1/6th of humanity.
25% of the world’s working population.

16,000 languages. 

An AI for each one?

Even for a machine trained on 9 petabytes of storage, this is a staggering challenge. But one man is working on cracking the code: Pramod Varma, the chief architect of India’s celebrated digital revolution. Fascinatingly, this tech pathfinder is also painter Raja Ravi Varma’s grandson.  

Meet the Maestro of Scale

In the last decade, India has become a nursery for astonishing tech innovation. From Adhaar to UPI, it has changed the way we trade, communicate, do business or invoke our constitutional rights. Everything from governance to the economy has been compressed into the palm of your hand. Varma has been at the heart of it all. The creation of the India tech stack: a cash-less, paper-less and presence-less service delivery system.

Varma started his career with Infosys before going on to lead the technology side of entrepreneurial ventures like Yantra corporation and Sterling commerce. In 2009, he left his wildly successful job to join Nandan Nilekani (the co-founder of Infosys and the chairman of UIDAI at the time) to attempt the impossible - map a billion people. Western experts said it was undoable. Consultants backed out. But years later, thanks to Varma and his peers, India launched Aadhaar, the digitization of national identity and a virtual citizenship register that has helped bring xxx 85 percent of the population - 500 million people - into the formal economy. Varma has now helped launch other marvels like Digilocker, a one-stop shop for all your documents and certificates; UPI, the universal payment gateway; and the Covid tracking app CoWIN. Issues of exclusion and access, however, continue to be worked upon, as Varma regularly fields questions about Aadhaar’s safety, its usage as a surveillance tool and its implications for national security. His next mission is to tailor an AI or many AIs for India.

A ‘truly’ Democratic AI

AI is exploding but is it really accessible? Unlike the western world, India is split into languages, cultures, scripts. Not to mention class, caste and other forms of circumstantial divisions. It makes a one-AI-for-all approach unfeasible and discriminatory to those with no access to urban, elite languages like English. The solution? Move from thinking of our diversity (think of each human as a data asset) as ‘oil to extract’ to ‘soil for building life’. i.e. use it to build ‘Indic’ AIs.

Varma argues that for AI to truly be democratic it has to be put in the hands of everyone. Because it’s a train that the country simply cannot afford to miss. For starters, it can help fill generational “literacy gaps’’. Become the revolution that the country’s education policy has struggled to be. Which is why Varma stresses the importance of regulating the ‘quality of services’ that AI offers, rather than the technology itself. 

Decentralizing the future

One of the key problems on Varma’s plate these days is the decentralization of local economies. Think of it this way, what if a basement start-up could talk to a large corporation. What if street hawkers could sell to large businesses. What if you could become a seller and a buyer and operate a seamless business from the corner of your room. No middlemen, agencies, burdening regulations or paperwork. 

Varma calls it the Beckn Protocol – the world’s first-of-its-kind protocol that allows for the interoperability of local, fragmented economies and its many moving parts. The protocol has already become an infrastructural unicorn with applications like ONDC and Namma Yatri. It is now being adopted by countries like Nepal, Brazil, Netherlands and France to name a few.

At the core of each of Varma’s ambitious ideas is the unfathomable puzzle of scale. How does one imagine, create and design for a sixth of the world’s population, with socio-economic riddles of diversity baked in. At SYNAPSE 2025, Pramod Varma will unseal the treasury of his mind to speak on the need for sovereign AIs, data as an asset, interoperability as a design principle, the art of building for ‘societal benefit’, and how to innovate at scale that no human has tackled before. 

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