An Aadhaar card submission queue at Hanuman Nagar, Kandivli (East)

It was a chance meeting with UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India) chairman and Infosys co-founder Nandan Nileknani circa 2010, that led to Viral Shah’s brief, yet significant stint with Aadhaar. At that time, Shah, who was in the US, fresh out of his PhD. from University of California, Santa Barbara, was in India to renew his visa. His eyes were set on collaborating with MIT on a project for his post doctorate. The meeting with Nilekani, however, changed everything. Shah dropped his visa application and immersed himself in rolling out the system as we know it today. "He told me about this cool and significant system that he was working on which would change the future of the country, but he mentioned he had no salary to offer. He had an open-door policy and he was getting hundreds of applications from people who understood the kind of impact Aadhaar was going to make. I wanted to be a part of that, I must have been among the first five or 10 people in the team," says the 37-year-old, who was assigned the role of building applications for Aadhaar in financial inclusions. "I rolled out the eKYC (Know Your Customer) and the LPG, kerosene and fertiliser subsidy, of which the LPG took off in a big way." Shah worked in Aadhaar for a little over two years, till 2012, before he left to resume his original passion — scientific computing. "My job in Aadhaar was to roll out the financial inclusion part of the system, and not to run it. While economic policy is also an area of my passion, I was itching to start something of my own," says Shah, co-founder of Julia Language, a high-performance computer (programming) language.