Permanent Mission of India
New York

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Empowering the Digital Citizen of the Future: Towards an
Integrated Digital Public Infrastructure

Statement by Ambassador Parvathaneni Harish, Permanent Representative
24 April 2025

Excellency Mr. Philemon Yang,

Hon’ble Minister of State Shri Jitin Prasada

Mr. Amandeep Singh Gill, UNSG Envoy

Mr. Rob Opp of UNDP

Prof Arun Sundararajan,

Mr. Srikanth Nadhamuni,

Excellencies, Distinguished guests, Ladies and Gentlemen

India mourns the loss of lives in the brutal terrorist attack at Pahalgam in Jammu and Kashmir, day before yesterday. I wish to thank India’s friends and partners who expressed condolences, stood in solidarity with us at this difficult hour and condemned terrorism in all its forms and manifestations. The UN and the world must publicly condemn such terrorism perpetrated against civilians and tourists for which there can be no justification.

Friends,

For the last few decades all governments have been adjusting to a new role that has been thrust on them – of being digital service providers.

Until two years ago Digital Public Infrastructure as a term did not appear in any headline. It was during India’s G 20 presidency in 2023 that a DPI framework was crafted and accepted by G 20 member states. The UN launched the High Impact Initiative on DPI in September 2023, to deploy DPI in 100 countries by 2030, leveraging digital solutions to address critical development challenges. The 50-in-5 Campaign was also launched with the goal of having 50 countries design, launch, and scale at least one component of their DPI stack within five years.

DPI refers to a set of shared, secure and inter-operable digital systems to support broad access to public and private services. India’s DPI journey has been a bottom-up model which over a decade has built various layers of infrastructure from scratch and then combined these capabilities in innovative ways to craft digital solutions. These are open-source assets that have been possible due to India’s deep technological capacity and talent base, the size of its economy, institutional base, a mature eco-system, and most importantly, the political commitment of our leadership.

The push for DPI from our leadership came from a desire to leverage technology to level the playing field for all Indians and to address some core imbalances that characterized our economic growth and development.

1. Our growth has been unequal in terms of geographic and demographic distribution – 13 urban districts representing large metropolitan areas and Tier 2 cities out of 788 districts contribute to around 50% of our GDP. While a smaller percentage of the population earn a significant proportion of total income, the concentration of high-income earners is in urban areas.

2. India’s overall labour productivity was lower compared with other large economies.

3. The level of formalization in the economy was lower, with a majority employed in the non-formal sector.

4. Access to credit for business and households had been an issue due to lack of formalization and significant barriers in monetizing assets, especially land and real estate.

5. A majority of citizens did not have bank accounts and were outside the financial and banking system due to significant process barriers.

6. Government’s social safety net was dependent on non-digital means to deliver vital assistance to citizens in need, leading to delays, fraud and transmission losses.

With the launch of Digital India in 2015 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has implemented several unique digital transformational projects.

• With Aadhaar, all adult Indians numbering over 1.2 billion have a 12 digit unique bio-metric based identifier that can be securely and in real-time authenticate one’s identity.

• The Unified Payments Interface – UPI is a real-time, instant payment system that allows users to transfer money between business-to-consumer, business-to-business, and peer-to-peer payments, promoting digital inclusion while reducing dependency on cash and that is agnostic of the banks or financial services providers used. Today, there are 17 billion monthly transactions, with a value of over USD 275 billion.

• The Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana provides a platform for universal financial inclusion and access to banking facilities for households with at least one basic banking account for every household, financial literacy, and access to credit, health and accident insurance and pension facility.

• The Jan Dhan Yojana-Aadhaar-Mobile the so-called JAM Trinity initiative linked 540 million Jan Dhan bank accounts, with Aadhaar cards, and mobile phone numbers to facilitate Direct Benefit Transfers (DBTs) of government subsidies to needy citizens, ushering in the world’s largest financial inclusion programme and reducing leakages and corruption.

• Bringing over 500 million into the banking system would normally have taken over one decade. However, this was achieved in a few years because the cost of Know Your Customer verification through DPI digital tools was brought down from $ 23 to half a dollar per verification, and literally compressing the time needed to open a bank account from a couple of days to five minutes.

• The use of DPIs for tax formalization has been particularly successful. Core tax administration operations rely heavily on DPI initiatives, especially since unique tax identifiers - the Permanent Account Numbers - have been linked with the biometric based Aadhaar and associated Mobile Numbers, facilitating seamless online tax submissions and refunds directly into bank accounts of tax payers.

• Further, the nationwide Goods and Services Tax Network is an example of a specific DPI that has helped strengthen tax collection capability and simultaneously enabled innovation. It has over 15 million registered businesses, with 1.6 billion registered returns filed, and around 6 billion Electronic Way bills generated for movement of goods.

• DPIs have also ushered an age of Digital Democracy strengthening participative formats for our citizens in governance. MyGov is a citizen engagement platform that has enabled citizen participation in governance and nation-building activities, by allowing them to contribute ideas, participate in discussions, and engage with government initiatives. Over 55 million citizens have registered as Saathis – or Digital Governance Volunteers – to participate in nation building.

Friends,

The onset of Artificial Intelligence has been a force multiplier in the roll out of DPIs. Let me make this case for four high-impact sectors:

First, the digital lending market in India is ripe for DPI and AI related innovation, brought in through the Open Credit Enablement Network (OCEN), a framework for interaction between lenders, loan service providers, and account aggregators. There is an untapped customer base of over 300 million Indians who have remained outside the formal credit market, resulting in a credit gap estimated at over USD 250 billion. Today over 2 billion financial accounts have Account Aggregator facility, and the cumulative Account Aggregator based data sharing exceeds 144 million creating an open and secure digital lending framework for our entrepreneurs. Whereas a new bank account can be opened in five minutes, today a new loan is disbursed in ten minutes after all due diligence and authentication processes.

Second, there has been huge progress in advancing AI technology for Indian languages through open-source contributions. The focus areas include transliteration, natural language understanding, generation, translation, automatic speech recognition, and speech synthesis.

• India has pioneered the development of multilingual LLMs tailored for Indian languages.

• Machine translation models have been built on large-scale datasets mined from the web and carefully curated human translations, catering to all 22 Indian languages.

• Transliteration models have been optimized for converting text between scripts of Indian languages and English.

• Automatic Speech Recognition models have been trained on rich datasets covering multiple Indian languages.

• Text to Speech efforts have focused on creating natural-sounding synthetic voices for Indian languages.

• We are also working on Document Layout Parsing and Optical Character Recognition technologies to support the wide range of Indian scripts.

Third, AI combined with DPI is enabling a low-cost and population-scale effort to enable personalized learning opportunities for every child, in 36 Indian languages and 60 education boards and systems. SunBird, an open source, configurable, and modular digital infrastructure designed for scale supports multiple languages and digital educational content dissemination at scale across India. It powers Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing (DIKSHA), an education ministry-led national platform for school education. Overtime, this platform can also enable upskilling and reskilling through personalized online modules for businesses.

Fourth, AI is redefining Indian agriculture, by enhancing productivity, optimizing resource use, and improving decision-making for 200 million farmers. It is empowering them in crop monitoring, pest control, optimal water use, crop rotation and harvesting strategies, accessing credit, enabling market access and availing of government assistance.

Friends,

Our digital citizens of the future deserve an integrated Digital Public Infrastructure aided by AI systems, so that no one is digitally left behind. Our duty is to work for that, and in such an endeavour, India is a friend and partner of choice for all, especially the Global South.

Thank you

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