For the last two months, Jantar Mantar has been filled with anxious students, worried parents and angry slogans.
The trigger was the NEET crisis. A paper leak forced the government to cancel the 2026 medical entrance exam and order a re-test, sending more than two million students back to their books.
What began as frustration soon grew into a larger movement.
A satirical youth group calling itself the Cockroach Janta Party turned the protest into a national talking point.
Activist Sonam Wangchuk joined the agitation and went on a 26-day hunger strike. Reports of students dying by suicide added to the public anger.
So when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced this week that Nandan Nilekani would head a new task force on exam reforms, it did not feel like a routine committee appointment.
It felt like the government was turning to someone it trusts when a problem becomes too difficult for the usual system to handle.
It is not the first time Nilekani has received that call.
The conversation that changed everything
Go back to 2009.
Nandan Nilekani had just completed a successful run as CEO of Infosys.
One day, he sat down with Montek Singh Ahluwalia, then deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and one of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s closest advisers.
Ahluwalia had a proposal.
Would Nilekani leave the corporate world and build a national identity system for more than a billion Indians?
For most people, that would have been an easy yes.
But Nilekani had one condition.
He wanted complete freedom to run the project.
He did not want to be a ceremonial chairman reporting to multiple ministries. If he was taking the job, he wanted authority to make decisions and move fast.
Manmohan Singh agreed.
Nilekani was given Cabinet rank and put in charge of what would become Aadhaar.
It was a small moment. But it explained much of what followed.
Nilekani, who was the co-founder of Infosys, was appointed in 2009 by then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with cabinet rank to lead UIDAI.
A resignation nobody expected
Leaving one of India’s most successful companies for a government assignment was not a normal career move.
In 2009, very few corporate leaders had done anything similar.
Nilekani did it anyway.
He became the founding chairman of the newly created Unique Identification Authority of India, or UIDAI.
The challenge was enormous.
India needed a unique identity system for more than 1.2 billion people. Millions had no reliable proof of identity. Many lacked birth certificates. Others depended on documents that were often incomplete, outdated or difficult to verify.
The task sounded almost impossible.
Yet the project moved quickly.
The first Aadhaar number was issued in September 2010.
By November 2011, enrolment had crossed 100 million people.
Just a few months later, the number doubled.
Within Nilekani’s tenure, more than 600 million people had enrolled.
Few countries had attempted anything on that scale.
Even fewer had done it so quickly.
Nandan Nilekani with PM Modi
Building support before the law arrived
There was another problem.
For years, UIDAI operated without a dedicated law passed by Parliament.
That uncertainty could have slowed the project.
Many officials would have waited for legislation before moving ahead.
Nilekani chose a different path.
Instead of focusing on what Aadhaar lacked, he focused on who could benefit from it.
He convinced the Reserve Bank of India that Aadhaar could help bring millions of unbanked Indians into the financial system.
He persuaded oil companies that it could reduce fraud in subsidy programmes.
He convinced state governments that it could improve welfare delivery.
Different institutions supported Aadhaar for different reasons.
The result was the same.
The project gathered momentum.
People who worked with Nilekani during those years often speak about his patience.
Meetings were full of competing interests, sceptical officials and bureaucratic hurdles.
Yet he rarely seemed interested in public battles.
His approach was usually the same.
Keep talking. Keep persuading. Keep moving forward.
The year Aadhaar nearly changed course
Then came the biggest test.
In 2014, Nilekani left UIDAI and entered politics.
He contested the Bengaluru South Lok Sabha election as a Congress candidate.
He lost to BJP leader Ananth Kumar.
Soon after, Narendra Modi led the BJP to a sweeping national victory.
For Aadhaar, the timing was worrying.
The BJP had criticised the programme while in opposition. Some leaders had raised concerns about privacy and surveillance. Others saw it as a flagship UPA project.
There were genuine doubts about whether the new government would continue with it.
Former Planning Commission chief Montek Singh Ahluwalia later recalled that Aadhaar appeared vulnerable at that moment.
Nilekani did not simply watch from the sidelines.
Nandan Nilekani joined the Indian National Congress in March 2014 and contested from the Bangalore South constituency.
In June 2014, he met Modi and made the case for continuing the project.
The details of that conversation remain private.
Its outcome is not.
Aadhaar survived.
More than that, it expanded.
Over the following years, it became central to welfare delivery, digital payments and financial inclusion. After demonetisation in 2016, the digital infrastructure built around Aadhaar became even more important.
The project had started under one government.
It grew under another.
And Nilekani made sure both could claim ownership.
Over the years, he has consistently credited the UPA for launching the idea and the NDA for expanding it.
It is a position that avoids political fights and keeps the focus on the project itself.
Success came with criticism too
Aadhaar’s growth also made Nilekani one of the most visible faces of India’s digital transformation.
With that visibility came scrutiny.
Privacy advocates questioned how much information should be linked to a single identity number.
Others worried about surveillance and data security.
The debate eventually reached the Supreme Court.
It continues even today.
Whenever Aadhaar returns to the headlines, Nilekani often finds himself answering questions about choices made more than a decade ago.
That is the reality of building something used by almost every Indian.
The successes become public.
So do the criticisms.
Back in the spotlight
Now, seventeen years after he first entered government, Nilekani finds himself leading another high-profile mission.
The new exam reform task force includes a former ISRO chief, a former Intelligence Bureau director and the director of IIT Madras.
The names are different.
The challenge is different.
But the approach feels familiar.
Bring together experts from different fields.
Build consensus.
Find a way through a problem that has become politically and emotionally charged.
That may be why both Congress and BJP governments have repeatedly turned to Nilekani.
His reputation is not built on speeches or ideology.
It is built on execution.
Seventeen years ago, he was asked to solve a problem many believed was too large and too complicated to fix.
Aadhaar was the result.
Today, India is asking him to help rebuild trust in its examination system.
Whether he succeeds remains to be seen.
But once again, when the government needed a fixer, it called Nandan Nilekani.
