Building digital government at speed and scale with open sourcing and DPI

The architect behind the world’s largest digital ID system, Nandan Nilekani, clinched the Lifetime Achievement Award at the recent Future of Government Awards 2024 ceremony held virtually on March 20.

As the only one award out of the five chosen by the selection committee, this recognises a digital leader and innovator who is “a trailblazer within digital government,” according to the awards website.  

At its third edition, the Future of Government Awards are organised by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Public Digital and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Institute. 

Prior to accepting his award, Nilekani – who was also Infosys’ co-founder - was doing an interview with AWS’ Government Transformation Director, Liam Maxwell, on the digital government trends he is seeing.  

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Keep it simple and open to build momentum 

“You have to get the momentum right in the beginning. If there’s no momentum, you’ll never get it back,” said Nilekani, highlighting the need to keep the user design simple and incentivise users to adopt. 

He cautioned digital governments of the tendency to “throw the kitchen sink into the solution, which then it becomes so heavy that it sinks under its own weight.” 

Consider both the technology and business point of view, he said.  

On the technology side, it is about keeping the user design minimalistic with a few fields and simple enough enrolment.

While on the business side, the team behind Aadhar had to ensure that there were incentives for people to use Aadhar. 

Aadhaar is a 12-digit individual identification number issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) on behalf of the Government of India. The number serves as a proof of identity anywhere in India. 

“The digital ID allowed users to open bank accounts, get mobile connections and withdraw money,” he shared some examples. 

Particularly for government projects, Nilekani also highlighted that Aadhar avoided “treading on anyone’s else toes”, which are existing government agencies.  

It focused on providing a foundational identity verification – for example, verifying that John was indeed John – without encroaching on the specific functions of other departments such as passport issuance which is managed by another agency. 

Designing Aadhar as an open application programming interface (API) also helped, he explained, adding that this allowed Aadhar to be integrated with other software applications and exchange information.

How digital public infrastructure (DPI) empowers 

Nilekani pointed to an increasing global recognition of the need for a strategically designed digital public infrastructure (DPI) to ensure self-sovereignty.  

Essentially, DPI is “architecture which allows layering of capability one on top of the other,” he added. 

In Africa, he highlighted that individual countries are not only developing DPI and recognising its benefits, but the region is also exploring the potential of a pan-African digital infrastructure to unify the services across the countries. 

Nilekani has played a key role in building the DPI in India. Following Aadhar, his other big contribution was launching the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which is an open architecture platform that allows banks to develop their own apps and services on top of it. 

As of last June, UPI has over 350 million active UPI users in India and over 340 million QR codes at various merchant locations to facilitate digital payments.  

The ecosystem has also integrated over 77 mobile applications including Google Pay, Amazon Pay, with more than 550 banks integrated into the UPI framework, according to NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL) - the subsidiary of the Indian government agency that promotes the international use of UPI. 

Open sourcing for self-sovereignty 

Nilekani is also a big advocate for open sourcing and its ability to accelerate digital transformation for governments.  

“There’re no strings attached. [Other countries] retain their sovereignty, and they have the source code. So, there are a lot of thoughts going into how to make governments comfortable implementing technology without feeling that they are locked in,” he explained.  

He cited the example Modular Open-Source Identity Platform (MOSIP), an open-source platform which allows countries to build their digital IDs. 

MOSIP came out of a research university in Bangalore, and is currently adopted in 26 countries across Africa, Asia Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, according to its website. 

Open source products, or digital public goods (DPGs), have had a strong hold in the Future of Government awards in the last couple of years. You can find the full list of winners on their website.