A. The story so far Since the launch of Aadhaar in 2010, India has made rapid strides in developing its ‘digital public infrastructure’. The key paradigm shift has been this: rather than building more siloed technology systems, India has embarked on the journey of building Open Digital Ecosystems (ODEs) – a paradigm where shared digital building blocks – data registries, protocols, standards for interoperability and data exchange - are created, which can be leveraged by the government and private sector innovators to roll out citizen-centric services at population scale. Starting with ID (Aadhaar) and payments (UPI), the ODE approach is now seeing impressive implementations in several sectors including health, education, urban governance, and law & justice.
The key paradigm shift has been this: rather than building siloed tech systems, India is building Open Digital Ecosystems (ODEs), which can be leveraged by government and private sector innovators to roll out citizencentric services at population scale. India has an opportunity to be a learning lab for the world on how to make the digital economy work for every citizen.
The socio-economic impact of ODEs is large: it is estimated that National level ODEs could collectively create new economic value of USD 500+ billion (INR 35+ lakh crore) or ~5.5% of India’s projected GDP in 2030, and also generate USD 200+ billion (INR 15+ lakh crore) in savings. Even during this pandemic, the Indian government was able to transfer more than INR 37 thousand crore directly to the bank accounts of 16 crore citizens using India’s digital infrastructure.
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