‘Finance is seduction’: Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu challenges Nandan Nilekani’s grand plan for land tokenisation

Zoho founder and the company's chief scientist, Sridhar Vembu has raised serious concerns over the push to tokenise land assets in India, cautioning against the dangers of excessive financialisation. His warning comes amid growing advocacy for digital land tokenisation, led by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, who recently had outlined his bold vision of transforming of India’s vast but illiquid land holdings.

Vembu, a vocal critic of unchecked financial engineering, took to social media to highlight what he calls the "Fundamental Axiom of Financialisation"—the belief that making every asset liquid is inherently beneficial.

He warned that such an approach could lead to speculative bubbles, detaching land prices from their real economic value. “Just because an asset can be traded doesn’t mean it should be,” he argued, stressing that in an agricultural economy like India’s, rapid financialisation might displace farmers, fuel inequality, and destabilise rural communities.