Dear Listeners, in this episode we speak to Dr. Pramod Varma, who is the Chief Architect of Aadhaar. He is also the chief architect for various India Stack layers such as eSign, Digital Locker, Unified Payment Interface (UPI), and Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA). He also played an integral role in architecting India’s digital health infrastructure (ABDM), vaccination & immunization infrastructure (Co-WIN and DIVOC), and Unified Health Interface (UHI). He is currently the CTO of EkStep Foundation and the genesis author of the open source beckn protocol. 

Most importantly a true thought leader. We spoke to him about the following topics/questions:

• Dr. Pramod's journey and how he came to work on Aadhaar and India Stack. The vision/mindset of the team that led to the largest biometric identity program in the world is also discussed


• How Aadhaar has unlocked value for various sectors in India.


• When designing Aadhaar, were other options/IDs/approaches available to your team?


• Why should the industry attempt to solve some use cases around authentication?


• What he thinks about relying less on OTP and moving toward secure and password-less solutions


• We discuss the supreme court's ruling stating that the right to privacy is fundamental, but not absolute. As well as asking his thoughts on the new Data Protection law


• What are the new projects that you have been working on - beck.org/diksha?