CTO EkStep Foundation, Chief Architect Aadhaar & India Stack, Founding Architect of Beckn Protocol
Dr. Pramod Varma is the Chief Architect of Aadhaar, India's digital identity program that has successfully covered more than 1.3 billion people. He is also the chief architect for various India Stack layers such as eSign, Digital Locker, and Unified Payment Interface (UPI), and Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA), and all of which are now working at population scale in India. He also played 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, a not-for-profit creating learner-centric digital public goods under Project Sunbird (sunbird.org) that powers India’s largest digital learning platform called DIKSHA. These are used to provide learning opportunities to 200 million children and 10+ million teachers in India and also used in other learning, skilling, and capacity building efforts in India and other countries. As part of this effort, he also helped design India’s digital education & skilling architecture blueprint called NDEAR.
He is also the genesis author of the open source beckn protocol (becknprotocol.io) that helps create decentralized open discovery, fulfillment, and transaction networks. Beckn protocol is the base protocol for India’s new efforts such as Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), Kochi Open Mobility Network (KOMN), and Unified Health Interface (UHI).
He is an advisor to Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), National Payment Corporation (NPCI), Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN), National Health Authority (NHA), Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), Turing Institute Identity Initiative in the UK, and helps with many digital public infrastructure (DPI/DPG) initiatives in India and across the globe.
Pramod holds a Master’s and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science along with a second Master’s in Applied Mathematics. His interests include Internet scale distributed architectures and intelligent systems. He is passionate about technology, science, society, and teaching.