Seven Countries To Sign Up For India Stack

According to the minister of state for electronics and information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar, as many as seven countries will sign up with the government to use India Stack.

India Stack is a set of indigenously-developed digital goods that have been used extensively for e-governance and public applications. Some of the apps that are part of the India Stack include UPI, CoWIN, Aarogya Setu and DigiLocker, among others.

The seven countries will sign agreements with India at the World Government Summit to be held in Dubai from February 13-15, the MoS told ET. More than 140 countries are expected to participate in the summit.

Incidentally, sources cited by the publication said the countries signing up with India are mostly interested in DigiLocker, the cloud-based platform for document and certificate storage, sharing and verification. In India, DigiLocker has 144 Mn users.

The government is offering many other platforms in the agreements, including Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP), Covid vaccination platform CoWIN and the Digital Health Stack.

Some countries are also said to have expressed interest in the Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing (DIKSHA) and National Digital Education Architecture (NDEAR).

The source quoted above noted that the government has to close the agreements with the regulators of the countries interested in India Stack and UPI. They added that if financial institutions and regulators are interested in UPI, Indian companies and developers would follow where the payments network goes.

The development comes as India is in talks with as many as 30 countries in Asia, Europe and the Middle East to export UPI. Many countries such as Singapore, France and the UAE have announced their plans to use UPI, the most well-known IP within the India Stack.

The government has been working to enable non-resident Indians (NRIs) in Singapore, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Oman, Qatar, the US, Saudi Arabia, UAE and the UK to use UPI as a payment method. 

Recently, the government also allowed UPI players to enable NRE/NRO accounts with international mobile numbers to use the payments network.

India is also hosting a developers’ conference on Wednesday (January 25), which will be attended by startups, state and central government, officials from foreign embassies and app developers and system integrators.

The developers’ conference would also allow foreign nations interested in India stack to gather information on how to implement these technologies. 

“This is to help those countries who intend to use India’s digital public goods but do not have the digital infrastructure or know-how to implement these technologies,” said Chandrasekhar in a press conference on Tuesday (January 24).

To further help other countries with the implementation of the India Stack, India will also release certification courses to certify developers and system integrators to use and deploy India Stack.

Speaking of certification, the government is also planning to introduce a certification mechanism for Indian startups who seek to help foreign countries integrate their existing digital infrastructure with the application programming interfaces (APIs) of various digital public goods part of the ‘India Stack’.