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    India Stack: Can ‘Digital India’ be exported?

    Synopsis

    The need to be tech-savvy has always been a talking point in India and the world. This became clearer during the Covid outbreak when the world came to a standstill and everyone turned to their phones for everything from vaccine information to ordering medicines and groceries online.

    API-IndiastackiStock
    The core principles of India Stack is to lower the cost of transactions so that 1.3 billion people get access to socially and economically important services.
    India’s tech ecosystem players like India Stack and others have been building innovative models to solve critical social problems. Can this model work elsewhere in the world? What more can be done to ensure these models reach everyone at minimal costs? All this and more was discussed at the virtual TiEcon annual conference held from 5 to 7 May in Silicon Valley.

    Initiating the discussion on “Can the India template go global” at the recently held TiEcon annual conference in Silicon Valley, WhatsApp India Head Abhijit Bose said WhatsApp was focused on taking the disruptive and massive vision of India Stack and making it into specialised solutions to reach every segment in the country. “WhatsApp found four years ago that it can play an important role in scaling access to citizens and accelerating adoption of any solution built by social entrepreneurs, NGOs, institutions and even the government.”

    In 2021, partially driven by the massive need for remote service due to Covid, WhatsApp launched a Covid support channel to schedule vaccine appointments and certification downloads. It helped people find oxygen and hospital beds during the acute phase of the Delta variant. Today, over 31 million people have downloaded vaccine certificates and 2.9 million people have booked vaccination slots using the Mygov Corona chatbot on WhatsApp. Many small and big companies, state governments, rural banks and fintechs are making unique solutions available for its customers through the chat platform.

    Understanding India StackThe core principles of India Stack is to lower the cost of transactions so that 1.3 billion people get access to socially and economically important services and that those services can be delivered by the private as well as public sector. It enables private innovation on the back of public infrastructure.

    India Stack created a set of open protocols or standards that are implemented by the institutions concerned. This has opened up the private sector to innovate in the case of authentication services such as Aadhaar, digital signing of a document, facilitating payments and sharing data with consent.

    Such services have helped individuals and small businesses to transact in a paperless manner. These have also led to companies across financial, health, telecom creating new services using the core building blocks.

    Planning ahead
    Elaborating on what to expect in the future, Siddharth Shetty, Fellow, iSPIRT Foundation, said, “There is a focus on data empowerment for individuals and small businesses and how that manifests. It has made its way into different parts of the world. It has been operationalised in India to what's known as the data empowerment and protection architecture. This is a techno-legal approach towards giving people control of their data. Here, data is completely decentralised and its identity is completely federated. We don't use a centralised ID in the system because our core view is that the individual should be able to get together and have a unified view, but no one in the system should have a unique view of your profile. On the back of this open protocol, you can discover, link your accounts, and get a unique ID.”

    The democratisation of data that will happen through this infrastructure will unlock a large amount of private innovation because it will shift focus from value creation to predictions. It is becoming a technology counterpart to regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

    Understanding digital public goods
    Digital public goods is open source software, data, AI models, standards and content that help attain the Sustainable Development Goals. Countries can adapt these kinds of generic solutions to meet their own specific needs, in their own context, and not start from scratch digital public goods matters for identity solutions and payments platforms.

    Explaining this, Liv Marte Nordhaug Co-Lead, Digital Public Goods Alliance, said, “It is a curated subset of open source technologies. There are a number of ways that digital public goods are essential for helping scale impact particularly in international development corporation. It's very costly for each country to develop its own tailor-made data solution. There's a reckoning among governments everywhere that digital sovereignty depends on retaining the ability to manage the digital transformation in your country.”

    So, what can India Stack do for social good being transferred across countries?

    Henri Verdier, Ambassador for Digital Affairs, Government of France, said things get a boost when governments understand the importance of digitalisation. The role of the government is to build public infrastructures, empower citizens, advance the economy and let everyone innovate and create value. For countries to coordinate, one must understand the digital revolution. Most countries don't have a digital ecosystem in place. “Apart from India, Europe, USA, Japan and Korea. Maybe five or six other countries, but we are in the minority,” he said.

    To the question of what exciting solution he sees happening that will amaze him, Verdier said the potential of digital revolution was limitless and can come from anywhere. “Think about what we can do with the metal, meteorological or statistical data. We can never be sure where the next big thing might pop up from. On a personal note, I would want artificial intelligence to understand French so that we don't have to work in English,” he quipped.
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