Ganesh Jayadevan, Chief Technology Officer at Sahamati for National Engineer’s Day
“For most of my career, engineers, myself included, spent more time fixing than building. In India, we even celebrated it: Jugaad. But as my friend Vinay Dhabolkar writes, we are steadily moving from improvisation to systematic innovation. And engineering from first principles.
Digital Public Infrastructure is where I see it most powerfully. Build it well, open, interoperable, rights preserving, and it becomes a foundation for economic growth and inclusion. At 1.4 billion people, India is not a test bed. It is the real thing.
The Account Aggregator ecosystem is the example I am proudest of. 220 million users. Over 500 million consents given. Services that simply did not exist before: MSME and personal lending, insurance, wealth management, personal finance, tax filing, all powered by consented, secure data flows. And critically, designed so that a citizen can share their financial data with a tap, without friction, without confusion. Good user experience is not a layer on top of infrastructure. Without good UX, we don’t serve the citizens.
No single team achieved this. The best talent across Account Aggregators, banks, insurers, fintechs and technology partners built this together. Great engineering at scale can be a community effort.
For an engineer who wants to build things that matter, this is a genuinely great time to be alive.” – Ganesh Jayadevan, CTO, Sahamati