Life In The Digital World

The pandemic highlighted the benefits of a robust globally. Indiq has made significant progress in the digital public infrastructure (DPI) space. An Omidyar Network India and Boston Consulting Group report estimates that by 2030, tën high potential National Open Digital Ecosystems (NODES) in sectors like health, agriculture, justice, etc, could collectively create new economic value of over $500 billion (more than Rs 35 lakh crore)

- Jyotsna Sharma

Yes, we blame the pandemic for a lot, but we must agree that it did push innovation and progress light years ahead. The need for a robust digital public infrastructure (DPI), especially digital Identity and digital payments, were most beneficial when the pandemic struck. In India, we have been leaders in building a population-scale digital ID initiative and digital payments infrastructure such as the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

There's been a lot of conversation about the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) recently. This initiative was born out of the pandemic. More specifically, the Ministry of Commerce and Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) understood the problem people faced buying and selling goods during the pandemic. It came up with the ONDC, so it may be a bridge between sellers and buyers. “The team’s philosophy was not to create something proprietary but something on an open-source foundation. They then looked at the backend protocol that was already available as a standard protocol, used by many sectors like mobility and health and asked whether ONDC could adopt that protocol with this idea of creating an open foundation,” said T. Koshy, CEO, ONDC in a conversation with our team.