New Delhi, Aug 20 — India is offering a transformative growth story built on population‑scale digital rails that link identity, banking, payments and verifiable documents, Union MoS Communications, Dr Chandra Sekhar Pemmasani, said at the BRICS ICT Track on Thursday.
Minister Pemmasani told the international delegation that digital public infrastructure is a necessity, not a luxury, for sustainable development across the Global South.
He urged stronger BRICS digital partnership anchored in sharing modular, open-source technology frameworks to eliminate prohibitive licensing costs, alongside joint capacity-building initiatives to ensure fair representation in international ICT standard-setting bodies.
The minister outlined India’s strategic vision for open, inclusive, and resilient digital architectures designed to empower citizens and accelerate economic progress, to the international delegation of ministers, policymakers, academicians, and industry leaders from BRICS nations.
Highlighting India’s transformative journey, Dr Pemmasani said that India has demonstrated a modern paradigm built on population-scale digital rails encompassing identity, banking, payments, verifiable documents, and consented data.
He noted that the true innovation lies in establishing an open, interoperable foundational public layer upon which banks, fintech enterprises, and government departments can build diverse consumer services.
Elaborating on the core pillars of India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), the Union MoS detailed how the foundational identity layer enables low-cost remote verification across billions of authentications, SIM issuances, and banking access.
In the payments sphere, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has democratised finance, linking 720 banks, processing 85 per cent of India’s digital transactions, and contributing to nearly 49 per cent of global real-time payment volumes while expanding to nine partner nations.
He also emphasised the role of the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) portal, which integrates 318 schemes across 56 ministries to eliminate intermediaries, alongside DigiLocker’s ecosystem of over 700 million users and 9 billion issued verifiable credentials.
Newer initiatives such as the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), Government e-Marketplace (GeM), and Account Aggregator framework are further democratizing market access and individual data sovereignty.