Startups To Soon Get Certification To Help Other Countries Integrate With India Stack

The Centre is reportedly 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’.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) will also hold the first India Stack Developer Conference on Wednesday (January 25) to discuss ways to ensure wider adoption of India’s digital goods by countries across the world.

The conference will be attended by over 100 digital leaders from the industry, government, startups, unicorns, and academia. Besides, delegates from G20 countries and G20 Secretariat have also been invited for the conference, the ministry said in a statement.

The conference will also provide a platform for the industry and developer community to explore ways to develop a robust startup and innovation ecosystem within the country, MoS for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said.

Moreover, seven countries have already agreed to sign agreements to use India Stack’s digital public goods, ET quoted Chandrasekhar as saying.

The agreements will be signed at World Government Summit that will be held in Dubai from February 13 to 15.

As per the report, countries are mostly showing interest in DigiLocker, which utilises APIs to retrieve, digitise and retain documents.

Earlier on Monday, Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw also said that India will be offering the locally-developed 5G technology and India Stack API to the world as part of its commitment towards the global community.

India’s digital stack or the India Stack is a set of open APIs and digital public products covering identity, payments, among others. It includes Aadhaar, account aggregator framework, UPI, among others.

Last year, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman also said that India’s digital stack is available to all countries that need such technology.

The government has been promoting UPI at an international scale, with as many as 30 countries from across the world in talks with India for deploying the payments framework in their countries. Earlier this month, a senior official of the Monetary Authority of Singapore said that the integration of UPI with its Singaporean counterpart PayNow is expected to go live soon.

Recently, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) also instructed members of UPI to allow non-resident account types such as non-resident external (NRE) and non-resident ordinary (NRO) accounts with international mobile numbers to use UPI.