2024 will see a consolidation of global efforts to leverage the DPI model, and there are indications that the enthusiasm surrounding DPIs could infect the Brazilian G20 presidency too.
This essay is part of the “What to expect in 2024” series.
A little over a year ago, at the outset of its G20 presidency, India had announced that promoting “technological transformation and digital public infrastructure (DPI)” would be a priority of its tenure. In particular, India asserted that it would advocate for a human-centric approach to technology, and promote greater knowledge-sharing in interlinked thematic areas such as “DPI, financial inclusion, and tech-enabled development”.
As the leader of the G20 in 2023, India has been able to raise an extraordinary level of awareness about DPI among countries of the Global North and South, through the interventions of the G20 Digital Economy Working Group, the new high-level Task Force on DPI for Economic Transformation, Financial Inclusion and Development, and several G20 Engagement Groups. Today, the DPI model has emerged as a key Indian offering to the world, and is being considered, adopted, or adapted by nations at very different stages of development.
As foundational population-scale tech systems, DPIs enable the flow of individuals (through digital identity systems), money (through real-time swift payment systems), and information (through consent-based, privacy-protecting, data-sharing systems). India Stack’s pioneering, integrated architecture 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).
The DPI model has emerged as a key Indian offering to the world, and is being considered, adopted, or adapted by nations at very different stages of development.
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.
Given their low cost and inherent scalability, there is much interest among other nations to explore the establishment of DPIs. The Indian presidency has been able to leverage this burgeoning interest, and shape it into concrete outcomes, or at the very least into diplomatic declarations that formally recognise DPIs’ power and potential.
In May 2023, for instance, the EU-India Trade and Technology Council acknowledged “the importance of DPI for the development of open and inclusive digital economies”. The EU and India have agreed to collaborate on improving the interoperability of their respective DPIs, and use that as a basis for promoting secure privacy-preserving solutions for developing countries. Released in the same month, the Quad Leaders’ Statement drew attention to the “transformative power of […] DPI to support sustainable development in the Indo-Pacific”; and the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) too unanimously supported India’s proposal to help SCO member states to assess and adopt India Stack.
The EU and India have agreed to collaborate on improving the interoperability of their respective DPIs, and use that as a basis for promoting secure privacy-preserving solutions for developing countries.
The progress of DPI-focused bilateral engagements has also been impressive. Following Prime Minister Modi’s state visit to the US in June, for instance, a US-India Joint Statement announced that both countries intended to work together to “provide global leadership for the implementation of DPI”. Similarly, the meeting of the Indian and Japanese Foreign Ministers in July included a forward-looking focus on collaborating to strengthen DPI as part of tech partnerships to build a strong and open Indo-Pacific. PM Modi’s visit to France in July saw the two countries enter into an agreement to make UPI available in France, with the objective of enabling seamless cross-border transactions and lowering the cost of remittance payments and fund transfers. That made France the latest in a series of nations with whom India has UPI-related bilateral agreements – which include Singapore, Australia, the United States (US), United Kingdom (UK), Canada, Hong Kong, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Nepal, and Bhutan. Since early 2023, Japan, too, has been evaluating the possibility of adopting India’s UPI system.
The core value of DPI for developing nations, and as an accelerator of the SDGs, is now widely recognised. India’s Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP) was set up in 2018 to support countries seeking to build foundational digital identity systems. Today, nine developing countries have partnered with India through MOSIP, and are drawing on Indian expertise to build their national ID platforms, further consolidating the status of DPI as a global digital public good. Finally, during its G20 presidency, India has entered into MOUs with eight developing countries, under which India will offer them access to its India Stack architecture and DPI infrastructure at no cost.
The United Nations and other multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank have unequivocally endorsed the DPI approach. At a recent international seminar on DPI, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) observed that India’s DPI model offers valuable lessons for countries worldwide, and commended DPIs for enabling direct benefit transfers and supporting 87 percent of India’s poor households during the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, a World Bank report points out that DPIs have helped India achieve 80 percent financial inclusion in the last six years – a feat that may have taken 50 years otherwise.
2024 will see a further consolidation of global efforts to leverage the DPI model. With international groupings and individual nations keen to maintain the momentum generated by the Indian presidency, several countries are likely to put in place the building blocks of their DPIs. Building on the agreements forged in 2023, India, and the EU and US, will very likely ramp up cooperation around DPIs with a focus on building capacities in third countries. Indeed, this kind of collaborative work is a much-anticipated element of the US-India Global Digital Development Partnership.
The United Nations and other multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank have unequivocally endorsed the DPI approach.
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 will also 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 impacts 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 Brazilian G20 presidency too. President Lula has announced that Brazil’s tenure presents a “unique opportunity for the sustainable development agenda”, and that the “fight against … extreme poverty and inequality” will be a driving priority. These are challenges that DPIs have been able to address squarely in other parts of the world. Besides, Brazil has enjoyed much success with several of its own population-scale digital infrastructures; and 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 (APIs) for value-added services.
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.
Broadly, in 2024, 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, 2024 ought to be marked by 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 that the principles of data privacy and security are firmly upheld. As part of DEPA 2.0, for example, India is already experimenting with a solution called Confidential Clean Rooms which are “hardware-protected 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.
Anirban Sarma is Deputy Director, ORF Kolkata and Senior Fellow, Centre for New Economic Diplomacy
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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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