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Ambassador Ruchira Kamboj, The Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations, shared a story at the UN HQ that echoes from the streets of Khurja, a small town in India, where a remarkable woman named Geeta has dreams just like you and me.
“Geeta, a mother of two and a tailor, never had the chance to attend university. Every day, she stitches clothes for her neighbors and with every stitch, she weaves her dreams—not just for herself but for her children, ensuring they receive the education she missed. Geeta's routine included a monthly trip to the city bank, trading a day's earnings for a bus ride to deposit her hard-earned savings.
One day in 2016, a change sparked when a customer asked if she accepted payment via India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI). Unfamiliar but intrigued, Geeta decided it was time to learn something new. She found a tutorial video by the Press Information Bureau, produced by the Government of India, and what she discovered was nothing short of a revolution. It opened up a world where she could connect with customers not just in her locality but across the country.
Today, Geeta doesn’t make those trips to the bank anymore. Instead, she spends that time at her children's school, watching them learn and grow, secure in the knowledge that their future is bright. Payments for her tailored clothes now come instantly on her phone from all over India. She saves for her business and pays for her children’s tuition, all through a digital wallet on her mobile. Geeta has become what she always wished to be—a successful businesswoman, empowered by the digital age” stated Ambassador Ruchira Kamboj, Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations.
This transformation was made possible by India Stack (India's Citizen Stack), a pioneering force in building DPI, turning a billion dreams like Geeta’s into reality. It has revolutionized everyday transactions in India—from buying vegetables to consuming street food, and from taking loans to saving money. India Stack is a 'sum-of-parts' technology that despite being privately provisioned is publicly owned infrastructure and delivers a gamut of citizen services encompassing digital identity, payments, open networks and data that enable other innovations using this as a national digital backbone.
THIS is Digital Public Infrastructure. Similar to how public infrastructure includes roads, bridges, and railways on which an economy and society builds and advances upon, Digital Public Infrastructure is no different. In India it has been built to empower our 1.4B citizens and leapfrog our country's journey into a product-driven, innovation-led, and high-growth global state.
When India’s G20 Sherpa, Amitabh Kant, took to stage he emphasized on some of the many achievements of India’s DPI one of which was how India has undergone a transformative journey pioneering the implementation of DPI like the Unique Identification system (Aadhaar), a unique digital identity for its 1.4B citizens, in less than a decade, which the World Bank estimate reveals to have typically taken 47 years for any country to achieve.
In 2009, only 17% of adults in India had a bank account. The reason? There is a super high cost of verifying the person. Verifying the KYC took 15 days and anywhere between Rs. 50 ($0.60) to Rs. 100 ($1.20). The Aadhaar KYC brought down the customer onboarding cost for an Indian Bank from $7 to just $0.4. At this lower and newer price, it was economical for banks to open new accounts. Soon, private banks started to mushroom all over the country. Within 7 years the bank accounts increased from 35% to 80+%, a level of progress that typically takes 47 years to achieve.
We stand as a role model in digital financial inclusion, through a democratic infrastructure of banking and payments.
Looking ahead, India envisions the future of Digital Public Infrastructure not just as a foundation for current technological needs but as an enabler for the next set of innovations and global challenges across Artificial Intelligence (AI), privacy, and decentralized infrastructure. Our vision is to enable ethical use of AI, data protection, and privacy through the Data Empowerment and Protection Framework (DEPA). This approach goes beyond technology and creates an ecosystem that respects rights, builds trust, and includes everyone. This careful balance of innovation and privacy, with the unlocking of data silos in a secure manner (under DEPA), ensures we move into the future with technology that not only empowers but also protects.
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