- India Stack Knowledge Exchange 2022, a virtual event with more than 5000 participants from 53 countries kick-starts
- India’s Digital Products and Services in sectors of Health, Education, Agriculture Commerce, Digital Identity, Data Empowerment and Good Governance being showcased
IndiGlobal Media
As part of the ongoing Digital India Week 2022 celebrations, a three-day long virtual conference on India Stack Knowledge Exchange kicked off on July 7. This event is an opportunity to showcase India’s most significant contribution to the Digital world – the India Stack, which is a unified software platform to bring India’s 1.4 billion population into the Digital Age. This programme witnessed participation from across the world. The objective is to give an orientation to the basic building blocks of India Stack, which is driving Digital Transformation in India.
In the inaugural session, Alkesh Kumar Sharma, Secretary, MeitY, (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology), Government of India, touched upon the challenging yet rewarding journey of the country’s Digital Transformation in the last eight years. The fruitful journey resulted in India’s leadership in Digital technologies and its experience in implementing Digital transformation projects. Rajesh Gera, Director General, National Informatics Centre, said that Aadhaar and Mobile as the two services that have enabled good governance to grow and reach out to the end-user, whether in rural or urban areas, for ease of living. Abhishek Singh, President and CEO, National e-Governance Division, said that each speaker was a pioneer and real practitioner, having implemented Digital Transformation projects at population scale in the country.
The first session was on India Stack’s prime product, the Aadhaar. Aptly titled ‘Building Aadhaar’, it had distinguished speakers such as Dr. R.S.Sharma, Founding CEO, UIDAI, Dr. Saurabh Garg, CEO, UIDAI, Dr. Pramod Varma, ex-Chief Architect and Advisor, UIDAI, and Mr. Suresh Sethi, MD and CEO, Protean eGov Technologies Ltd. It spoke of the evolution of Aadhaar considering all challenges of the diverse population, and overcoming these challenges Aadhaar has enabled ease of living for the citizens, especially the most marginalized and deprived class through seamless delivery of subsidies, benefits, and other services under various state welfare schemes. Aadhaar has also been the foundation of multiple Building Blocks. More than 17 transactional stacks have been launched pan- India for Digital Identity, Payments, Data Empowerment and Open Ecosystems.
The second session was on ‘UPI: Leading Digital Payment Ecosystem in India’. Amit Agarwal, Additional Secretary, MeitY highlighted on Digital India initiatives, which has ensured inclusive democratized solutions at population scale, keeping the concerns of privacy, consumer protection and potential risk management. Dilip Asbe, MD & CEO, NPCI and Sudhanshu Prasad, General Manager, RBI spoke about UPI being the path-breaking innovation in digital payments and how wallets have revolutionized how people pay in the country.
A parallel session was organised alongside, which highlighted the achievements India has achieved in the Education sector through Technology Stack. The last thematic session of the day was on Paperless Governance and Data Empowerment. The significance of Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA) was suitably highlighted as a strategy for data empowerment towards economic wellbeing for all citizens of India.The KYC / e-KYC formalities are now much easier. DEPA enables data protection, sharing, consent and privacy. Citizens can seamlessly and securely access their data and share it with third party institutions. The panel also discussed India Stack’s highlight, the API Setu aimed at good data governance, and which enables quick and transparent software integration with the other e-Governance applications and systems.
Day 1 of the virtual event successfully concluded with 19 distinguished Speakers – all pioneers in their respective thematic areas, disseminating their experience and knowledge to more than 5000 registered participants across 53 countries. Day 2 will witness thematic sessions on Health Stack, AgriStack, and Technology Stack for Skilling and Digital Inclusion – Connecting the Unconnected. With over 5654 registered participants of both national and international practitioners from the Government, Industry and the Academia, the event has served as a knowledge exchange platform for India to speak of its contribution to the repository of Global Digital Public Goods.