The Ledger, every show

“The danger is that we would be a trade colony of China and a tech colony of the U S and we have to find our way out of this scenario.”

“Today in the fast payment world, the momentum is not with UPI is with PIX. It's a Brazilian system, which is inspired by UPI as they say. And but they've done a very good job of the basics of taking it out.”

“If you use a Visa MasterCard, the US government will potentially have strings that they can use to control one day, perhaps even shut the system down if needed.”

“Big tech had a well known, although they won't admit it, but the fact is that they had an organized effort to restrict AI. To their own set of people. They said, let's erect entry barriers so that , right? This is they will never accept it, but this was a real…”

“That doesn't happen today, because CSIR, I'm sorry to be so blunt, is defunct. Our academic research is mostly hobby research, and so we have a problem. We don't have the research infrastructure.”

“Now, of course, this means that we should give some preferential treatment to Indian model builders over other model builders.”

“What if I tell you that a year from now, it'll be Tejas. And if it is Tejas, then you have to take me out for lunch. And if it is not Tejas, I'll take all of you out for lunch, right? As having lost the bed.”

“Our choke point is no longer whether the ecosystem is ready, whether the market is ready, whether the investors are ready. Our, frankly, our entrepreneurs are not ready. And we have to therefore help them be ready.”

“Today, you know, it's safe to say that if you have Economic power and military power, but no technology power. It doesn't count for a lot. And if you have technology power, you'll be able to accumulate the other two parts relatively easily.”

“They think every open source project is a DPI. They think every government tech is DPI, which is not true. Some government tech is DPI. If it enables private entrepreneurship or private innovation to happen on type on top, some open sources DPI. And all DPI is…”

“There is literally, literally no meaningful country which has adopted UPI as a domestic payment system. Within their country.”

“And that required us to open up the protocol in a very structured way. We didn't do that. You know, we are doing that now. But Brazilians with Pix did that I think in July or August of and so we got a little cocky and overconfident about our own momentum in th…”

“And the same Facebook, which had insisted on removing net neutrality here was now defending net neutrality here using the three page policy that we had created to basically preserve our net neutrality.”

“And the fact that stock market is popped up is because lots of new money is coming in. And because that system provides clarity and good regulation of the mutual fund ecosystem in a way, very few countries do it today.”

“So we understand these tax liability chains now better than anything else. And that will be important for AI. We'll come back to AI a little later in AI regulation in a very big way.”

“And we have we did a very poor job of that with Aadhaar, better job with UPI, better still with Depa.”

“Part of our pain in the fintech system is that neither the fintechs nor the banks, unregulated, regulated, and the regulator have remained true to this three lane model while everybody says this is the right model.”

“The fact is that when your economy is reliant on Visa MasterCard, you're paying a one person tax to a third country, right?”

“Probably 50 of our 120 unicorns are technically not Indian, right?”

“We do well with the technology architecture, you know, protocols and platforms and how to think about them. I would say we get an A there. We do pretty poorly B minus for the regulatory architecture on top of that. We do our ecosystem building organizations, w…”

“So about 23 years ago, had they not challenged the monopoly of Internet Explorer, I can tell you Google would not be an important company it is today. You know, you won't have had Facebook as an independent company that you have today. You know, even the curre…”

“Now your question is, do we have a game plan like that for AI, right? And is it understood by all the three stakeholders? And the short answer is not yet. We don't have a game plan. We know some elements of the game plan but we don't We know those elements are…”

“Furthermore, this is one place where there is Difficult regulation called HIPAA in the US that will prevent US startups being able to do well.”

“By looking at the bookends on the distribution side and at the data side, We may allow for a fairly liberal system in the middle.”

“This is next few years, our make or break off for India, because as the supply chains are up in the air, We can find our place in this world, you know, by dominating some parts of the supply chain. If we don't do this in the next four or five years, you know, …”

“In India, you get actually the ability to influence because you have taken this approach of being no greed, no glory. So you can now say I'm genuinely doing it for this cause. There is no hidden agenda that I have, which is either to get glory or to make money…”

“And on, on, on February 11th or February 13th, I forget the date, ah, of 2016, was in, in Taj Vivanthal, ah, the sandbox that was launched. And 321 people came for that. I remember that because, you know, everybody had to register. There was only one VC amongs…”

“The numbers for UPI started ticking up slowly only in September of 2017. And whoever entered the UPI market after September 2017 does not effectively exist.”

“Today, tech is all about S curve inflection. After the first S curve inflection happens, it's already too late to enter the market. Not only for the entrepreneur, but even for the early stage investor. I say to early stage investors that it's already come in t…”

“You know, 40% of our unicorns are technically not Indian at all, right? They are Singaporean or American.”

“The fact that we could avoid monopolization and wrong kind of toll collecting because the primitives in our view should be public utilities data blind public utilities rather than anything else.”

“One of the promises that we make in MOSIP is that it is non-weaponizable. So if you implement the MOSIP system in your country, there is no backdoor that India will have that will allow India to control that system as you go forward.”

“We get a little bit of a chance. We go from being the underdog to the top dog, and we think everything is sorted out. And this is our problem even, even in DPI. And so it's very, very important that we maintain an underdog mindset.”

“Now in India, cable television is Follows the must carry rule. It's good for the ecosystem, but not good for the consumer. You pay actually more for cable TV today than you were paying earlier, because that is how the system is set up.”

“So I don't know how many people in India know that when you buy a ticket from make my trip Yatra or clear trip or any of these place, they are passengers agents. So you pay a convenience fee. The airline doesn't pay them. And that means that when Akasa air as …”

“GST revenues are very hard to fudge because we do the value chain kind of settlement, not on a monthly basis, not even on an invoice basis, but on a line item of an invoice basis.”

“If I take a hundred regulators, I would say only about 20, 30 of them have a good understanding of this. Another 20, 30 have heard of it, but they don't have a very good understanding and 20, 30 have not even heard of it.”

“Similarly, I would say in many corporate use cases you know, will we be able to win? I don't think so. For example Salesforce has got such a lock in on customer facing kind of corporate use cases. And since our way of thinking about those use cases is more or …”

“We already have a line of sight to 18,000 GPUs if we need”

“Right now, we don't have an industrial lab here at all.”

“Our big companies like Reliance you know, our leaders there are very interested in doing that. You know, in Tata's, they're very interested in doing that and others, and I'm hoping that they'll make the right big moves to create these kinds of industrial labs.”

“But what will happen is that if these companies are profit maximizing entities, they will suck the value away from the edges, because if you, on the other hand, make them a public utility, Then the value is either with the person who had the data, the hospital…”

“And some of them are going to announce in the coming months that they will follow our system. DEPA on a global basis, even in jurisdictions that don't require them to follow.”

“Our view in India is that we don't know how the ecosystem will evolve. There's a lot of unpredictability. Therefore, we must think of it as a complex adaptive system and retain the right to intervene wherever it makes sense. For some years, it may make sense t…”

“So we have to take some agency away from the children and give it to the parents, because if you were in the West, we would give it to the teachers. If you were in China, we'd give it to the state, you know, but in India, we have to give it to the parents.”

“We went and said, look, so much experiment that has happened with philanthropic capital has to move into public capital, and perhaps we need to allocate 10,000 crores. Then we were told that's too little. It should be. So we said, okay, 25,000 crores is what y…”

“First of all, you can't be a sutradhar in your twenties. It's very difficult, right? Because you have to deal with complex things. You have to draw many stakeholders together, right? You got to take a whole of nation approach. So you got to be in your mid fort…”

“Microsoft, of course, the profits are through the roof, but the low profit year for them was 2013. But even in that low profit year, they made more profits than the top 20 IT services companies of the world put together.”