Nandan Nilekani: The Tech Stalwart Steering India's Exam Reform

On Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a surprise – Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani would now spearhead a high‑powered task force charged with revamping the National Testing Agency (NTA). The move signals the government’s intent to inject a fresh, tech‑first mindset into the way exams are conducted across the country.

For anyone who’s followed India’s digital transformation, Nilekani’s name rings a lot of bells. He was the founding chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and, back in 2009, oversaw the birth of Aadhaar – the world’s largest biometric ID system. That massive rollout taught him how to blend scale with security, lessons that are suddenly very relevant for an examination ecosystem that touches millions of students.

But Aadhaar was just the start. Nilekani has also been a relentless champion of the country’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) stack. He helped push the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) from a niche idea to a global reference for instant payments. He sat on the Technology Advisory Group for Unique Projects (TAGUP), whose recommendations shaped the architecture of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) portal – another complex, high‑volume system that runs largely on technology.

Remember FASTag, the electronic toll collection system that you see on highways? Yep, that too bears his imprint. And in 2019, the Reserve Bank of India tapped him to chair a high‑level committee on deepening digital payments, a report that nudged the nation further toward a cash‑less future.

More recently, Nilekani’s expertise has been called upon in arenas you might not immediately associate with a tech veteran. In 2025, the Supreme Court appointed him as an external expert to its AI Committee, guiding the judiciary on how to safely adopt artificial intelligence. The same year, he became the chief mentor of the India Energy Stack task force, which is basically building a digital backbone for the power sector.

Now, with the exam reform task force, he’s being asked to stitch together all those threads – governance, scalability, security, and user‑centric design – into a single, coherent strategy for the NTA. The mandate is ambitious: redesign the agency’s processes, embed robust digital tools, and ensure that the exam‑taking experience is transparent, fraud‑proof, and accessible.

Sources say the task force will be multidisciplinary, pulling in experts from education, cybersecurity, data analytics and even behavioural science. The idea is to move beyond piecemeal fixes and instead build a resilient, future‑ready examination ecosystem.

For students and parents, the hope is simple – fewer glitches, quicker results, and a system that can adapt to unforeseen challenges (think pandemics or cyber‑attacks). For the bureaucracy, it’s a chance to finally leverage the same kind of technology that has powered Aadhaar or UPI, but this time to safeguard the integrity of assessments that determine millions of futures.

Whether Nilekani’s track record can be replicated in the education sector remains to be seen, but his résumé suggests he knows how to turn grand visions into operating realities. All eyes will now be on the task force’s first set of recommendations, expected later this year.