Dr. Pramod Varma CTO EkStep Foundation, Chief Architect Aadhaar & India Stack
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 the population scale in India. He also played an 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.
He is also the genesis author of the open source beckn protocol (becknprotocol.io) that helps create decentralized open discovery, fulfillment, and transaction networks.
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.
