope it prompts in themselves? The same way that you sort of have that same kind of level of curiosity about the world around you.

Speaker 2 (1:00:41)
I think I would like to believe that people who meet me goes back with hope. Just hope. They become lot more hopeful, energized, positive when they walk out of that room. So I think I always believe that if I can transfer hope and

hope and belief. Generally, I'm happy as an individual that if I can get people who meet me to be very hopeful and believe in that it's possible to change the world and it's possible to do the right things. I'm okay. I'm happy with that.

Speaker 1 (1:01:28)
whether it's ⁓ evangelizing hope and optimism, but also thinking about the possibilities and also being very proud of what's been done and what's to come. I know that people who are meeting you and learning about you and relearning about all the work you do are incredibly proud. so amazingly, I think happy to be around you. Pramod, what a wonderful conversation. I really enjoyed it. I hope we can visit with you again down the road and thank you so, much for joining us.

Speaker 2 (1:01:56)
Thank you so much. I really enjoyed the conversations and I hope people who are listening to it wake up believing that we can shape a better future.

Speaker 1 (1:02:07)
You're listening to Trust Me, I know what I'm doing. Stay tuned.

Thanks again Pramod and please take a look at all of his work and accomplishments as listed in some of the links in the show notes. A big shout out once again to Indiaspora for being the fertile ground for connection and to all of you once again for listening, rating and writing reviews, following along and sharing this with all your friends and family. Until next time, I'm Abhay Dandekar.