India’s digital economy has made personal data unavoidable. The harder task is ensuring that citizens retain meaningful control over the trails they leave behind. In August this year, the Unified Payments Interface processed about 24.5 billion transactions worth nearly Rs. 29.8 lakh crore, according to data from the National Payments Corporation of India. Aadhaar’s authentication system recorded more than 17,759 crore transactions in FY2025-26, according to UIDAI’s dashboard.

AI generated image Every profession has its own measure of success. A lawyer wins a case. An entrepreneur builds a company. An athlete breaks a record. A scientist, however, succeeds in a rather unusual way. A scientist succeeds by becoming less certain. That may sound paradoxical. Yet the history of science is nothing but a history of changing minds. The Earth ceased to be the center of the universe. Diseases stopped being blamed on bad air. Ulcers were no longer attributed

Kunal Shah’s rise from city entrepreneur to global head of WhatsApp signals that India is producing genuine architects of the digital age. For much of the internet era, the world’s defining digital products were imagined in California. The next chapter looks markedly different. Artificial intelligence, digital finance and ubiquitous connectivity have flattened the distance between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world. Increasingly, the most interesting ideas are emerging