New Delhi: India has provided a template for digital governance to the world, Minister of State for External Affairs Meenakshi Lekhi said Wednesday, highlighting several government initiatives such as Aadhaar, the proliferation of bank accounts, and enhanced digital health ecosystems.
Speaking at the Global Technology Summit, organised by the Ministry of External Affairs and Carnegie India, Lekhi said: “India Stack Global is what we are presenting to the world…12 different projects from unique ID to Aadhar…these 12 projects basically tell the world that these are the services from the government’s perspective which need to be made available to every Indian.”
She further said that these tools of governance needed to be applied to everyone as they had brought in inclusion.
Every democratic government wanted to work on inclusion, but the template for digital governance may not be known by all, the minister said, adding that India had “produced” the template.
She indicated the government was working on “deepening and widening” the scope to add more services to the current 12 projects.
Lekhi was giving a ministerial address at the three-day summit on the geopolitics of technology.
Covid hastened digital transformation process
The pace of digital transformation, especially in the last five years, was in part due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Lekhi said. She highlighted how the pandemic changed the way individuals operated. “Covid-19 changed the way we operated…How comfortable are we in our spaces? Are we secure enough? The second aspect was obviously all the transactions from physical to digital — be it shopping, be it groceries or be it receipts, everything shifted to a digital mechanism.”
Apart from changes in individual livelihoods, the pandemic brought forth another change – transformation in governance, the minister asserted.
“During the timeframe of the pandemic, we realised that 1.2 billion Indians had to be given vaccines. How do you manage that system? How do you communicate about that system?… So we developed CoWin,” she said. CoWin is the government’s portal to register for Covid vaccination.
Lekhi added: “I remember when we developed CoWin, there was a lot of resistance from many bodies, including nations… Because CoWin was applying its technology to help those unreached both in terms of vaccination as well as digital footprints.”
However, India’s principled approach to CoWin — keeping it open sourced and making it available to countries who could not afford their own systems — was an example of how New Delhi was able to use digital technology to transform its “national goal” as well as internationally-accepted principles of governance, Lekhi said.
“Whether it was Vaccine Maitri or it was open source CoWin, India showcased not just its might, but its principled stand that technology needs to be made available and that a sense of inclusion had to prevail all over,” the minister added.
Lekhi said India’s principles showed an alternative to a corporatist approach to the pandemic by putting the “interests of the people” above profit interests. “That is the bottom line of India’s geopolitical standard. The geopolitical standard we communicated during Covid-19 got entrenched and further deepened when we hosted G20.”
(Edited by Tikli Basu)
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