Digitisation of Rig Veda was a simple tech challenge that I enjoyed: Sadagopan, founder-director, IIIT Bangalore

Sadagopan speaks to indianexpress.com about his journey as an educationist, researcher, research administrator, startup incubator, and advisor to various government initiatives in the tech for good space. Excerpts:

Venkatesh Kannaiah: What has personally been a satisfying intervention for you in the tech sphere?

SN Sadagopan: One thing I recall with fondness is that during the 1990s, I came to know that the Rig Veda had not been digitised yet. The books published by Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute and VVR Institute Hoshiarapur went out of print fast. I along with Prof RL Kashyap, Padma Shri awardee and a pioneering mathematician and the originator of the Ho-Kashyap rule in algorithmic pattern recognition, worked to build an enhanced Sanskrit font, as the Sanskrit fonts then were not capturing the intonations in the Rig Veda.

We worked along with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and came up with an enhanced Sanskrit font and digitised the Rig Veda. We also got it published in the form of a book.

It was personally a very satisfying experience for me. It was also done with my and Prof Kashyap’s personal funds.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Can you tell us about your role in the digitisation of Tirumala Tirupati temple?

SN Sadagopan: I had gone to give a lecture at SV university in Tirupati, when I had the chance to meet with the Executive Officer of Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam, who wanted a tech solution to the ever-growing and chaotic queues of pilgrims at the temple.

Around 60,000-80,000 pilgrims visit the temple every day and it was not a very organised system. We worked to computerise the entry with a bar-coded tag pasted onto the hands of the pilgrims, and in the process replaced the physical queue with a logical queue. We tested the tag to make it waterproof, durable, and safe. We also worked on online payment systems for the temple in the form of e-Hundi, booking of rooms, and most challenging of all was the computerisation of the tonsuring process.

The methods of the hairdressers of Tirupati Tirumala (part of the tonsuring process) were all part of folklore, and digitising their services was quite a challenge. However, it went on well after convincing all the stakeholders. Now, I understand that TTD now is a model which is being followed at various pilgrim centres across the country.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Can you tell us the social impact startups that were incubated under IIIT-Bangalore under your guidance?

SN Sadagopan: The impact non-profit startup that I recall with a certain fondness is Vision Empower Trust by Y Vidhya. She was a visually challenged student and wanted to pursue MSc in Digital Society at IIIT-Bangalore. There were some initial hiccups from our end, but she later topped the entrance test and the course with a gold medal. She was also the first visually challenged student to study Mathematics in a Bachelor’s degree course in Computer Applications from Christ University, Bangalore and was the topper of her batch.

Vision Empower Trust went on to build a product that provides for Braille printing of books on a tablet and other devices at near zero cost. They also work to create accessible content, instruction kits, and technologies to assist the teaching and learning of STEM for children with visual impairment.

Bionic Yantra was another startup incubated at IIIT-Bangalore, trying to solve specific spinal cord problems. Patients with these conditions need to lie down all their remaining life and it is quite a hellish experience. The venture built a walking robot, a kind of intelligent walker, with an AI-enabled learning process so that it almost becomes like a friend helping you walk.

It is what is called a Wearable Robotic Exoskeleton (WRE) that is affordable and enables people to walk. Exoskeletons can be used to stand, walk and assist in performing activities of daily living. This startup went on to get recognised at various global medical conferences and is now a thriving company.

One of the interesting startups that was mentored by me was Zipdial, which was the first company to be acquired by Twitter (now X) in India. The idea for the venture came from the work carried out in the slums of Ejipura in Bengaluru. It was a Stanford student Valerie Rozycki Wagoner, who was interning at mChek in 2006 who found out the behaviour of basic phone users and how ordinary workers including housemaids and drivers used the “missed call” very creatively. For example, it would be one missed call for being late, two if they were not coming, and three for something very relevant to the person and the receiver.

This “missed call” logic was later picked up by the company Zipdial and used in a variety of situations. Many banks provide basic banking services like “balance inquiry” or “last 5 transactions” routinely using this concept.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Can you tell us more about your initiatives in the field of digitisation of examinations in India?

SN Sadagopan: We have used IIIT-Bangalore as a test bed for much of the experimentation around the digitisation of examinations. By around 2007, we found that examinations like GRE and GMAT were slowly moving online but that was not picking up in India. MeritTrac, an online testing company approached us and we worked with them to have the first online test pilot in IIIT-Bangalore. We had IIM’s CAT exam first in 2009 and others followed later. Many of the online testing models that you hear about now have been fine-tuned over the past 15 years.

We at IIIT-Bangalore were among the first to experiment with e-pads or exam pads. These exam pads are digitally writable devices with a stylus. The intention is to digitise the exam process while retaining the experience of writing an exam. The exam pads work on the cloud. The setting of question papers, answering questions, and evaluation is on the cloud. Exam Pad is a product of Chennai-based Little More Innovation Labs and used by dozens of universities involving thousands of students.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: What were your interventions in the fintech space, in terms of policy and governance?

SN Sadagopan: I am particularly proud of my association with NPCI (National Payment Corporation of India); I was the only non-banker and a techie Board member apart from Chairman NR Narayana Murthy. The then COO of NPCI and another Board member along with me pushed NPCI to make IMPS (Immediate Payment System) more and more simple; over time IMPS morphed into the now globally famous UPI.

Another intervention was the RTGS (Real Time Gross Settlement) for banks in India, a system where there is continuous and real-time settlement of fund transfers. I was the chairman of the technical committee for the upgradation of RTGS to 2.0; it was much before the explosion in online transfers. There was talk of increasing the capacity by 4 or 5 times, something considered ambitious those days. We went in for a 100-fold increase in capacity and there was initially some scepticism. I am sure that it paid off for the banks.

During 2020-22, I was the Chairman of the Regulatory Sandbox set up by the IRDAI (Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India), to monitor innovative insurance policies. Several innovative policies have evolved in the fields of health insurance and motor insurance.

I was also the TAC (Technology Advisory Committee) Chair of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI); during the tenure of our TAC, Algo (algorithmic trading) was notified, Algo democratised online trading and tech-savvy younger generation of Indians took to trading in a big way.

With the DICGC (Deposit Insurance and Credit Guarantee Corporation), I was the Chair of the committee that went into the ERP solution for increasing the guaranteed protection to ordinary depositors of banks. Earlier, the protection was to the tune of Rs 1 lakh, today the guaranteed protection has been increased to Rs 5 lakh. The ERP system provides information support to such decisions that ultimately helps ordinary citizens.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Any other tech interventions you are keen on, and which are under implementation?

SN Sadagopan: After Aadhar, there was global interest in citizen identity systems. iSPIRT was looking for an academic partner to develop an Open Source system for global adoption. IIIT-Bangalore was identified by iSPIRT as the academic partner and I was made the Chair of MOSIP (Modular Open Source Identity System); from 2017 to 2021, MOSIP developed an Open Source Citizen Identity system that is currently under implementation in several countries and several million identities have been issued already. MOSIP represents one of the first and most significant DPI (Digital Public Good) from India for the world and I am the Chairman (Emeritus) today.

I am eagerly awaiting the full implementation of the core banking services in all post offices in the country. The Indian postal service received a banking licence in the form of IPPB (India Post Payment Bank). I am on the technical committee to implement core banking across IPPB. It is expected that over the next couple of years, it will be fully implemented. It is a considerable achievement, as leading global banks like SBI have around 22,500 branches compared to 115,000 post office branches across the country.