“Is-se aap logon ko kya milta hai?” (What do you all get out of it?). That’s what Delhi bureaucrats sometimes ask this group of people who are going around the world – from Brazil to Morocco and the Philippines – helping countries replicate the success of India’s Aadhaar, UPI, and other digital public infrastructure (DPI). Many in this group, including those building and upgrading the open-source technology modules that go into DPI, are doing it pro bono. They are driven by a mission – to help lay the foundations for high-growth, equitable and inclusive societies. Many of them don’t recognise it, but they are also helping build India’s soft power, especially in the Global South.
Morocco’s Digital Journey
Noureddine Boutayeb, a former deputy interior minister of Morocco, recalls how the country’s football team held Brazil to a thrilling draw in a World Cup match. “Morocco is a great football nation. It is the result of hard work!” he says. Boutayeb himself has been working hard over the past decade to build DPI in Morocco. His journey began in 2017, when the country was creating a national population register for direct aid transfers and looked closely at India’s Aadhaar experience. He travelled with a Moroccan delegation to Delhi, Bengaluru, and Vijayawada, where he saw Aadhaar authentication work in poor rural telecom conditions. A household received rice after a quick fingerprint authentication. “What I wanted to do was already there in India, for a billion Indians,” he says.
In Bengaluru, he met Nandan Nilekani, the founding chairman of UIDAI, which built Aadhaar. Nilekani told him that Aadhaar itself could not be shared, but its core ideas could be rebuilt as an open digital public good for the world. Morocco signed an MoU in 2018, becoming the first adopter of the open-source identity platform Mosip that Nilekani and his team built. Today, the North African country has registered 22 million of its 39 million people in its national population register, and it’s already being used to help 5 million eligible households access social programmes.
Years later, after retiring from government and becoming president of a Moroccan preschool foundation, Boutayeb returned to India. This time, inspired by another of Nilekani’s open-source platforms, an education one called Sunbird that was being used by the Indian government’s Diksha programme, he signed up to build Maharat, an open-source platform to train Morocco’s 26,000 preschool educators.
A New Approach to Digital Transformation
When Nilekani joined the government in 2009 to build Aadhaar, the task was domestic and daunting: give every resident a digital identity that could work at India’s scale. Years later, that experience has turned into one of India’s most unusual exports. Not a product. Not a service contract. But a way of thinking about digital transformation.
Nilekani, S Rajagopalan, professor at IIIT-Bangalore, and Pramod Varma, mathematician-turned-computer scientist and one of the principal architects of Aadhaar, UPI, eSign and DigiLocker, are among those leading the initiative to take India’s DPI experience to the world. Their bet is that countries wanting inclusive growth, better service delivery, and digital markets need low-cost, interoperable public rails on which private innovation can flourish. It’s similar to roads, which form a physical network essential for people to connect with each other and access a huge range of goods and services.
“Over the years, it became clear that many of India’s learnings were globally applicable,” Nilekani says. “Around the world people want to use digital transformation to change their societies. And you need to have a way of doing it which is low cost, high performance, and manage even small transactions.” Western models that depend on private enterprise and proprietary models were seen as prohibitive.
The government-driven Indian model is now familiar. Aadhaar gave more than 1.3 billion people a digital identity. That enabled eKYC, bank accounts, mobile connections, Aadhaar-enabled payments and direct benefit transfers. UPI now does 23 billion transactions a month. DigiLocker allows 500 million people to store documents digitally. eSign lets individuals sign documents using Aadhaar-based authentication.
Demand for Digital Identity
The international push began with identity. Rajagopalan says Mosip (Modular Open Source Identity Platform) was launched in 2018 after several countries asked for help in building digital identity systems. A digital identity was seen as essential for many of the UN’s sustainable development goals, and the World Bank was ready to fund these initiatives. Many countries initially tried the conventional route: write requirements, issue tenders, pick a vendor and buy a proprietary solution. That often led to vendor lock-in, high costs and limited government control over citizen data.
“Most of the nearly 20 countries that attempted this ended in lots of trouble,” Rajagopalan says. “The vendor would say, I’ll give you identity, per identity, so many dollars.”
That’s when the World Bank contacted iSpirt (Indian Software Product Industry Roundtable), a nonprofit, volunteer-driven think tank that has helped build India’s DPI. And iSpirt turned to Nilekani. The government’s stance was that Aadhaar is proprietary and a strategic asset of India. That, together with requests from Morocco and the Philippines, prompted Nilekani to suggest a free, open-source identity platform that could learn from Aadhaar as well as global experiences, with stronger privacy, security and standards compliance.
“I recollect Sanjay Anandaram of iSpirt meeting me and S Sadagopan (then IIIT director) in 2017 to request us to take up this project. We were surprised, we said we would try. Sadagopan said it’s a complex system, and asked me to lead it,” Rajagopalan says.
Tata Trusts, Gates Foundation, Omidyar Network and Norad (Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation) came forward to fund it. Rajagopalan and Varma planned the project. Morocco provided the requirements for the software, some 300 features. IT services company Mindtree assigned 110 developers to do coding and testing. Infosys, Thoughtworks and NSDL (National Securities Depository Ltd) also provided engineers. “Mosip has 2 million lines of code today, and 20% of that was done pro bono,” Rajagopalan says.
By 2021, Morocco and the Philippines had started using Mosip. Today, Mosip has 30 active country engagements, of which 14 are national rollouts.
G20 Boost
India’s presidency of G20 in 2022-23 was an inflection point. “G20 made this one of the tracks and coined the term DPI,” says Varma. “Till then we didn’t even call it that. We called it IndiaStack. But, obviously, other countries would not want it if it was called IndiaStack. Everyone agreed on DPI.”
One of the highlights of India’s presidency was the G20 Task Force on DPI, co-chaired by Nilekani and Amitabh Kant, former CEO of Niti Aayog. The task force report, Nilekani says, laid the intellectual framework for DPI. Through case studies, it highlighted its cost-effectiveness, expansion of markets, and massive reduction in leakages for government benefit transfers. And it outlined a plug-and-play architectural blueprint to help nations deploy scalable, interoperable systems.
Since then, three other organisations have come up, all under IIIT-Bangalore, and funded by the Nilekanis and a host of others. One is the Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure (CDPI), whose purpose was to ensure countries don’t build siloed systems – like India did in its early decades of computerisation, by digitising railway reservations, airline reservations, bus reservations, banking, insurance and healthcare separately, with little reuse and limited interoperability.
Tangram Model
CDPI’s new conceptual model, Rajagopalan says, is the tangram, the Chinese puzzle in which seven shapes can be rearranged to create many figures. DPI was imagined similarly. Most digital governance systems need a few basic building blocks: identity, payments, credentials (our documents), consented data exchange, and contracts (because many services involve discovery, fulfilment and dispute settlement).
“We said, why don’t we help governments imagine their digital governance in this form,” Rajagopalan says. “Talk to them, train them, show them use cases so that they don’t have to go through the siloed ways in which India or US or others have done.”
Kamya Chandra, co-founder of CDPI, says the organisation is today working with 60-70 countries.
Another organisation is OpenG2P (or open government-to-people platform), which supports governments to use their identity systems to provide benefits and services.
And in May 2024, the Centre for Open Societal Systems (Coss) was created to take open-source assets such as Mosip, Sunbird, Inji (a decentralised verifiable credentialing solution) and other DPI building blocks into complete solutions. Rajagopalan says many countries do not have enough technical capacity even when they understand the architecture. Skilled engineers migrate quickly from places such as Fiji and Morocco, leaving governments with thin execution teams.
While India may be leading the global DPI movement, Nilekani’s teams emphasise they are part of a global ecosystem. India, Varma says, did not invent every component of the technology stacks. Estonia had digital identity. Brazil has Pix, which resembles UPI. Thailand, Singapore and China have digital payments. Many of them are contributing too. Rohit Ranjan Rai, consultant with Mosip, says other countries using Mosip are now contributing code back to the platform. But India’s distinction compared to other countries, Varma says, is the breadth of DPI implementation – across identity, payments, credentials, education, health, agriculture and green financing. And it’s moving faster.
Towards AI
Today, Morocco’s Boutayeb is delighted with the effort of people like MC Ramesh, a former senior Dell and Akamai executive who was CEO of Coss during its first two years. “He and his team did a great job. Even helped us with financing.”
Boutayeb is now looking to see what India is doing with artificial intelligence (AI). And that’s indeed what Kamya and her team are increasingly focusing on. DPI is foundational to AI, but governments also now need to showcase some powerful AI-based innovations to their voters. CDPI, along with others, Kamya says, is helping them think through this.
In doing so, they are also indisputably helping build India’s soft power across the world.
