Union minister of state for electronics and IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Monday said, government has floated the concept of `One Future Alliance’, a voluntary initiative that aims to bring together all countries and stakeholders to synergize, shape, architect and design the future of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) that could be used by all the countries. He hoped the G20 countries and invitees would consider this proposition and offer to transform with the One Future Alliance.
It is an alliance of like-minded countries that would work together and take the current open source, customizable stacks that are available and build for the future for themselves and rest of the world and at the heart of the alliance was the power of technology to improve governance and peoples’ life, Chandrasekhar said. Speaking at the Global Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) Summit as the G20 Digital Economy Working Group in Pune, the minister said the India stack could be made available to any country that was interested in joining this accelerated digitalization trends.
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The digital economy was a powerful opportunity and DPI was an enabler of that opportunity and the India Stack and the conversations around DPIs was for betterment of the collective future using technology, Chandrashekar said. Both developed and developing countries have the potential to harness digital technology and the world need not be anymore a place of haves and have nots, he said. The coming decade should be a decade of technology and this kind of partnership would allow all countries to pursue these emerging digital opportunities, he said.
Issues of cyber security could also be addressed by the proposed alliance. He urged member countries to understand the security threats and work together and address digital harm and criminality. It was important for governments to recognize security in a digital economy was not a domestic issue or geographically isolated, he said. The template for cyber crime was that the perpetrators could be in one jurisdiction, crime committed in another and victims could be from a different jurisdiction so more and more cooperation with a global protocol was required. The DPI partnership and One Future Alliance could address these issues, the minister said.
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“DPIs is the future of digital government for India and the world. India will work steadfastly with all countries, small or medium, who want to embrace the power digitalization to improve the lives of their people,” the minister said.
Pushing for implementing DPIs, the minister said the catalytic benefit of implementing DPIs was the creation of an innovation and startup ecosystem. He cited the India experience of emerging as a world’s fastest growing digital and fintech ecosystem.
India signed three memorandums of understanding at the summit for sharing he Indian stack with Armenia, Suriname and Sierra Leonne at population scale. Many more countries were expected to sign MoUs with India in the coming months.