Seven countries to sign up for India Stack's digital public goods: MoS IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar

As many as seven countries will sign up with India to use India Stack’s digital public goods, minister of state for electronics and information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar told ET.

These agreements will be signed at the World Government Summit to be held from February 13-15 in Dubai. More than 140 countries are expected to participate in the summit.

Sources said countries are mostly interested in DigiLocker, a secure cloud-based platform for storage, sharing and verification of documents and certificates. So far, 144 million citizens have used the platform in India.

Other platforms on offer are foundational identity programmes such as the Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP), instant real-time payments system Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Covid vaccination platform CoWIN and Health Stack. Some countries have also expressed interest in the Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing (DIKSHA) and National Digital Education Architecture (NDEAR) on the education front.

Separately, Chandrasekhar told a press conference in New Delhi on Tuesday, “India will be hosting a developers’ conference on Wednesday which will be attended by officials from foreign embassies, startups, state and central government and app developers and system integrators.”

“This is to help those countries who intend to use India’s digital public goods but do not have the digital infrastructure or know-how to implement these technologies.”

India will also come out with certification courses soon to have ‘India Stack certified developers’ or ‘India Stack certified system integrators’ who can help other countries to integrate their existing digital infrastructure with the application programming interfaces of various digital public goods that are part of the India Stack.

“Singapore, France and Dubai have already announced their plans of using UPI, while other countries are in discussions. We have offered UPI to all central banks around the world,” a source told ET.

Soon, non-resident Indians will also be able to use UPI in Singapore, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Oman, Qatar, US, Saudi Arabia, UAE and UK.

“We have offered digital public goods to be independently leveraged by several countries. What is pending is closing agreements with the regulators of these countries. On the implementation front, UPI is only an underlying digital rail. If neither the banks, which are the store of value, nor the apps in these countries exist, like in Afghanistan, it will be hard to implement,” the source quoted above said.

If financial institutions and regulators are interested, the Indian companies and app developers will follow wherever UPI goes, he said. “Just like Google Pay and Amazon Pay are now international, companies will be interested in going where UPI goes,” the source added.

If a local entrepreneurial ecosystem exists, like in Africa, local app-developing companies will also be interested, he said.