
India offers to manage DPI repository

Summary
- Minister of state for electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said there was a global consensus for the first time on the principles of DPIs, cybersecurity in digital economy and digital skills, within the G20 digital economy ministers’ working group
NEW DELHI : India has volunteered to man and manage the global repository of all digital public infrastructure (DPI) through an open-source platform, minister of state for electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said, adding that there was interest from multilateral institutions, government and non-government organizations to finance the expansion and adoption of DPIs.
“The global DPI repository, which would be essentially the platform where all of these DPIs, will be open in open-source manner, shared technology and innovation and be available to the whole world, will be manned by and managed by us. That is what we’ve volunteered to do," the minister said at a briefing on the digital economy minister’s document on Tuesday.
“There’s a lot of interest in many bodies, multilateral, non-governmental, governmental, that are interested in making sure that continents and countries that have lagged behind the digitization have the ability to implement this in this form or in some other form," he added.
Chandrasekhar said there was a global consensus for the first time on the principles of DPIs, cybersecurity in digital economy and digital skills, within the G20 digital economy ministers’ working group.
The minister added the definition, principles and framework on what should comprise as DPIs was also agreed upon by member countries.
DPIs by India include the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Aadhaar identification platform, CoWin platform for healthcare, Digilocker as well as indigenously built 4G and 5G stack.
The minister said UPI was becoming a popular DPI, and several countries have shown interest in adopting it.
Eight countries including Surinam, Sierra Leone, Antigua, Barbados, Papua New Guinea, Trinidad and Tobago, Mauritius and Armenia, have already inked memorandums of understanding for the same.
“What we are offering today to these countries is the technology in itself. We are offering skilling, and we are also offering access to partnership for their own startups for their young companies access to partnership with the Indian innovation and developer ecosystem that supports the India DPI," the minister said.
On the comments from Congress leaders triggered by the invitation sent to delegates within G20 from President of India Droupadi Murmu as ‘President of Bharat’, the minister said: “I have no problem with Bharat. Our country is ‘Bharat’... Congress have a problem with everything. I don’t have a problem with ‘Bharat’...Our country is ‘Bharat’ and there should be no doubts about it. We have to wait and see if it will be a part of the Special Session (of Parliament)," he told ANI, when asked on speculation on the name change of India to Bharat will be taken up during the special session of parliament.
(With inputs from ANI)