AT a G20 session, India’s burgeoning digital services architecture received high praise from Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates. “No country has built a more comprehensive digital infrastructure than India,” Gates, also Co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said. Just a few months later, towards the tail-end of India’s presidency of the G20, Gates’ views found deep resonance among almost all the dignitaries who visited the country to participate in the Summit. What was also appreciated was the leadership role India had taken in promoting access to this infrastructure.
Recently, Dennis Francis, President of the UN General Assembly, said that lessons learnt from India’s DPI could be beneficially shared with the international community.
There is good reason for this recognition. What began with the Aadhaar digital identity, way back in 2009 – joined later by services like the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), JAM (Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar and Mobile) trinity, and Co-WIN (for managing the Covid-19 vaccination programme), among others – helped India achieve 80 per cent financial inclusion in just six years, which a paper from the Bank for International Settlements estimated would have otherwise taken 47 years to achieve. Besides, the impact of these services hasn’t been restricted to just digital identity and financial inclusion; they now support efforts in health, education, and sustainability sectors as well. Several developing nations have expressed a desire to adopt India’s DPI.
Keyzom Ngodup Massally, Head of Digital Programming at United Nations Development Programme Chief Digital Office, says DPI is appealing to every country because each one is building its own DPI, though they are at different stages of their journey. For low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), in particular, which may not have the technical knowhow and resources to start from scratch, the adoption of a DPI approach can reduce implementation cost and shorten the learning curve through shared lessons. India has shown that it can genuinely be a leader of the Global South, as is evident from the fact that eight countries have already signed memoranda of understanding (MoUs) with India and several others, have shown a keen interest in adopting the payments and healthcare systems.
It is not just the developing countries that have been all praise for India’s DPI. France, Germany and the UK have been effusive in their appreciation of the UPI and linked it with their own digital payment systems.
Most developed countries have their own DPIs. But even in this large field of DPIs available globally, India DPI appeals to many countries, say experts, as some problems that it is solving around identity, payments, healthcare, and education, and at scale, are common in developing countries. These solutions have been in use in India for more than 10 years now and have reached a level of maturity and robustness.
Multiple use cases have been built and implemented in India, which means countries adopting it don’t have to start from the scratch and can use these solutions to scale up fast. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, MoS in the Ministry of Electronics & IT, says the interest in DPI is so deep that India can sign deals with 30 more countries. Strong governance systems and a participatory ecosystem can help DPI deliver economic and social benefits. It can also help scale various Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
