When the British laid railroads in India it led to the more efficient extraction of natural resources. Now the Indian government, through the combination of a trusted unique ID platform — tied to cellphones and mobile bank accounts — is creating a kind of digital railroad enabling the more efficient empowerment of human resources.

“It’s transforming the lives of ordinary people,” explained Alok Kshirsagar, a McKinsey partner based in Mumbai. “Millions are already benefiting from digital payments and credit. There are already more than 30 percent productivity gains when digital capabilities are used in agriculture, transportation and manufacturing. We are in the early stages of a transformation that could generate as much as $1 trillion in economic value over the next seven to 10 years.”

Now any Indian farmer can just go to one of 250,000 government community centers — each with a computer, Wi-Fi and a local entrepreneur who manages it — log into a government digital services website with the farmer’s unique ID and instantly print out a birth certificate or land records needed for transactions.

An Indian friend told me: “My driver has two bank accounts, and he has given one debit card to his wife and another to his son. And now he tells me he puts X amount of his salary into one account and Y into another, using his cellphone, so his wife is empowered and not asking her mother-in-law for money, because she has her own debit card, and the son, who is off in school training to be a doctor, can be independent.”

Nilekani and his wife, Rohini, have built a foundation, EkStep, to create mobile education apps to help parents, teachers and students — armed only with cellphones — to learn faster, using these new digital networks. As Shankar Maruwada, an EkStep co-founder and its C.E.O., explained: Unlike, say Facebook, whose business model is to “retain your attention,” EkStep, Aadhaar and other such “societal platforms” are designed to “restore your agency,” particularly to the poor.

The West got economically rich “before it got data rich,” added Pramod Varma, EKStep’s chief technology officer. “So when data came along, it just became a better way to sell you things. They could target you better; you became a better customer for them. But in a country like India, where per-capita income is $2,000, today you can get data rich before you get economically rich. And if you empower people with their data, they can use their data to get better loans, get better skills, and build a digital repository that captures their skills to get better salaries.”