India Stack Comprising UPI And Other Digital Public Goods Set To Go Global In May With Around Eight Countries On Board

Around eight countries are expected to sign up and implement 'India Stack' During the upcoming India Stack Global Conference in May.

'India Stack' is the moniker for a set of open APIs and digital public goods that aim to unlock the economic primitives of identity, data, and payments at population scale.

The project represents a collection of disparate technology products and frameworks.

The components of this collection are owned and maintained by different Indian agencies.

Aadhaar products such as e-authentication and e-KYC are owned by the Unique ID Authority of India. eSign is a technology specification which is maintained by India's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.

Digilocker is owned by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

UPI is owned by the National Payments Corporation of India and the Account Aggregator framework is regulated by RBI and its technology standards and owned by ReBIT.

Although the name of this project bears the word India, the vision of India Stack is not limited to one country and the principles, technologies, and functionality of India Stack can be applied in any country, be it a developed one or an emerging one.

None of the systems which comprise India Stack require any proprietary technology or intellectual property which would preclude their implementation in any other country.

During a fireside chat at the Lenovo Tech World India 2023 on Thursday (16 March), Union Minister of State for IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said, "In the month of May we will have the India Stack Global Conference, where we expect seven to eight countries to sign up and implement the India stack which are open-source, low cost, interoperable and scalable".

At a core level, the driving vision of India Stack is of open networks, that enable setting up of a level playing field for members of a digital ecosystem to enable application developers to focus on building the best consumer experiences and products instead of having to worry about infrastructure, permissioning, and access.

Currently, there are two implementations of open networks in India Stack. The first is OCEN (Open Credit Enablement Network), and the second is the National Digital Health Mission.

OCEN supports the easy transmission of credit to consumers and businesses, and the NDHM is an open network for consumers to securely share their health data with an ecosystem of healthcare apps and providers.