From Foreign Policy magazine.

"Seattle has Bill," Thomas Friedman once wrote. "Bangalore has Nandan." The co-founder of Infosys -- the Indian company that made "outsourcing" a household word -- famously gave Friedman the central conceit for The World Is Flat when he said that global commerce's "playing field is being leveled" by communications technology.

Now tasked with providing digital IDs to 1.2 billion Indians, Nandan Nilekani is trying to finish the job he started in the private sector: bringing a country that never entirely left the 19th century all the way into the 21st.  Read