Nandan Nilekani on Cashless Nation

Thank you. It is a great pleasure for me to talk about this book, Cashless Nation. It is a wonderful book — almost like a thriller — because it traces the history of how UPI came about.

It has been written by two very talented people. Santanu Paul is a technologist and entrepreneur: IIT Madras, a PhD from the University of Michigan, worked at IBM, and has founded a number of startups. He was on the board of NPCI, so he had a ringside seat to what happened in those remarkable years when UPI was conceived and implemented. B. Sambamurthy is a banker. He was Chairman of Corporation Bank, head of IDRBT (a research institute in Hyderabad), briefly Chairman of NPCI, and the board member representing RBI.

So these two people — one a technologist-entrepreneur, the other a banker — have come together to write this book. They interviewed more than thirty of the key stakeholders, and what emerges is a fascinating tale of how a country went from laggard to leapfrog into the modern world of UPI over a ten-year journey.

In fact, the story precedes UPI. Long before it, there were many important steps that led to it:

• The passing of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act in 2007
• The formation of NPCI in 2008
• IMPS, launched to send money and enable remittances
• Aadhaar, which laid the foundation for bank account opening
• eKYC, which led to bank accounts
• The Aadhaar-enabled payment system, which allowed people to withdraw money from their bank accounts
• And then UPI, which made it no longer necessary to withdraw money at all

Aadhaar eKYC also enabled companies like Reliance Jio to roll out 100 million users in six months, transforming the mobile networks and creating very low-cost data in India, which changed everything.

So it all came together: the mobile revolution, Aadhaar, UPI — and of course the events along the way. Demonetisation led to a big push on digital payments and the launch of BHIM. COVID, when people did not want to touch one another, made cashless transactions the preferred option. And then the rise of the humble QR code, now found in millions and millions of establishments.

This is a fascinating book by two stalwarts — one a technologist, one a banker. It is written in a very good style, where you actually feel you are in the room when the decisions are being taken. It also shows how complex reforms are. Reforms take years. They have to navigate many things. They have to sell a vision of what is possible. In many cases there are incumbents who do not want these reforms, and that has to be dealt with. Regulators have to appreciate what is happening. There are a lot of angles.

But I think this book has done a wonderful job. Everyone at GFF should read it. Thank you very much.