The Great Tech Story: The India Stack and the

adoption on Digital Platforms

The Indian economy is ever evolving towards a digitally empowered society.
Technological developments such as digital infrastructure connectivity, smartphone
penetration, strides made by India Stack and accelerated adoption of digital platforms
are some of the recent developments:

Technology Building Blocks OR Digital Public Goods

These are once in a generation, population-scale, low-cost, open-architecture systems

designed to transit from an off-line cash and informal low productivity economy to an
online, cash-less, formal high productive economy.

The Indian internet is built on transactions, and not on advertisements, where scale is
very important. The digital public goods have been built, layer by layer, which are
interoperable.

1. ID Layer (Aadhaar) – 1.3 billion and heavily. The authentication / daily KYC is 80
million/day;

2. JAN DHAN – 700 million Bank Accounts opened in 9 years;

3. Mobile Phones – Data consumption: From ½ a month to ½ a day. Cost of data

amongst the cheapest in the world; massive growth in smart phones;

4. UPI – Currently at 7.3 billion transactions a month. World’s largest digital payment
system, designed to be interoperable. 260 million Indians use this platform. With
UPI feature phone, UPI Light and UPI Global, the NPCI goal is to do 1 billion a day;

5. DIGI Locker – There are 134 million users;

6. FASTag – There were 2.4 billion transactions in 2022/23. The road projects have
become finance worthy;

7. DBT – India, in the last 10 years, has transferred 310 billion dollars directly into the
bank accounts, with 1 billion transactions;

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8. GST – There are 14 million cos registered who do transactions electronically. 71.4
million file taxes digitally. The tax to GDP ratio is going up;

9. Capital Markets – The IPO and the SIP markets have been transformed;

10. COWIN – 2.15 billion vaccines delivered, along with COWIN applications;

11. DEEKSHA – In the education sector, through this platform, 59 million learning
minutes have been used across the country. Every Indian text book printed by the
state government will have a QR quote. There are 600 million text books;

12. IT Industry – IT Industry is now doing 300 billion and along with inward
remittances, it is about 500 billion balance-sheet;

13. Start-ups – 90,000 in 2022; IT toppers want to become Elon Musk;

14. IPL – in the last auctions, the digital auctions received more money than TV rights;

15. Digital Currency (CBDC) – RBI has launched CBDC), e-Rupee and are exploring
the interoperability with UPI;

16. Account Aggregator (AA) Network and Open Credit Enablement Network
(OCEN) will make accessing credit an instantaneous and secure process. Once
the AA framework and protocols are fully established, it will ensure scale-up of
secure flow of financial information of the users between regulated institutions to
enable easier loan sanctions and money management. Currently, financial
institutions are using real-time data from the GST framework and E-way bills to
improve their lending decisions to SMEs. BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) providers use
automated proprietary models using customer data for their underwriting. OCEN
will supplement the current system of lending and expand the customer base to
give lower income customers and MSMEs better access to formal credit at
reasonable interest rates. The digital collateral will replace Asset collateral.

17. Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) – With ONDC banks will be able
to offer credit to new MSMEs and increase credit to existing ones. Access to the
transaction data in this elaborate payment network can be leveraged to offer credit
to all partners in the supply chain;

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18. FinTechs allow banks to utilize their tech stack instead of building from scratch.
The unique and complementary strengths of both entities create win-win scenario
and incentivize more partnerships;

19. Generative AI for hyper-personalized engagement - Banks will rely heavily on

Generative AI for hyper-personalized engagement;

20. Logistics – In 7 years’ time, Bangaluru airport will handle 80 million passengers.