"Tokenisation of land assets can unlock capital worth $3.3 trillion": Nandan Nilekani's pitch to "turbocharge" economy
Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani has pitched for tokenisation of India's land assets. Nilekani, who is credited for driving India's unique identity programme 'Aadhar', believes that tokenisation of land assets will result in unlocking of land capital worth $3.3 trillion.
In a video shared on social media platform X on Tuesday, Nandan Nilekani, known as the architect of India’s Digital Public Infrastructure, is seen addressing a keynote session on 'The Great Unlock: India in 2035,' at the Arkam Annual Meet on March 20.
The time is right for another massive unlock: Tokenisation of land assets. To understand how this can turbocharge the economy, see👇
— Nandan Nilekani (@NandanNilekani) April 1, 2025
Full video here: https://t.co/NboKoiSIXh pic.twitter.com/JlGeBEneYn
During the session he said, "The largest asset class of Indians is land and you cannot monetise land. In other words it's very very difficult for a land owner to actually get access to use his land as collateral to get a credit and 50% of India's wealth is actually in land and this is even more so in rural India where everybody has a small piece of land. Maybe it's got fragmented but it's there and they have, there's no way to monetise it."
Can't Do Anything With Land: Nilekani
He underlined that Indians couldn't do much with their land and reiterated, "50% of the assets owned by Indians is in the form of land which is not tradable. You can't sell it, you can't take a loan against it. It's a, it's like an asset which is there but you can't do anything."
Need To Tokenise Land: Nilekani
In this context, Nilekani pitched for tokenisation of land assets. He said, "We believe that tokenisation of land assets using a proper ledger and so on can unlock these things where you can tokenise every piece of land and then that can be traded very easily." This, Nilekani's presentation added, could potentially lead to unlocking of land capital worth $3.3 trillion.
Tokenising Land: The Challenges
However, the Infosys co-founder also talked about the challenges in implementing this proposal. He highlighted that land assets were a state subject and so this reform will depend on individual states implementing tokenisation and improving the quality of their registration, their property taxes, their title system.
For this, Nilekani added, a number of things will have to happen on on each state. However, he expressed confidence that as states realise the power of this (reform), more states will tokenise.
Tokenising Land: The Hope
Nilekani expressed hope that once states undertake tokenisation of land assets it will allow more and more people, who own land, to offer the land. Talking about such landowners he said, "They can either sell the land or they can get a loan against the land and then they can get into you know starting a business so this is another big unlock which is tokenisation of land assets."
