Beyond Bollywood and yoga: DPG, India’s new soft power, about to be introduced

Last month, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MEA) issued a press note (bit.ly/3ygqZhM). He identified priorities for the upcoming G20 forum, the powerful global high table that frames collective responses to challenges impacting the global economy, once India takes over the presidency on December 1.

The G20 is made up of both developed and developing countries, which together represent 85% of global GDP, 75% of international trade and two-thirds of the world’s population. Given the state of dysfunction of most multilateral bodies, the G20 is now the institution of reference in the world.

Among other goals, the walk identified a very compelling priority, “digital public infrastructure and technology-enabled development in areas ranging from health, agriculture and education to trade, skills mapping, culture and tourism”. Obviously, the focus here is on India’s new calling card – Digital Public Goods (DPGs) – which is rapidly gaining notoriety and expanding its global footprint.

This was not an isolated reference from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Earlier, at a rally hosted by the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), former Foreign Secretary and G20 coordinator Harsh Shringla stressed the need to showcase India’s success with the DPGs. He began by highlighting innovations, “Our startup sector, a world that beats digital public goods and an industrial policy, focused on technological innovation and growth, shows that we are capable of creating technological models that balance the need for global integration and priorities at the national level”. .’

And then he flagged India’s plan for its next presidency: “At the G20, this model needs to be internationalized… The world needs new and innovative approaches to meet today’s complex challenges. Digital technologies offer us the necessary tools to meet certain contemporary challenges. Implicitly, Shringla and the MEA recognize that India’s soft power arsenal has a new inclusion: DPGs.

Traditionally, India’s soft power has been defined around yoga, cuisine, Bollywood and, more recently, contemporary Indian art. A little over the past decade, with the launch of Aadhaar, India began to garner international attention for its prowess in creating public digital infrastructure to deliver the public good.

CoWin-Win Platform

He succeeded in creating digital building blocks using Aadhaar as the basis for creating a public digital rail – on which anyone, government or private sector, can build applications at scales as staggering as a billion.

These protocols were used to create the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which propelled India’s fintech revolution and democratized payments – from just 1,000 in 2016, average transactions per month have fallen to just under of 7 billion.

Similarly, CoWin was used to deliver 2 billion jabs using the “One Nation, One Jab” principle. Not only did this allow for an orderly rollout of the vaccination project in India, but it also ensured that no one, especially migrants, was left out. Its phenomenal success in delivering 2 billion vaccines has led to 50 countries expressing interest in signing up to a similar system to roll out their vaccination campaigns.

On September 30, India launched its boldest digital economy plan to reinvent digital commerce by rolling out the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) in Bangalore. It seeks to reset digital commerce, in the same way that UPI completely disrupted the payments industry by enabling interoperability – whereby we can pay each other in real time using any wallet as long as each of us is on the UPI network – at an extremely low transaction cost.

In short, ONDC seeks to overhaul the way sellers and buyers connect with each other in digital commerce, making it even more accessible and inclusive. Right now, these cohorts can only engage with each other by being on the same platform, closed and dominated by the few.

India has also soft-launched two other initiatives aimed at:

• Catalyze credit with the account aggregator framework.
• Democratize credit through the Open Credit Enablement Network, so even bagged loans can be used at bank rates. At present, these are bought mostly by those at the bottom of the pyramid at usurious rates.

India’s unique concept of digital commons, as opposed to the walled garden approach adopted by most global platforms that drives users captive, is quickly finding takers, especially in Europe. Of the nine platforms worldwide with over a billion users, five operate from the United States and the rest from China. The idea of ​​DPGs is to eventually make all these platforms interoperable, thus democratizing the ability of customers to discover, engage and meet their needs.

Pick the digital fruits

All of these projects enable scaling by lowering the cost of entry and barriers. Today, other countries are looking to adopt the same strategy to deliver public goods without relying on proprietary software systems. India has already started to institutionalize its DPG game. Earlier this year, he joined the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), a multi-stakeholder initiative to accelerate the use of DPGs to achieve sustainable development goals in low- and middle-income countries.

The G20 would therefore be the next logical step to cement and showcase India’s new soft power.