India’s proposal for developing digital public infrastructure (DPI) has been adopted by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) nations, according to Union Minister for Electronics & Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw. During the meeting of ICT ministers of SCO member countries, chaired by Vaishnaw, the nations unanimously adopted India’s proposal. The SCO includes Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and India, as well as four Observer States and six Dialogue Partners.
DPI is crucial for making technology accessible to everyone, according to Vaishnaw. The minister also urged fellow SCO members to evaluate and adopt India Stack, which refers to a set of digital infrastructure services developed by the Indian government to deliver various services to citizens, businesses, and other organisations.
India Stack’s core components include Aadhaar, a biometric identification system, e-KYC for electronic identity verification, and the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) for real-time payment transactions between bank accounts. These components provide a digital foundation that organisations can use to offer a range of services, such as e-commerce, financial services, and healthcare.
According to Vaishnaw, the SCO nations recognised the need for interoperability between the different digital systems being developed by member states and agreed on the need for a common organisation to set interoperability standards. India also informed SCO members of plans to invest $5bn to provide broadband access to all 250,000 village councils and $3bn to offer mobile coverage to rural villages.
India has already agreed to implement UPI with more than a dozen other countries and is providing the technology to a number of nations as part of its G20 Presidency duties. The system has been credited with enabling greater financial inclusion and helping to bring more people into the formal economy.
Kazim Rizvi, founder of technological think tank The Dialogue, said that one of the main outputs of India Stack is UPI, which has altered the country’s payments system and increased financial inclusion by a compounded annual growth rate of 5%. Rizvi added that the recent adoption of India’s proposal by SCO member states is a significant recognition of India’s efforts towards digitally inclusive global growth.
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