When Nandan Nilekani and Pramod Verma designed India Stack, they created something unprecedented: open, interoperable digital infrastructure at civilizational scale. Aadhaar gives identity. UPI enables value transfer. DigiLocker enables verifiable credentials. Together, they form what I think of as civilizational plumbing — invisible infrastructure that makes everything else possible.
Why this matters through a dharmic lens
The Vedic concept of yajna — sacrifice for collective good — finds a modern expression here. India Stack is a yajna of engineering: vast effort, no individual credit, collective benefit.
The preservation question
If India Stack can be built for financial inclusion, could the same architectural principles — open protocols, population-scale, interoperable — be applied to cultural preservation? Could we build an open protocol for heritage data the way UPI is an open protocol for payments?
This is the question that animates several of my projects.