This article is a part of the series - Raisina Chronicles 2024
Alittle over a year ago, at the outset of its G20 presidency, India announced that promoting digital public infrastructure (DPI) would be a priority of its tenure. In particular, India was keen to advocate for a human-centric approach to technology, and to encourage greater knowledge-sharing in interlinked areas such as “DPI, financial inclusion, and tech-enabled development”. This was consonant with its efforts to champion the cause of the Global South, and to act as a unifying force for the developing world.
As the leader of the G20 in 2023, India raised an extraordinary level of global awareness about DPI through the interventions of the G20 Digital Economy Working Group, a new high-level Task Force on DPI, and several G20 Engagement Groups. Today, the DPI model has emerged as a key Indian value proposition, and is being considered, adopted, or adapted by nations at very different stages of development. It is recognised as a tech innovation born in the South, whose transformative power could impact the world.
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Transforming India
As foundational population-scale tech systems, DPIs enable the flow of individuals (through digital identity systems), money (through realtime swift payment systems), and information (through consent-based, privacy-protecting, data-sharing systems). The pioneering architecture of India Stack helped India become the first nation to develop all three foundational DPIs—the Aadhaar unique identity, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), and the Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA).
As foundational population-scale tech systems, DPIs enable the flow of individuals (through digital identity systems), money (through realtime swift payment systems), and information (through consent-based, privacy-protecting, data-sharing systems).
Taken together, these three layers have revolutionised public service delivery, and democratised innovation on a scale never seen before. Today, Aadhaar is used by over 99.9 percent of Indian adults to utilise public services; Indians use the UPI to make 30 million transactions every day; and the DEPA is changing the national credit landscape. Importantly, DPIs are also driving public and private innovation by allowing the government and businesses to design new applications atop the DPI layers; and the open principles embedded in DPIs are helping create open networks in the domains of health, credit, and commerce.
Going Global
Given their low cost and inherent scalability, there is much interest among other nations to explore the establishment of DPIs. Platforms like the G20 have allowed India to leverage this burgeoning interest, and shape it into concrete outcomes, or at the very least into diplomatic declarations that acknowledge DPIs’ potential.
The value of DPI as an accelerator of development outcomes has been amply demonstrated. India set up the Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP) in 2018 to support countries seeking to build foundational digital identity systems. Today, 11 developing countries have adopted MOSIP, are drawing on Indian know-how to build their national ID platforms, and have directly benefited over 95 million citizens worldwide in the process. As G20 president, India also entered into MoUs with eight developing countries, under which it is offering them access to the India Stack architecture at no cost.
The value of DPI as an accelerator of development outcomes has been amply demonstrated. India set up the Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP) in 2018 to support countries seeking to build foundational digital identity systems.
It is clear, though, that the relevance of DPI transcends the Global South. In May 2023, for instance, the EU-India Trade and Technology Council acknowledged “the importance of DPI for […] open and inclusive digital economies”; and the two parties have agreed to collaborate on improving the interoperability of their respective DPIs. Released in the same month, the Quad Leaders’ Statement drew attention to the promise DPI held for “sustainable development in the Indo-Pacific”. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) too has supported India’s proposal to help SCO member states assess and adopt India Stack.
The progress of DPI-focused bilateral engagements with advanced nations has been impressive by any standard. Following Prime Minister Modi’s state visit to the United States (US) last June, both countries announced that they intended to work together to “provide global leadership for the implementation of DPI”. Similarly, the meeting of the Indian and Japanese foreign ministers incorporated a focus on DPIs into tech partnerships that seek to build a strong and open Indo-Pacific. And PM Modi’s visit to France in July last year saw the two countries enter into an agreement to make the UPI fast payment switch available in France, with the objective of enabling seamless cross-border transactions, and lowering the cost of fund transfers. This move made France the latest in a series of nations with whom India has UPI-related agreements, which include Singapore, Australia, the US, United Kingdom, Canada, Hong Kong, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Nepal, and Bhutan.
The progress of DPI-focused bilateral engagements with advanced nations has been impressive by any standard. Following Prime Minister Modi’s state visit to the United States (US) last June, both countries announced that they intended to work together to “provide global leadership for the implementation of DPI”.
Even the United Nations and other multilateral institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank have unequivocally endorsed the DPI approach. The IMF has commended DPIs for enabling direct benefit transfers and supporting 87 percent of India’s poor households during the COVID-19 pandemic, while a World Bank report concluded that India’s digital infrastructure helped it achieve 80 percent financial inclusion between 2018 and 2023—a feat that may have taken 50 years otherwise.
Onward and Upward
Speaking at the Raisina Dialogue 2023, Amitabh Kant, the Indian G20 Sherpa, had outlined the remarkable journey of DPI, calling it “the model for the future” and “an innovation from an emerging market that has overtaken the developed part of the world”. Deep dives into digital breakthroughs have long been among the Raisina Dialogue’s priority areas, and recent years have seen it become a pivotal platform for sharing international views and experiences related to DPI. It was at Raisina that some of the earliest public conversations around digital public goods and India Stack took place, and the conference continues to act as a living warehouse of ideas about technological progress and opportunities for cooperation.
With international groupings and individual nations eager to maintain the momentum generated by the Indian presidency, the next few years will see a further consolidation of global efforts to build DPIs. Building on the agreements forged in 2023, India, and the European Union and US, will very likely ramp up cooperation around DPIs with a focus on strengthening capacities in third countries. Indeed, this kind of collaborative work is a much-anticipated element of the US-India Global Digital Development Partnership.
The high-level “G20 Framework for Systems of DPI”, adopted under India’s leadership of the G20, which outlines principles for designing and deploying DPIs, is expected to emerge as an indispensable tool as countries operationalise their DPI roadmaps. India has also committed to set up an accompanying knowledge platform—a virtual Global DPI Repository—to host DPI-focused tools, resources, practices and experiences from around the globe. As the world inches towards 2030, the proven impact of DPI in terms of galvanising inclusive development, seamless public service delivery, and the digital economy, will become a fulcrum for advocacy.
There are indications that the climate of enthusiasm surrounding DPIs could infect the ongoing Brazilian G20 presidency too. According to President Lula, Brazil’s tenure presents a “unique opportunity for the sustainable development agenda”, and the “fight against… extreme poverty and inequality” will be a driving priority. These are challenges that DPIs have been able to tackle head-on in other parts of the world. Besides, Brazil has enjoyed much success with several of its own population-scale digital infrastructures; and some Brazilian stakeholders have expressed an interest in aligning its digital systems with the Indian DPI approach, or applying certain elements of India Stack to its domestic contexts. Brazil’s Pix, for example, is a near equivalent of India’s UPI; the country’s much-lauded open finance system is based on consent-based data sharing, akin to DEPA; and it has been argued that Consumidor, an online dispute resolution system launched by the Brazilian government, could achieve fuller potential as a DPI if it were to introduce open standards or application programming interfaces for value-added services.
Going forward, India is likely to seek to understand more closely what different countries would like to do—and in some cases are already doing—in the DPI space, and to provide them the necessary assistance. India is well placed to do this, given its legacy of cooperation and knowledge-sharing through MOSIP, and more recently through its MOUs with partner nations.
Finally, the future could witness a rise in global awareness about the link between DPIs and AI development efforts. Large volumes of data are a critical component of DPIs, and they could be an asset for training AI models, provided the principles of data privacy and security are firmly upheld. As part of DEPA 2.0, for instance, India is already experimenting with a solution called Confidential Clean Rooms, which are “secure computing environments where sensitive data can be accessed in an algorithmically controlled manner for model training”. As more countries begin to understand and implement these approaches, DPIs could help unleash a new wave of AI-based solutions.
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Anirban Sarma is Deputy Director of ORF Kolkata and a Senior Fellow at ORF’s Centre for New Economic Diplomacy. He is also Chair of the ...
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