Dr. Pramod Varma is the visionary technologist and engineer who served as the Chief Architect of Aadhaar, India's digital identity program that successfully covered nearly 1.4 billion people. He is the foundational architect for the entire India Stack—including eSign, DigiLocker, and Unified Payment Interface (UPI)—all of which operate at population scale. His career is dedicated to leveraging technology, science, and open-source principles to drive inclusive and equitable economic growth.
Varma’s influence extends to the next generation of digital infrastructure. He is the Co-Founder of FIDE and co-creator of the open-source Beckn Protocol, which enables decentralized open discovery and transaction networks. This protocol is the base for India’s new efforts, such as the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC.org) and Kochi Open Mobility Network (Namma Yatri), signaling a shift from centralized platforms to open, interoperable digital ecosystems.
His commitment to national development is unwavering: he played an integral role in architecting India’s digital health infrastructure, including the vaccination and immunization infrastructure (Co-WIN & DIVOC). He is currently the CTO at the EkStep Foundation, helping build Digital Public Infrastructure for the education sector, which currently provides learning opportunities to over 200 million children.
As a regular speaker, evangelist for open-source efforts, and Co-Chair at the global Center for DPI, Dr. Varma advocates for the DPI approach as a means to drive inclusive and equitable economic growth. His counsel is highly sought by numerous key government bodies, including UIDAI, NPCI, SEBI, and ONDC, and he is an adjunct faculty at IIIT-B. His presentations offer unparalleled insight into scaling complex, internet-scale distributed architectures.
