India’s digital public infrastructure finds many takers globally, says NISG CEO

The Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) of India is now truly going global, as an increasing number of countries are seeking assistance to implement this technology platform to deliver various citizen services.

“There is a huge opportunity of taking it (DPI) globally,” said Rajiv Bansal, CEO, National Institute for Smart Government (NISG) during a panel discussion on the topic “Digital Public Infrastructure of India going Global” at the Bengaluru Tech Summit (BTS) 2024.

DPI in India has become the driving force for delivering services from both the government and private sector. These include the nationwide Aadhar identity and the unified payment interface (UPI) for financial services.

According to Bansal, NISG is engaged with several countries to come out with pilot projects or provide consultancy services on how they can implement DPI. Sri Lanka is undertaking a nationwide ID project, while other countries like Gambia, Myanmar, Belize and Fiji are keen to implement DPI to deliver several citizen services.

NISG is a not-for-profit organisation set up in 2003 by the Indian government, based on a public-private partnership model. It aims to assist governments in ushering in smart governance, process reforms and digitalisation.

Bansal said the DPI framework has achieved a certain level of maturity where it is based on fundamentals of open source technology, interoperability, subject to regulation and offering services for social welfare.

The greater interest for India’s DPI has largely come from developing countries who are looking at this platform for setting up a national identity setup similar to Aadhar. According to Bansal, developed economies are also interested in DPI but for other kinds of services.

However, Sharad Sharma, Founder – iSPIRT Foundation, was of the belief that the various functionalities from DPI till date in India are early iterations, and there is a vast scope to deliver numerous other services especially in the area of healthcare.