Govt Looking To Build A Unified Portal To House All Its Digital Public Goods

The Centre is planning to build a unified portal to house all its digital public goods (DPGs), including Aadhaar, unified payments interface and open network for digital commerce in one place to provide easy access to all the apps and services.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology may take up the task in creating the portal and collaborate with all ministries, as well as their respective departments and agencies, to detail the digital public infrastructure (DPI) created by them, ET reported, citing a government official.

This comes at a time when UPI transactions surged by nearly 60% to a record 11,768 Cr in 2023 from 7,404.45 Cr in 2022. 

“Almost all central government departments and even a few states have created their DPGs which provide different services through apps and platforms. Anyone trying to access a service has to navigate through all of them. A single portal will at least unify all this information along with the steps to access the service,” the official said

The report further added that government departments may need to provide information about the tasks performed by the DPI, the user base, the technology utilised, whether it’s based on an open protocol, and any additional service requirements.

The idea is to enable not only user-friendly access but also to enhance the ease of doing business, given that multinational companies are also interested in using these DPIs.

“Most DPGs also serve as the underlying infrastructure for other private apps and services. We want this portal to be different from the super app idea that has been proposed (by the central government),” the official told ET.

As per the report, the portal may also include apps and services under DPGs that are currently in development and not yet launched for public use. This would provide an opportunity for application developers and software engineers to collaborate and build on top of the DPI. 

Nearly 60 DPGs have been either fully or partially developed in the country across various levels so far, the official added.

Estimates suggest that the global market size of DPGs is projected to reach $100 Bn within the next five to six years. 

The development comes after Reliance Retail’s digital commerce arm JioMart saw healthy growth in seller additions in the quarter ended March 2024. 

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