India’s DPI is going global, says Nilekani

The digital public infrastructure (DPI) of India is increasingly finding traction in other countries and its reach is only going to increase, said Nandan Nilekani, non-executive chairman, Infosys, at an interactive event organised by online crafts platform Zwende in Bengaluru.

In response to a question from Amazon Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Werner Vogels, Nilekani said there is a programme to take the DPI global, and at present this infrastructure is available in 15 countries. Vogels is also an investor in Zwede.

However, Nilekani cautioned that it would not be possible to roll out the entire DPI stack overseas as it is a bit complex and there are some pieces which are being rolled out.

The topic of discussion was—India’s unorganised sector: a multi-billion dollar opportunity ripe for tech disruption.

Nilekani, who is the founding chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), recounted the strides made by this identification platform.

“Today, we are 1.3 billion people who have the ID, and most of India has been covered and they are using it 80 billion times a day online for real time authentication in sub-second response time,” he remarked.

The Aadhaar stack has also been closely linked to the payment infrastructure of the country, and this has led to the emergence of the unified payment interface (UPI). “Today, UPI does 14.4 billion transactions a month with 500 million users and 50 million merchants taking payments. Our philosophy was public rails and private innovation,” he said.

Today, the digital infrastructure of Aadhaar and UPI has led to the creation of an account aggregator system which is designed to enable easier access to credit.

During the interaction, Nilekani also mooted the idea of creating a new infrastructure for the energy segment, which will involve renewable energy. He believes that the current centralised model of energy distribution is ready for disruption with the increased acceptance of solar and battery technologies.

“Tomorrow, every home will have a battery, a rooftop solar, and they will buy power in the daytime when it is cheap and sell it night when it is expensive,” Nilekani said.

The Amazon CTO in his speech called upon the ecommerce and direct-to-consumer companies to focus on catalogue size as this will bring in the customers. He also advised entrepreneurs to experiment continuously and measure relentlessly.