Dev Khandekar

Dev Khandekar is a fellow in the technology policy programme, working on digital public infrastructure, compute policy and data governance. His argument, made across several papers, is that India's digital infrastructure succeeds or fails on governance rather than code: identity, payments and data-sharing rails need institutions that answer to users, not only engineering that scales to them. He also makes the case for treating compute as a strategic input, planned the way the country once planned power.

Trained as an engineer, he spent a decade building large transaction systems in the payments industry before moving into public service as an adviser to a Union ministry on digital infrastructure. He has served on official working groups on data protection and on the governance of population-scale platforms, and helped draft the technical standards for a national data-exchange framework. He later took graduate training in public policy abroad.

At Vidura House his current work concerns public compute: where India should build shared capacity for training and running large models, who should get access to it and at what price. He also writes on the unfinished business of data governance, including the rules for government use of personal data, and convenes a monthly forum for engineers and regulators to argue in private.