Digital public infrastructure as an Indian Belt and Road Initiative | Jun 4th 2023 | The Economist
ioi_ab's bookmarks 2023-06-05
Summary:
"In a little over a decade India has built a collection of public-facing digital platforms that have transformed life for its citizens. Once collectively known as the “India Stack”, they have been rebranded “digital public infrastructure” (dpi) as the number and ambition of the platforms have grown. It is this dpi that India hopes to export...
Several other digital platforms have recently been launched or soon will be. The Open Network for Digital Commerce (ondc) is a newish government-backed non-profit dedicated to helping e-commerce services work together. The idea is to provide a platform where India’s millions of small businesses can connect to third-party payments and logistics providers. Sahamati, an ngo, is setting up a platform to allow “account aggregators” to enable individuals to share their financial information in a standardised format with, for instance, lenders. It hopes this will mitigate the need for the forests-worth of documents that applying for a loan in India entails.
The digital ecosystem behind these developments is vast and complex. Its members include government agencies, regulators, tech firms, quasi-public corporations, foundations, ngos and universities, all of which are building different elements of the digital edifice. Aadhaar is run by the government; upi is managed by a public-private venture, the National Payments Corporation of India (npci). Other platforms, such as for health and sanitation management, are created by non-profits and sold to city, district and state governments. Many of these public technologies have been designed by it experts with private-sector experience.
India now wants to coax other developing countries to follow its lead. Beyond reaping mutual benefits, it views this as a means to cement its status as the leader of the developing world. Partly to that end, India invited 125 such countries to a “Voice of the Global South Summit” in Delhi last January. “I firmly believe that countries of the global south have a lot to learn from each other’s development,” Mr Modi told their representatives, offering dpi as an example...."