NEW DELHI: The world today acknowledges that India has truly revolutionised technology through Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), G20 Sherpa Amitabh Kant said in a media briefing on Friday ahead of the G20 Summit in Delhi.
Hailing the Digital Public Infrastructure as a unique model, Kant said that India’s DPI has been broadly accepted as the way to financial inclusion, fast payments and drive tech innovations in the future.
“When we started the G20 presidency, very few people knew about digital public infrastructure and the open-source model. This has been extensively taken forward by both the finance track and the sherpa track (during the G20 discussions),” said the Sherpa when asked about the discussions on DPI with global leaders.
Kant further said that India has built a huge India narrative to the G20. “You will see that in the New Delhi leaders’ declaration -- whether it is in terms of India emerging as leaders of the Global South, spokesperson of developing countries or huge technological development that Indian has undertaken in Digital Public Infrastructure,” Kant said when he was asked about the key takeaways of the discussions held ahead of the G20 Summit.
On the question of efforts taken by the government to take India’s DPI success story overseas, VM Kwatra, secretary, Ministry of External Affairs, said: “There are multiple lines of efforts to ensure that DPI not only expands and spreads across various economic ecosystem within India, but also develop huge value proposition for governance, transparency and financial inclusion internationally.”
Meanwhile, the G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion document prepared by the World Bank has lauded the transformative impact of DPIs in India over the past decade.
Praising India’s efforts and its approach -- combining digital ID, interoperable payments, a digital credentials ledger, and account aggregation – the report says in just six years, India has achieved a remarkable 80% financial inclusion rate—a feat that would have taken nearly five decades without a DPI approach.
“Other nations, including Brazil, Estonia, Peru and Singapore, have similarly embraced DPI models, yielding tangible results that underscore the efficacy of this approach,” says the report.