India plans own certification for digital public infra, goods
NEW DELHI : 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), two people with direct knowledge of the matter said. 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, said the first person mentioned above, who didn’t want to be named. 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
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