Minister of State for IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar
The country's digital goods architecture will become more sophisticated in the future with the inclusion of an artificial intelligence layer, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on January 25.
"What we have now is just India Stack 1.0 version. It will evolve and become more sophisticated and nuanced," he said, kicking off the inaugural India Stack Developers Conference. "The smart dataset programme will soon be launched. There will also be an AI layer built into the stack."
The conference has been hosted to bring together the developer community, startups, corporates and foreign governments who want to adopt the India Stack that includes digital public goods like Aadhaar, United Payments Interface and Digilocker.
Chandrashekhar said that five-seven countries are expected to sign up to one or more of these digital goods systems by February-March.
"Many more countries are interested to implement their own versions of India Stack. One minister of an African country travelled all the way to Bengaluru to meet me and understand how they can do it," he said.
At the conference, senior officials from Aadhaar, GeM (Government e-marketplace), Diksha (a public edtech initiative) and Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission gave short presentations on the roadmaps of each of these platforms.
Aadhaar chief Saurabh Garg said that the biometric identification system has signed up more than 134 crore people in the country till date and handles around 7.5 crore transactions a day. These transactions include e-authentication by different kinds of organisations like banks and fintech, as well as the Aadhaar-enabled payment service.
A GeM official claimed that with Rs 2 lakh crore of transactions in FY22, the e-commerce platform has already become bigger than the top two privately operated counterparts. Over the next couple of years, it aims to hit Rs 3 lakh crore of e-commerce transactions.
Speaking at the conference, Nasscom chief Debjani Ghosh said that India is the only country building a citizen-centric digital economy.
She recounted an anecdote from 2008 when India had a 17 percent bank account penetration. At the time, a leading industry study had predicted that it would take another 46 years for bank accounts to reach 80 percent penetration in the country. However, that benchmark was reached in the next six years.
"Nobody in the world has seen such a disruption happen. And the best thing is that it is open," he said.
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