New Delhi: Questions about sovereignty and security when adopting digital public infrastructure (DPI) dominated a panel discussion at a marquee tech summit in New Delhi Tuesday.
DPI, the digital network that allows countries to safely and efficiently deliver economic opportunities and social services to all citizens, includes Aadhaar, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), and CoWin among others in India.
Speaking at Carnegie India’s Global Technology Summit, Sopnendu Mohanty, Chief Fintech Officer, Monetary Authority in Singapore, said, “When it comes to DPI, it is a strong sovereign choice for national infrastructure. It is hard for a government to adopt infrastructure from another country within its national infrastructure. Questions arise such as what are the components being implemented, what are their impacts and risks on the sovereignty of the country.”
“It is hard for politicians and bureaucrats to make that choice. There are various concerns regarding national security and sovereignty despite the systemic significance of DPI,” he added.
Talking about the issue of sovereignty within DPI, Amazon chief technologist Shalini Kapoor espoused technologies such as encryption keys for data protection, observing, “DPI needs to be sovereign by design. The definition of sovereignty changes with each region. Therefore, sovereignty needs to be built into the DPI’s design principle, and technology itself has the solution for this.”
She added that the first five mutually exclusive diverse countries to adopt DPI would be “most important”, and these would then create demand globally.
Rohini Srivathsa, Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft India & South Asia, said: “The idea of sovereignty is about control. Technology is moving rapidly to provide users with better control, through cloud, landing zones and more. We need to think more about resilience and innovation. Here, we need to think about AI first.”
She added that it was imperative to “find the right balance between sovereignty and control while unleashing private sector innovation and AI, which is only going to expand in the future”.
Digital Development Specialist of the World Bank, Jonathan Marskell, stressed sovereignty and security, given the present geopolitical realities, but also focussed on inclusivity. “If we go all digital too quickly, we are going to leave out a lot of people,” he said.
The panel also included Pramod Varma, Former Chief Architect, Aadhaar, IndiaStack, and Co-Chair, Centre for DPI, and Vivek Sonny Abraham, Senior Director, External Strategy, India & South Asia, Salesforce. The conversation was moderated by Rudra Chaudhuri, Director, Carnegie India.
Questions of sovereignty and national security have become a crucial part of conversations around emerging technologies and data science in recent years.
Over the past year, the US, along with various European countries such as Germany, has accused China of stealing data and intellectual property.
In their first ever joint public meeting earlier this year, the intelligence chiefs of the Five Eyes — an intelligence alliance comprising the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand — highlighted China’s use of emerging technologies and sophisticated espionage to advance its own strategic goals.
(Edited by Tikli Basu)
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