The Finance Minister said that easy to use for people belonging to all walks of life, “the digital public goods are all government-owned and there is no private profiteering on this”…reports Asian Lite News
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said that G20 nations look up to India and praise the achievements in its digital public goods infrastructure.
“Today, when I address the G20 nations, we are proud to highlight that all of them admire India for its prolific use of technology and its leadership in utilising digital public goods. A significant portion of our Indian youth are making remarkable contributions in these areas,” she said in a video address.
The Finance Minister said that easy to use for people belonging to all walks of life, “the digital public goods are all government-owned and there is no private profiteering on this”.
“For making India a developed nation during the next 25 years, we’re making sure that our policies reach each and every citizen of the nation,” Sitharaman said in the message.
India is working with multilateral forums, including the UN and the G20, to create collaborations that would certify, register, test and benchmark Indian digital public infrastructure (DPIs) and public goods (DPGs).
The success of some of the government’s popular DPI programmes like CoWin, UPI, Digilocker and Diksha (national digital infrastructure for teachers) has prompted New Delhi to seek its own rating and testing mechanism for DPIs and DPGs, the people mentioned above said.
At present, an agency called the Digital Public Goods Alliance is the only multilateral organization that provides guidance, and benchmarks, rates, and judges DPIs. The UN-endorsed initiative facilitates the deployment and discovery of open-source technologies. The government’s plan to form a certification, testing and registration process for DPIs and DPGs will not only allow India to cater to local DPIs and DPGs but also for such platforms developed elsewhere.
As things stand, DPIs and DPGs developed by India have been deployed in other countries too. For instance, CoWin (for tracking Covid-19 vaccination) has been deployed in Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Jamaica.
The export of payment platform UPI has also grown significantly, with the international arm of NPCI partnering with countries such as the UK, the UAE, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Bhutan and Nepal.
The move will help India export some of its DPIs and DPGs to other countries with relative ease, the second person said, who too requested anonymity.
UPI has over 350 banks on its network with over 260 million unique users, while CoWin has more than 1.1 billion registered users. More than 500 million learning sessions have been conducted using the Diksha app, which was a key tool for teachers to impart education during the pandemic-induced lockdown period.
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