In 1995, Steve Jobs famously stated that great technology is invisible. The true power and magic of technology lies in laying low, appear discernible but fuelling multiple transactions, interactions, spurring unprecedented behaviour patterns, creating employment and enabling wealth generation.
Picture this – a person who wants to get a COVID vaccine must go through some steps:
- Book a slot through the CoWIN app
- Produce Aadhaar or PAN card as a digital verification
- Pay through UPI for the vaccine
- Download his vaccine certificate through Aarogya Setu
And this is just one transaction. Our daily lives are powered by such transactions that are soon becoming a mainstay. Passing through a national toll now requires a FASTag on vehicles, beneficiaries can get access to government aid and facilities through the Direct Benefit Transfer, Aadhaar is now the unanimous digital identification for Indians, businesses now have to formalize themselves with GST, CoWin is the national vaccination slot booking site, a Digital Health ID is in the works.. and so on.
There is literally nothing you cannot do without a smartphone or Internet today. What powers these facilities are silent digital highways that have been fortified over years. They have now reached a point of maturity and strength that they can spur an array of innovations upon them, unlock unseen potential, create huge employment opportunities and truly bring a nation forward in a digital era.
This is happening due the power of platforms.
Digital platforms are the modern, digital-era infrastructure quotient that determine how far a society can progress on the strength of technology-based offerings. India has set itself an ambitious goal of becoming a $5 trillion economy by the year 2025 and Digital India initiatives are pivotal in helping achieve the same. With the government as the enabler, India has adopted a unique platformization strategy by building public digital platforms across sectors. These platforms are playing a key role in enhancing government-citizen engagement by empowering citizens, ensuring ease of governance and ease of doing business. The success of these platforms in India is driven by their low-cost development, interoperable design & large scale adoption and reach, and in fact, it is these platforms that allow us to dream #ThinkDigitalThinkIndia.
Earlier this week during the Cloud Summit, NASSCOM released a thought paper on public digital platforms in India. Titled “Digital India: The Platformisation Play”- the objective of this report is to highlight notable Indian public digital platforms, their growth drivers, and the billion population scale impact delivered by them.
Debjani Ghosh, President of NASSCOM moderated a session with the two doyens who pioneered the success of digital India – Shri. Ajay Sawhney, Secretary, MeitY and Nandan Nilekani, cofounder and chairman of UIDAI, where they discussed the early vision behind building platforms, why platforms were core to cement India’s next phase of growth and the way ahead.
Ajay Sawhney, Secretary, MeitY, remarked that platforms were bringing society and the world together like never before. They were especially impactful in bringing together government organisations, break silos of information and data, and provide a logical continuum of services. “Platforms will help us organize ourselves, our data, clean the data and enable the entry of emerging technologies.”
India has nearly 20 platforms now and is set to create many more in the future across sectors like healthcare, education, travel, government services, finance, agriculture and procurement. Platforms are designed to unlock immense value for stakeholders, who are the users or citizens of the country. The development of platform interoperability has multiple knock-on effects on other sectors. For instance, the soil health card project can immensely benefit from other sector platforms like land records, weather data, seed and fertilizer data and pricing data, to name a few. What India has managed to do is build an ‘elevated table’ for more innovation to take place, with no need to start ground up. Sawhney emphasized on the deliberate low barrier for entry for developers, technocrats and innovators, for it can open up a plethora of opportunities for everyone on the spectrum.
A discussion about India’s decade-old platformisation strategy is incomplete without a nod to Nandan Nilekani, the brains behind Aadhaar. He credits the founding team comprising of Infosys veterans and other key bureaucrats like Pramod Varma and RS Sharma of NHA for building and supporting his vision to make a digital, scalable, low-cost, online authentication offering. Today, 1.3 billion Aadhar cards have been created, 9.6 billion eKYC done and 57.9bn authentication done over 29,000 enrolment stations. Aadhaar’s success is a benchmark of India’s seriousness to become a digitally-powered nation.
Other successful platform services includes BHIM UPI that has clocked 3.2 billion transactions and unlocked INR 600bn in transaction value, CoWIN that has enabled 500 mn vaccine doses to be administered at 46, 657 sites across India, FASTag that has issued 36.3 million tags and enabled digital transactions to the tune of INR 29.76 bn. The list goes on…
Nandan Nilekani added that platforms will continue to extend to newer areas like power, and platforms like UPI will spur new use cases. He lauded the most recent offering by the government E-rupi, which is a purpose-defined voucher for welfare schemes. Some future applications of the platform strategy will be seen in the National Language Translation Mission and Data Empowerment Protection Architecture.
What we will also see is more global adoption of the platformisation strategy. Already, Singapore and Bhutan are considering BHIM UPI to streamline payments, while Morocco is keen to introduce an ID verification similar to Aadhaar.
Source: indiaai.gov.in
