We enrolled 1.3 billion people into Aadhaar. That means we gave a verifiable identity to hundreds of millions of Indians who had never been able to prove who they were. A bank account, a phone number, a government benefit — all of it starts with knowing who you are.
India can't copy the West. We have 1.4 billion people, most of them on low incomes. We need solutions that work at population scale and near-zero cost. That's why we built digital public infrastructure — open, free, and universal.
We started Infosys with $250 between seven of us. Today it's worth $80 billion. The lesson is simple: you don't need money to start. You need an idea, a team, and the willingness to work harder than anyone else for a very long time.
Technology should be public infrastructure, not a private moat. Identity, payments, data sharing — these should be open platforms that anyone can build on. Like roads. Like electricity. Open and universal.
UPI processes billions of transactions a month in India. It's free. It works on any phone. And it was built on Aadhaar. That's the power of digital public infrastructure — one layer enables the next.