FM proposes expansion of DPIs across key sectors in Union Budget 2024

FM proposes DPIs in several new sectors

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman proposed more digital public infrastructure (DPI) in credit, e-commerce, corporate governance as well as in law and order sectors in the Union Budget 2024-2025.

FM suggested that programmes and applications developed at population scale or for consumer usage to address the delivery of these services to a large segment of the population.

Sitharaman did not specify any outlay for such applications in these sectors, where there are not many DPIs that have touched citizens directly.

Also read: Live Union Budget Blog

Indian government has built several DPIs over the last few years and has been highly successful and the country has been a role model for other emerging economies.

The DPIs include Aadhaar, e-KYC, Aadhaar-enabled Payment System, UPI, Bharat QR, DigiLocker, e-sign, Account Aggregator, Open Network for Digital Commerce among other initiatives.

These initiatives have helped the country reduce the cost of service delivery as well as deliver it to more than a billion citizens.

The success of DPIs such as Aadhaar and UPI has taken the world by surprise including the policy makers in the country. The subsidy transfers through Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) have also prevented the leakage of government resources to corruption.

In fact, many of the billion-dollar startups have been built on top of DPIs, helping the country attract foreign direct investment.

Meanwhile, the government has also been evangelising the establishment of DPIs in other friendly emerging economies, mostly as a goodwill gesture.

The government announced a Social Impact Fund(SIF) last year to help countries of the Global South to develop local digital public infrastructure (DPI) with the help of technology transfer from India. The fund was launched with a corpus of $25 million.

Over the last few months, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has been helping countries like Namibia and Peru to set up digital payment infrastructure that will help them build UPI-like real-time payment systems in the country.