The Hindu (Thiruvananthapuram)
Startups have a crucial role in scaling up digital public infrastructure, says expert
Startups have to build and fund product innovations around Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) to make an impact on the life of common people, Pramod Varma, former Chief Architect, Aadhaar and India Stack, has said.
Mr. Varma was speaking on the scope and opportunities across the DPI ecosystem at the The Dawn of DPI conclave organised by Sunbird.org in association with the Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM) and Gtech MuLearn here on Thursday.
Policy shift
The DPI includes digital forms of ID and verification, civil registration, payment, data exchange, and information systems.
Noting that India is making a policy shift in building digital infrastructure with a new scale and speed, Mr. Varma said innovators were the driving force of the transformation. He urged innovators and startups to adopt market innovation and use Digital Public Goods (DPG) — opensource software with open standards and data, artificial intelligence (AI) models, standards and content — and protocols within their platforms.
According to Mr. Varma, the DPI is not different from physical infrastructure and it should create equity and common playground in digital realm.
“Innovators with tech/ product skills can join the community and contribute to make an impact. Countries are really reimagining the possibility of a sustainable economic development and India has shown the world how it can be done,” said Mr. Varma.
Voice-based apps
He said language was the biggest barrier in UPI transaction and the next biggest AI initiative in India was going to be voicebased apps, enabling voicebased payments, which was a powerful way to bring millions of people under its ambit.
Before 2016, India had less than 50 million people doing digital payment. “But in 2023, we had 500 million people using UPI. It means that more people are now coming into the formalisation of society,” he said.
Mr. Varma recalled that Aadhaar was the fastest to get to a billion people, faster than facebook or WhatsApp. “Started in 2010, now there are 1.39 billion unique digital ID holders and even today, Aadhaar is being used 7080 million times everyday,” observed.
The success of Aadhaar was that India managed to keep it simple despite its technical difficulties, he noted.
“Countries like Mexico and Brazil started along with India but they still haven’t finished the project. When you build infrastructure pieces, you must keep them extremely simple and generic enough so that entrepreneurs who are building on top of that can build the rest of the features,” he added.
DPI incubator
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KSUM Chief Executive Officer Anoop Ambika said the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship had to be inculcated among students and youngsters to foster innovators with good technology skills in DPI sector. He said the Digital University Kerala was planning to set up a DPI incubator on its campus.