India digital public infrastructure is charting the journey towards becoming $1-tn digital economy by 2027-28

India’s ‘Digital India’ programme was launched in 2015.

The Economic Survey of India for 2023-24—the government's annual report card—will be tabled by Minister of Finance and Corporate Affairs Nirmala Sitharaman in Parliament on July 22. Among other things, it  is expected to highlight India’s achievements in digital public infrastructure.

And those achievements are nothing to sneeze at. “India did an incredible pole vault in digital public infrastructure. We achieved in nine years what would have taken 50 years without DPI,” India’s G20 sherpa Amitabh Kant had said recently. Digital public infrastructure or as it is commonly referred to colloquially, the India stack, lies at the intersection of technology, market and governance, enabling remarkable innovation and palpable change across different realms. Aadhaar, DigiLocker and Unified Payment Interface (UPI) are some of the prime examples of India’s DPI services. UPI achieved the milestone of processing 12 billion transactions in a month in January 2024.

The government is aiming to be a $1-trillion digital economy by 2027-28. As part of this, the Digital India programme was launched in 2015.

India aims to develop digital infrastructure as a core utility for every citizen. Between 2015 and 2021, rural internet subscriptions increased by 200 percent, compared to a 158 percent increase in urban areas, aided, no doubt, by the low base effect. This demonstrates the government's intensified efforts to equalise digital connectivity between rural and urban regions, Economic Survey 2023 added.

To be sure, the explosion in digital payments has been a driving force in this increased connectedness.

“Today in India, UPI is used at all levels from street vendors to large shopping malls, with the highest percentage of digital transactions globally, accounting for nearly 46 percent share. All these proved to be building blocks for India to steer through the COVID-19 pandemic, be it transfer $4.5 billion into the bank accounts of 160 million beneficiaries or facilitate distribution of 2.5 million vaccinations in two years with digital vaccine certificates on mobiles. We are far advanced in terms of digitisation and I am confident, this report will be the guiding North Star for the world to follow,” Kant said on July 15, referring to the final report of India’s G20 Task Force on Digital Public Infrastructure.

The bedrock of all this is Aadhaar, the digitised biometric proof of identity issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India  Now, around 1.3 billion Indians possess this digital ID and on average 10 million eKYC requests per day are being received and facilitated through Aadhaar. Meanwhile in the payments space, UPI facilitates 13 billion transactions monthly, serving about 350 million individuals and 50 million merchants, and the DPI-enabled direct transfer of benefits has saved the government $41 billion across central government schemes.

India during its G20 presidency steered a strong digital agenda by showcasing its achievements in the field of DPI and gathered unanimous support from the member countries. The final report, the 'G20 Task Force on Digital Public Infrastructure for Economic Transformation, Financial Inclusion and Development’ was released on July 15 in New Delhi. The work of this task force had led to the acceptance of the definition and framework of DPI during India’s G20 presidency and will be taken forward for implementation during the Brazilian and South African presidencies.

Of course, none of this would have been possible without the information technology backbone and particularly, the telecommunications technology and capability to back it up. From its faltering early steps, the Indian telecom sector is now among the most inclusive, with call and data rates that are among the lowest in the world.

India’s 5G rollout is also among the fastest in the world, and its UPI platform has become a global case study for financial inclusion. India has also agreed to share its digital public infrastructure resources with the Global South.