G20 Summit: India to push for future alliance to spread digital success stories

OFA is likely to be headquartered in India

The G20 Summit may see the emergence of a multilateral institution dedicated to taking the Indian experience of digital public infrastructure (DPI) global, The One Future Alliance (OFA).

OFA and the One Future Fund, aimed at helping developing countries adopt DPI, were both discussed at the conceptual level at the June meeting of the Digital Economy Working Group of G20.

"During our G20 Presidency, a framework to govern digital public infrastructure has been adopted by the Digital Economy Ministers, laying the foundations for the One Future Alliance,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Moneycontrol.

Read here: India got over 1 lakh visitors during its G20 presidency, says chief summit coordinator

What is OFA?

Led by India, OFA will look at building capacity by providing funding, offering technical assistance and synergising global efforts in the domain of DPI. It will be supplemented by a new Global DPI Repository, which will emerge as a virtual and voluntary bank of DPI initiatives of G20 members.

The Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) partnership was launched in June to enable especially low and middle-income brackets across nations to learn from its experiences in harnessing technology to improve governance and for social, economic, digital and sustainable development. It also introduced the idea to form an alliance of countries called One Future Alliance.

“Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made it clear that India’s technology capabilities, or the India stack, can be made available to any country that is interested in joining this accelerated digitalisation trend that is evident in the recent years,” said Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Rajeev Chandrasekhar,  according to an Indian Express report.

Chandrasekhar said countries will take the current open-source customisable stacks and build, customise and innovate for the future.

According to a Hindustan Times report, OFA is likely to be headquartered in India and led by an Indian but with the participation of other governments as well as private sector players, donors, and civil society outfits. Given the complexities involved in setting up a multilateral institution, there may be an in-principle nod to the idea of the OFA at the summit, while leaving the more specific modalities of how it will take shape for future discussions.