From red lights to green: DPI for businesses will spur job creation

Employer Aadhaar and Digilocker will apply Digital Public Infrastructure to compliance and help create high-wage jobs

- Manish Sabharwal & Rishi Agarwal

The primary theme of Jennifer Pahlka's book Recoding America—that the US government is failing in the digital age—doesn't apply to India. Our unique Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), from Aadhaar, UPI, Digilocker, Digiyatra and Co-Win to Fastag and much else, has enabled millions of citizen transactions through an appropriate balance of public standards and private innovation. However, so far, hundreds of thousands of employers have been left out of DPI. Fantastic recent policy announcements that green-light a unique identifier and digital repository for employers will enable a new wave of innovation in 'enterprise DPI'. This will accelerate high-wage job creation.

Why? India's challenge is simple but hard. Mass prosperity is held back by wages rather than jobs, high wages are held back by a shortage of non-farm employers with high productivity, and this employer population is held back by regulatory cholesterol: compliances/filings/jail provisions (over 85,000), irrational workflows (too many people and departments involved) and interpretation subjectivity ('Show me the person, I'll show you the rule'). This toxic brew breeds corruption, uncertainty and informality. Mass prosperity is a national security, justice and constitutional objective; that path includes digitizing, rationalizing and decriminalizing our regulatory cholesterol.