'Transforming Economy And Peoples' Lives': IMF Says India's Digital Journey Highlights Lessons For Other Countries

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said that India's success in creating a "world-class" digital public infrastructure (DPI) provides insight for other nations pursuing similar digital transformations.

In a working paper titled 'Stacking up the benefits Lessons from India's Digital Journey', IMF said that India stack's progress is based on a foundational building blocks approach and a focus on supporting innovation across the ecosystem.

India Stack is the collective name of a set of commonly used DPIs in India- consisting of three different layers - unique identity (Aadhaar), complimentary payments systems (Unified Payments Interface, Aadhaar Payments Bridge, Aadhaar Enabled Payment Service), and data exchange (DigiLocker and Account Aggregator).

India’s journey highlights lessons for other countries embarking on their own digital transformation, the paper said.

"India Stack’s development is guided by a foundational building blocks approach, and a focus on supporting innovation across the ecosystem. The building block approach involves unbundling the components of the solution to a set of problems and identifying a minimal common core," the IMF working paper said.

According to the paper, this modular approach fosters innovation, allowing solutions to be built to multiple problems based on the common core.

The paper said that for a large and diverse country such as India, a building block approach provides those closer to the problem with the basic tools to create tailored solutions.

"A focus on supporting a vibrant ecosystem implies the need for interoperability between the different DPIs and a competition-focused design. In India, interoperability was supported through open standards, allowing anyone to utilize the functionality provided by India Stack," the paper said.

"These principles are applied to other DPIs in education and health, including the Covid-19 vaccine and distribution platform, CoWIN. Using a digital backbone allowed India to scale its vaccine delivery quickly and overcome challenges such as large-scale internal migration," it said

The technology underlying CoWIN has been deployed in Indonesia, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Jamaica to help facilitate their vaccination programmes.

Luis E Breuer, IMF Senior Resident Representative to India, said in a tweet that India's digital public infrastructure is transforming people's lives.

"India has built a world-class digital public infrastructure that has lessons for many countries. The latest research by @IMFnews shows how it is transforming the economy and peoples' lives," he said.