India's low-cost digital platforms project its dominance

Prime Minister Narendra Modi aspires to turn India into a Vishwaguru, or ‘teacher to the world’. In a little over a decade India has built a collection of public-facing digital platforms that have transformed its citizens’ lives, according to the Economist.

Once 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 - and in the process build its economy and influence, reports The Economist. It said it is India’s low-cost, software-based version of China’s infrastructure-led Belt and Road Initiative. “The benefits of digital transformation should not be confined to a small part of the human race,” said PM Modi at the G20 summit in Indonesia last year.

‘DPI’ involves a triad of identity, payments and data management. It started with the aptly named Aadhaar, or ‘foundation’, a biometric digital-identity system rolled out under the former Congress-led government in 2010, which now covers nearly all of India’s 1.4 billion people.

Next came the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which makes digital payment as easy as sending a text or scanning a QR code. Launched in 2016, the platform accounted for 73% of all non-cash retail payments in India in the year to March.

The third DPI pillar involves data management. Using their 12-digit Aadhaar number, Indians can access online documents whose authenticity is guaranteed by the government.

This system, called Digilocker, is connected to tax documents, vaccine certificates and more. To make payments, verify identity and get access to crucial documents, an Indian can rely on their phone.