Nandan & Rohini Nilekani's 'world of good': How they are working on community-minded projects like EkStep

Finding Nandan and Rohini Nilekani’s home in Bengaluru’s upscale residential neighbourhood of Koramangala is as easy or as difficult as nosing out any other address for the first time in a big city. The almost inconspicuous driveway leading up to the bungalow belies the structure built out on 30,000 square feet bang in the heart of the city. A rather cramped external façade has no tell-tale signs of the famous residents inside and, just when you contemplate turning back, a guard peeps out from behind an iron gate to confirm the address and asks for names before letting you in.

Inside the house at the entrance there is a seating area where we take off our shoes. In an expansive living area, a swing adds a dash of playfulness. A sunlit courtyard-like space overlooks lush green lawns. Adjacent to it is a well-laid seating area that’s ideal as a hangout, and for a chat.

But that’s not where the Nilekanis want to meet. Down the stairs is a quieter zone, although some renovation is underway. AC cartons are strewn around, in places the paint has been scrubbed off and walls have a fresh layer of POP. “Sorry for the mess. There’s some repair work going on,” says Nandan.

You’re tempted to hang on to that word (“repair”), and draw a parallel with the career of one of the seven co-founders of one-time software services bellwether, Infosys. After all, at 60, Nandan too is dusting himself off and getting back up again. After a little over a year of lying low, and smarting from a massive defeat in the Lok Sabha elections, he is back to the drawing board. “For the first time I am in Bangalore most of the time… spending time at home with family. Even at Infosys, I travelled a lot to meet customers,” he says.

“Repair”, however, may be a tad harsh a word to describe Nandan’s current status. ‘Re-inventing’ is perhaps a more accurate description of the process for a man who till, only a year and a half ago, was at the forefront of the government’s ambitious project to give every Indian a unique identify number, called Aadhaar. “Rather than doing one thing like an Infosys or an Aadhaar, I am now doing a portfolio of things, 80-90 per cent of which are public spirited in nature,” he says. Another shift from the past is that Nandan is now working more closely than ever with his wife Rohini (although not on all fronts).

Their biggest initiative is EkStep, an ambitious education app that aspires to fix the learning challenges India’s 200 million children between the ages of five and 10 years face. “They are onto something big,” avers Ashish Dhawan, founder, Central Square Foundation, a philanthropic outfit focused on improving education in India.



Rohini jokes that it’s only when she “threw the phrase ‘200 million kids’ at him” that she caught Nandan’s attention for EkStep. Clearly, it’s the big picture that excites him and, as Rohini points out, Nandan “is able to imagine scale and platform in a way that is quite rare”.



Sure enough, Nandan’s deep and wide global networks have come to the fore, with EkStep working with over 100 organisations in India and globally, from Premji Foundation and NGO Pratham in India to Microsoft and Google for technology; the project should be ready to roll out by early next year.

“He has always brought innovation to whatever he has done — whether it was Infosys or UIDAI [Unique Identification Authority of India, which rolled out Aadhaar and where Nandan was chairman, with a Cabinet minister rank to boot]. I am positive he will bring innovative ideas to the cause of education,” says Infosys cofounder NR Narayana Murthy.

Neck-deep & Sailing Smooth

Beyond EkStep, there’s plenty more, too. Nandan is an anchor-investor in a startup that is in stealth mode. He does not want to reveal much except that he is neck-deep in its strategy. He is also mentoring/advising entrepreneurs and startups — from serial entrepreneur K Ganesh to the founders of InMobi, a mobile ad network. Nandan reckons he would be spending two to four hours a week advising at least two startups. “It exercises my strategic thinking muscles and gives me intellectual satisfaction. And also quickly updates me on what’s happening.”

For example, every quarter, he spends three hours with the board of Portea Medical, a home healthcare services startup. Its promoter K Ganesh says Nandan’s immense ability to marry the macro and micro picture has been very helpful. Nandan once advised that Portea should position itself not as home healthcare company (addressable market $5 billion) but consumer healthcare company (addressable market $50 billion). “It was a small thing but made a huge difference to our growth prospects,” says Ganesh.

For the couple who declared assets worth Rs 7,700 crore in the general elections of 2014 — the 38 million Infosys shares that he and his wife hold are today worth a little over Rs 3,500 crore — wealth creation isn’t a priority. He will continue to invest, but not with a keen eye on returns. “I don’t want to invest for the sake of investing [or making money]. I am looking at areas where the private sector can make high impact at a scale,” says Nandan.

That means investing in a slew of institutions that he hopes could give India its own share of home-grown think tanks. The Indian Institute of Human Settlements (IIHS, which focuses on urban issues), the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER, which does economic analysis and research), eGovernments Foundation (which is working to improve governance in government through technology), iSPIRT (an industry lobby that aspires to build IT product companies) and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI, which is working to make mobile payments easier) are some of the institutions he is immersed in.

And then there’s the book that he is working on and will be launched in six months. Rebooting Government, coauthored by Viral B Shah, founding partner of Julia Computing, who was also at UIDAI, dwells on how technology can improve governance.

Straddling Many Worlds

Nandan today has moved on far away from the poster boy of Indian IT services that he once was, leading Infosys as the chief executive during its dream run between 2002 and 2007, a period in which revenues multiplied five times (to over `13,000 crore) and net profit margins were as high as 27 per cent (as against 23.1 per cent in fiscal year 2015).

In July 2009, he stepped out of Infosys, and the corporate world, to join the Congress-led government and build UIDAI from scratch. “I went from running a 1,00,000-people company to a startup inside the government,” he says. Today, UIDAI is the world’s largest such programme to give a unique 12-number ID to over 100 crore Indians.

It was no walk in the park, with privacy concerns being voiced, and faults found in the data collection methods (by some from the Congress party, as well). Today, though, there’s no going back from Aadhaar, with the current government too firmly behind it. Nandan lets on that he met prime minister Narendra Modi and briefed him on the project. “He is very tech savvy. So the value of Aadhaar was very clear to him,” says the former UIDAI chairman. Since then the project has only got stronger; as of June 2015, 87.2 crore Indians had Aadhaar numbers.

“Very few people have used their experience in running large businesses to solve big social and developmental issues. Nandan has done that,” says Srikanth Nadhamuni, chief executive and cofounder of Khosla Labs, a startup incubation and innovation lab that has American serial entrepreneur Vinod Khosla as chairman. A top-notch chip designer from Silicon Valley, Nadhamuni has had stints in companies like Intel and was the chief technology officer for the UIDAI project.

In 2014, Nandan took another shot in the dark — he stepped into electoral politics, contesting the Lok Sabha elections on a Congress ticket from a seat in Bengaluru that had a five-time winner (Ananth Kumar).

A loss was inevitable, although the political greenhorn didn’t see it coming. “I am not used to losing. It is as simple as that... I was traumatised for a few weeks… but the fact that I found ways to engage and have a meaningful impact without a formal position [helped]. I think now I am completely over all that,” he says, adding that he has bid adieu to active politics.

Next step with EkStep

The idea occurred to the Nilekanis while they were attending their son-in-law Shray Chandra’s convocation ceremony at Harvard last summer. The Nilekanis visited edX, a joint MOOC (massive open online course) programme run by MIT and Harvard.

Fascinated by what MOOC could do to higher education, Rohini — who has been working in the education space with NGOs such as Pratham and Akshara Foundation over the last 15 years — wanted to explore if this could be done in primary education too. “While enrolments in schools have improved, learning outcome has been an issue,” she says. The nod from Nandan, fresh from his political defeat, came easily. “I was looking for something meaningful to do after the election. And I realise this could be done without being in the system,” he says. Despite the government spending `5,86,085 crore ($94 billion) over the last decade on primary education, learning outcomes have been poor.

To start with, the couple has allocated $10 million for the project. This is the first time the Nilekanis are working together. “It has been good so far.

I am enjoying it. Ask her,” quips Nandan. “So far, so good. We haven’t had too many fights,” jokes Rohini as she throws a glance at Nandan.

The cofounders — the Nilekanis and tech entrepreneur Shankar Maruwada, chief executive of EkStep — have built a core team of 16 people and are working with a range of experts, partners, institutions and universities in India and globally to make this happen. Expected to be ready early next year, the multimedia app will be available for free, will target children in the five to 10 age bracket and will focus on improving language and math skills. Helped by schools, parents or tuition teachers, children could learn in a fun way on a smartphone.

The app will identify learning gaps

for each child and offer a personalised learning trajectory.

“Think of it like this: a smartphone that can read a story to a child whose parents are semiliterate.

Or if a child reads out a story and then the voice recognition software can recognise and self-correct if the child is reading wrong,” explains Maruwada.

EkStep recently requested World Bank education specialist Helen Abadzi to be a member on its advisory board. “I am impressed with their interest in producing effective software that will teach numeracy to the poor,” she says. Zoran Popovic, a computer graphics and interactive games research expert from the University of Washington, too is chipping in: “Although the focus is on success in India, reaching the goals here at this scale could change the future of children globally,” he says. Eva L Baker, professor at University of California, and also a director at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards & Student Testing, is working closely with EkStep as a long-term strategic partner. “Because learning technologies are integral to their central goals, our experience in technology evaluation in educational settings is very relevant,” says Baker.

Brush with Public Life

The first signs of the Nilekanis’ public spiritedness were seen way back in 1999 when Nandan was appointed the chairman of Bangalore Action Task Force (BATF) when S M Krishna was chief minister of Karnataka, and Bengaluru was competing with Hyderabad to attract investments. “I got my first taste of tackling urban issues then,” recalls Nandan.

V Ravichandar, chairman and managing director, Feedback Consulting, has known Nandan since the ’80s. He recalls how at BATF, Nandan pushed to flip over the model from advisory to collaboration with the government.

In 2003, he helped cofound eGovernments Foundation with a `5-crore grant. The outfit would work to improve governance in municipal corporations. Today, its software is being used by 275 cities across India.

Be it Infosys or BATF or UIDAI and now Ek-Step, Nandan is at ease working with all kinds of people. As his former colleague at Infosys, V Balakrishnan, points out: “What stood out even at Infosys is Nandan’s ability to work with a team with different personalities and views and bring focus to the project despite differences,” he says.

The team at UIDAI was indeed diverse. For instance, Naman Pugalia, 27, when backpacking across the country in 2009, dropped an email to Nandan showing interest in joining the project. To Pugalia’s surprise, the chairman responded and a few interactions later he came on board. “He can connect at all levels.

I am less than half his age but he never made me feel that way. Working with him, the learning curve is steep,” says Pugalia, now the chief executive of Fourth Lion, a tech startup that provided data backup for Nandan’s poll campaign. At the other end of the spectrum, Ashok Pal Singh, a joint secretary at the ministry of finance, too, volunteered to work with Nandan.

“It was a blind shot I was taking.” He says it was like living a dream. “It never happened that we moved a file before lunch or dinner and the decision did not come by lunch or dinner respectively,” he says. More than anything, Singh was impressed by his ethical standards. In those five years, he never travelled on government expense.

His salary was put in the PM’s relief fund. He had the same samosas and tea that everybody else did.

Despite being of Cabinet rank, he never threw his weight around. He would stand in queue at the airport to check-in rather than use the VIP card.

Working inside the government when at UIDAI, though, brought its own challenge, of dealing with two cultures: those used to governmental hierarchy and those in the private sector who were not. Nandan managed to hold his own. “He was an agent of change. Government is all about systems and status quo. The tension between the two was there all the time,” adds Singh.

Tryst with Politics

Nothing in his over three-decade career, however, could prepare him for the drubbing in his political foray. “For me the political transition was even starker [as compared to the one from Infosys to UIDAI],” he says. The man who dressed up nattily in crisp suits during the Infosys days was now seen in safari suits, and untucked shirts to manage perceptions. At political meetings when he wore colourful shirts he was requested to wear only white.

“It is a high-contact activity. Some people thrive on that and draw energy from it. But for me that was quite challenging. You always have to be on call. You can never have a moment to yourself to reflect,” he says. Rohini nods: “It was gruelling. In a way you can never be off stage in politics,” she says. Nandan adds: “The reason I wanted to enter politics was I wanted to make a bigger difference. The good thing is, now we can be as impactful from the outside with EkStep.” And with a few more similar strides.