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### Overview of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) in India
- DPI defined as a set of shared digital building blocks—applications, systems, and platforms—powered by interoperable open standards or specifications.
- India Stack: three layers
  - unique identity (Aadhaar)
  - complimentary payments systems (Unified Payments Interface, Aadhaar Payments Bridge, Aadhaar Enabled Payment Service)
  - data exchange (DigiLocker and Account Aggregator)
- Objective: enable online, paperless, cashless, and privacy-respecting digital access to public and private services.

### Performance during the COVID-19 pandemic
- Aadhaar facilitated transfer of social safety net payments directly from government treasury accounts to beneficiaries’ bank accounts, reducing leakages and curbing corruption.
- Government estimate: up to March 2021, about 1.1 percent of GDP in expenditure was saved due to the digital infrastructure and other governance reforms.
- In the first months of the pandemic about 87 percent of poor households received at least one benefit using this digital infrastructure.
- PMGKY pandemic phase outcomes:
  - cash transfers to 320 million beneficiary bank accounts (initial three-month phase)
  - food rations to 236 million households (nearly 72 percent of all households)
  - LPG subsidies via cash transfers to 80 million households
- Coverage under PMGKY (Share of All Households):
  - Food only: All 40; Rural 38; Urban 43; Poor 42; Non-Poor 39
  - Cash only: All 6; Rural 7; Urban 4; Poor 6; Non-Poor 6
  - Food and Cash: All 34; Rural 40; Urban 22; Poor 40; Non-Poor 32
  - At least one benefit (Food or Cash): All 80; Rural 85; Urban 69; Poor 87; Non-Poor 76

### Economic and financial impacts
- UPI scale and market effects:
  - UPI accounts for 68 percent of all payment transactions by volume (Executive Summary) and 75 percent of all payment transactions by volume in January 2023 (NCFE Executive Summary).
  - As of December 2022 over 7.82 billion transactions per month on UPI by over 260 million unique users.
  - UPI monthly transaction volumes of 8 billion in December 2022 referenced as peer-to-peer and peer-to-merchant retail payments.
- Financial inclusion and channels:
  - 462.5 million bank accounts opened under no-frills, low-cost account push as of August 2022.
  - More than 960 million phones cited as part of the JAM trinity.
  - Mobile data usage jump from 154 MB/month in 2015 to 15.8 GB/month in 2021; entry of a new network operator in 2016 lowered the cost of mobile data by 90 percent.
  - Digital-only brokers leveraged identity and payments layers to lower customer acquisition costs.
- Business and macro outcomes:
  - Digital economy grew 2.4 times faster than the Indian economy as a whole and accounted for 8.5 percent of gross value added in 2019.
  - Banks using e-KYC lowered cost of compliance from USD 12 to US 6 cents (USD notation preserved as in source).

### Data exchange and financial services take-up
- Account Aggregator (AA) uptake:
  - Roughly 4.5 million individuals and companies have benefited since first launched in August 2021.
  - Adoption increasing rapidly with 0.5 million new linked accounts in the first quarter of 2023.
- OCEN (Open Credit Enablement Network) objective: digitize end-to-end lending, standardize loan life cycle, share credit demand with all potential lenders to present multiple offers and enhance competition.
- Financial product take-up as of 2019:
  - 8 percent using products related to capital markets
  - 13 percent leveraged pension related products
  - 72 percent benefited from insurance products

### Fiscal operations, tax administration, and social transfers
- Tax and identifier developments:
  - PAN issuance context: nearly 400 million PANs estimated as issued in excess of active taxpayers.
  - More than 44 million PANs linked to Aadhaar; PAN-Aadhaar linkage ongoing with target by March 2023.
- GST and taxpayer registration:
  - 8.8 million new taxpayers registered for the GST between July 2017 and end-March 2022.
  - GST transactions can peak at around 9 million per day.
- PFMS, TSA and DBT scale:
  - PFMS connects approximately 2.4 million implementing agencies, 255 banks, and 380 million registered beneficiaries (29 percent of the population).
  - PFMS integrated with 600+ banks and facilitated transfers to nearly 500 million beneficiaries during the COVID-19 outbreak.
  - Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) consolidates transfers for 310 different government schemes managed by 53 ministries.
  - Ministry of Finance data: 54 percent of DBT payments are channeled through Aadhaar linked accounts and 46 percent through bank accounts.
- Fiscal savings reported:
  - Government estimates cumulative savings up to March 2021 of 2230 billion Rs, equal to 1.14 percent of GDP (breakdown by program provided in source).
  - MoF saved around USD 1.2 billion as a result of SNA adoption during FY 2021/22.
  - Government estimated saving of about USD 1.2 billion in interest cost due to introduction of TSA during FY2021/22.

### DPI-enabled public services: health, education, and e-government
- Health: CoWIN
  - CoWIN used for end-to-end rollout of COVID-19 vaccines; built using DIVOC open-source software.
  - DIVOC deployed in Indonesia, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Jamaica.
  - CoWIN features: resident slot booking app; provider inventory app; centralized machine-readable vaccination certificates delivered to DigiLocker; CoWIN APIs enabled WhatsApp-based services.
- Education: DIKSHA
  - DIKSHA platform: over 8,900 courses and 200,000 pieces of content across 30 Indian languages from 11,500 contributors.
  - Reach of approximately 180 million students and 7 million teachers.
  - As of January 24, 2023: over sixty billion learning minutes and over 135 million course completions.
  - 1.7 million individual trainings have been completed and certified; DIKSHA built using MIT licensed open-source technology Sunbird.
- Telemedicine: eSanjeevani served more than 92 million patients between November 2019 launch and end-January 2023.

### Key documented benefits
- Inclusion and coverage:
  - 462.5 million bank accounts opened as of August 2022.
  - PFMS, Aadhaar, and DBT scaled to reach hundreds of millions of beneficiaries during crisis response.
- Market growth and resilience:
  - UPI achieved multi-billion monthly transactions enabling low-cost retail payments and merchant acceptance at scale.
  - Digital economy accounted for 8.5 percent of gross value added in 2019.
- Administrative savings and fraud reduction:
  - Biometric Attendance System (2014) removed ghost employees and provided public dashboards for real-time tracking.
  - DBT and PFMS improved budget execution responsiveness and efficiency for social programs.

### Challenges and measured gaps
- Digital divide and literacy:
  - Only 35 percent of persons aged 15 and over have made or received a digital payment.
  - Only 38 percent of households have at least one digitally literate person (2017-18 NSS).
  - Urban vs rural digital literacy: urban 61 percent, rural 25 percent.
  - Internet access: rural households 14.9 percent, urban households 42 percent.
  - Women’s access: only 53.9 percent of women have a mobile phone for their own use; among them, 29.5 percent cannot read SMS messages.
  - Smartphone penetration in 2021 estimated at 35 percent.
  - Share of households with a smartphone in rural areas rose from 36 percent in 2018 to 74.8 percent in 2022.
  - India has 54 mobile broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants (global median 79; emerging market median 80).
  - International bandwidth per user in India: 0.06 Mbits/s (global median 0.07).
  - RBI launched UPI for feature phones in March 2022 benefiting 400 million users.
- Data protection and cyber risk:
  - More than 80 million Indian users affected by data breaches in 2021.
  - IBM estimate: average cost of a data breach in India in 2021 at USD2.2 million (global average USD4.24 million).
  - Draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill released for consultation on November 18, 2022; commentators note concerns about exemptions and lack of data categorization.
- Inclusion/exclusion risks in social programs:
  - 2019 survey: 2.5 percent of respondents experienced exclusion from a welfare service because of Aadhaar problems.
  - Supreme Court guidance: Aadhaar can be mandatory in specific cases but not generally for distribution of social benefits.

### Policy recommendations and implementation lessons
- Digital inclusion and accessibility:
  - Expand training initiatives and public access outlets with user support.
  - Explore UPI accessibility on feature phones and offline modes; develop simpler interfaces (voice-based).
- Data protection and cybersecurity:
  - Enact a robust data protection framework to protect privacy, prevent indiscriminate data collection, and hold entities accountable for breaches.
- Governance and sustainability:
  - Establish open, transparent, participatory governance for DPIs; consider not-for-profit entities with public purpose (National Information Utilities) to operate critical infrastructure.
  - Ensure continuity through dedicated agencies (UIDAI, NPCI, ReBIT) and industry alliances (Sahamati).
- Fiscal transparency and reporting:
  - Improve timeliness, quality, and coverage of budgetary and financial reports.
  - Adopt a DPI data layer focused on government financial reporting with clear consolidation standards; consider lessons from Brazil’s SICONFI (XBRL).
- Social protection and exclusion mitigation:
  - Strengthen networks (power, internet, mobile), ensure correct Aadhaar linking, provide alternative verification methods, and invest in digital literacy.

### New initiatives and future directions
- ONDC (Open Network for Digital Commerce): PPP to unbundle e-commerce stages and include small merchants; pilot launched in 2022.
- Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (early March 2023 metrics):
  - over 338 million unique IDs
  - nearly 61 million linked health records
  - 200 thousand health facilities
  - over 150 thousand health providers registered
- CBDC pilots: retail and wholesale pilots since November 2022; remittance context: India received $87 billion in 2021.
- Indian Payments Vision 2025: “E-payments for Everyone, Everywhere, Everytime.”
- Cross-border extension of UPI and RuPay noted (examples referenced in source).

*Source: IMF Working Paper — Stacking up the Benefits: Lessons from India’s digital journey (wpiea2023078-print-pdf)*

### Executive Summary ......................................................................................................

### Executive Summary

### Overview of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) in India
- DPI refers to a set of shared digital building blocks—applications, systems, and platforms—powered by interoperable open standards or specifications.
- India Stack is the collective name for a set of commonly used DPIs in India, consisting of three layers:
  - unique identity (Aadhaar)
  - complimentary payments systems (Unified Payments Interface, Aadhaar Payments Bridge, Aadhaar Enabled Payment Service)
  - data exchange (DigiLocker and Account Aggregator)
- Together these DPIs enable online, paperless, cashless, and privacy-respecting digital access to a variety of public and private services.

### Performance during the COVID-19 pandemic
- Aadhaar facilitated transfer of social safety net payments directly from government treasury accounts to beneficiaries’ bank accounts, reducing leakages and curbing corruption.
- The Government of India estimates that, up to March 2021, about 1.1 percent of GDP in expenditure was saved due to the digital infrastructure and other governance reforms.
- In the first months of the pandemic, about 87 percent of poor households received at least one benefit using this digital infrastructure.

### Economic and financial impacts
- India Stack has been used as a platform to foster innovation and competition; expand markets; close gaps in financial inclusion; boost government revenue collection; and improve public expenditure efficiency.
- Digital payments are now ubiquitous:
  - UPI accounts for 68 percent of all payment transactions by volume.
- The use of digital payments has expanded the customer base of smaller merchants, documenting their cash flow and improving access to finance.

### Data exchange and financial services take-up
- Roughly 4.5 million individuals and companies have benefited from easier access to financial services through the Account Aggregator since it was first launched in August 2021, and adoption is increasing rapidly.

*Source: Executive Summary, wpiea2023078-print-pdf*

### 8.8 million new taxpayers registered for the GST between July 2017 and March 2022, contributing to buoyant

### Stacking up the Benefits: Lessons from India’s digital journey

### India Stack and the building-block approach
- India Stack is a collective name for DPIs consisting of three layers: identity, payments, and data, enabling online, paperless, cashless, and privacy-respecting access to public and private services.
- Core technical design:
  - DPIs are networks, systems or platforms exposing functionality through Application Programmatic Interfaces (APIs).
  - Emphasis on modularity: unbundling components to a minimal common core so solutions can be built for multiple problems.
  - Interoperability supported through open standards; India Stack uses open standards and open-source components (India Stack uses open source software for internal components, but is not itself open source).
- Governance and provision:
  - DPIs need open, transparent, participatory governance to address sovereignty and control.
  - Public provision rationale stems from public provision of private goods and positive externalities from open interoperable infrastructure.
  - India created not-for-profit entities with public purpose (National Information Utilities) and promoted technology as utilities (example: National Payments Corporation of India).

### Major DPI components and deployment timeline (selected)
- Identity Layer:
  - Aadhaar: A 12-digit unique identification number (2009) — Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).
  - eKYC: Electronic authentication using Aadhaar details (2013) — UIDAI.
  - eSign: Remote digital signature service (2016) — Controller of Certifying Authorities (CCA).
  - GSTN: 15-digit identifier for GST-registered entities (2017) — The Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN).
  - Udyam: MSME registration system (2020) — Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME).
- Payments Layer:
  - AePS (Aadhaar Enabled Payment System) (2010) — National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).
  - APB (Aadhaar Payment Bridge) (2011) — NPCI.
  - UPI (Unified Payments Interface) (2016) — NPCI.
  - BBPS (Bharat Bill Payment System) (2016) — NPCI.
- Data Layer:
  - DigiLocker (2015) — Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
  - Account Aggregator (2021) — Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

### Financial inclusion, payments, and market effects
- Bank account access and mobile connectivity:
  - 462.5 million bank accounts opened in both urban as rural areas as of August 2022 under no-frills, low-cost account push.
  - Entry of a new network operator in 2016 lowered the cost of mobile data by 90 percent, with data usage jump from 154 MB/month in 2015 to 15.8 GB/month in 2021.
  - More than 960 million phones in the mobile network referenced as part of the JAM trinity.
- UPI scale and usage:
  - UPI described as an interoperable instant real-time payment system; as of December 2022 there were over 7.82 billion transactions per month on UPI by over 260 million unique users.
  - UPI monthly transaction volumes of 8 billion in December 2022 referenced as peer-to-peer and peer-to-merchant retail payments.
- Cost savings and business effects:
  - Banks that use e-KYC lowered their cost of compliance from USD 12 to US 6 cents.
  - Digital-only brokers (e.g., Zerodha, Upstox) leveraged identity and payments layers to lower customer acquisition costs and expand investor base.
  - The digital economy grew 2.4 times faster than the Indian economy as a whole and accounted for 8.5 percent of gross value added in 2019.

### Fiscal operations, tax administration, and social transfers
- Tax administration and identifiers:
  - PAN: Permanent Account Number introduced in 1972; issuance expanded via PPP; nearly 400 million PANs estimated as issued in excess of active taxpayers.
  - Aadhaar adoption: more than 44 million PANs linked to Aadhaar (ongoing initiative to complete PAN-Aadhaar linkage by March 2023; PANs not linked to Aadhaar will become inoperative).
- GSTN and taxpayer registration:
  - Every GST-registered business must register on the GSTN portal; GSTN consolidates tax collection and provides open APIs for third-party compliance tools.
  - Number of newly registered GST taxpayers increased to 8.8 million between July 2017 and end-March 2022.
- PFMS and DBT:
  - Public Financial Management System (PFMS) integrates with 600+ banks, supports integration with NPCI, and connects approximately 2.4 million implementing agencies, 255 banks, and 380 million registered beneficiaries (29 percent of the population).
  - GST transactions can peak at around 9 million per day.
  - Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) mechanism consolidates transfers for 310 different government schemes managed by 53 ministries.
  - According to Ministry of Finance data, 54 percent of DBT payments are channeled through Aadhaar linked accounts and 46 percent through bank accounts.
  - PFMS facilitated transfers to nearly 500 million beneficiaries during the COVID-19 outbreak; PMGKY payments were made within two weeks of announcement.

### DPI-enabled public and private services: examples and outcomes
- Public services and efficiency:
  - Biometric Attendance System (2014) removed ghost employees and provided public dashboards for real-time tracking; enabled postal worker biometric proof-of-life verification for pensioners.
  - Aadhaar-enabled in-kind access in PDS to reduce identity and quantity fraud.
- Private sector innovation:
  - GSTN invoice-level data made available via Account Aggregator for trade financing, reducing underwriting risk and cost.
  - Platforms like KredX use India Stack for onboarding, verification, and transactions to enable retail participation in trade financing.
  - QR code payments enable novel fundraising and donation channels.
- Education and knowledge DPI:
  - DIKSHA platform: over 8,900 courses and 200,000 pieces of content across 30 Indian languages from 11,500 contributors; reach of approximately 180 million students and 7 million teachers.
  - As of January 24, 2023, DIKSHA recorded over sixty billion learning minutes and over 135 million course completions.
  - DIKSHA is open-source software, open content, and open data; its building blocks are available for other countries.

### Key benefits documented
- Inclusion and coverage:
  - 462.5 million bank accounts opened under low-cost account initiative as of August 2022.
  - PFMS, Aadhaar, and DBT scaled to reach hundreds of millions of beneficiaries during crisis response.
- Market growth and resilience:
  - Digital economy grew 2.4 times faster than the overall economy and accounted for 8.5 percent of gross value added in 2019.
  - UPI achieved multi-billion monthly transactions enabling low-cost retail payments and merchant acceptance at scale.
- Administrative savings and fraud reduction:
  - Biometric and digital identity measures reduced ghost beneficiaries and improved payroll integrity.
  - DBT and PFMS improved budget execution responsiveness and efficiency for social programs.

### Challenges and policy recommendations
- Digital divide and literacy:
  - Digital literacy remains low; digital divide persists along geographic, gender and income lines.
  - Internet access: 14.9 percent of rural households have internet access compared to 42 percent among urban households.
  - Women are more likely to be digitally illiterate, particularly among low-income groups.
  - Policy actions: training initiatives, public access outlets with user support, exploring UPI accessibility on feature phones and offline modes.
- Data protection, privacy, and cybersecurity:
  - Comprehensive data protection legislation is still missing; recommendation for a robust data protection framework to protect privacy, prevent indiscriminate data collection, and hold entities accountable for breaches.
- Capacity and resource constraints:
  - India benefited from high domestic IT capacity enabling in-house Aadhaar development; other countries may rely on open-source digital public goods and resource/knowledge-sharing initiatives.
  - For countries with low smartphone and bank access, consider mobile-money and feature-phone compatible DPI alternatives.
- Governance and long-term sustainability:
  - DPIs require governance structures to balance competition, interoperability, and continuity; public not-for-profit models (e.g., NPCI) can help provide efficient services while curbing monopoly rents.
- Fiscal transparency and use of DPI:
  - Leverage DPI to improve timelines, quality, and coverage of general government fiscal reports to enhance fiscal transparency and public sector accountability.
- Social protection adaptability:
  - Use DPI (e.g., Aadhaar) to exchange data between schemes across states to make social assistance more resilient and adaptable.

*Source: IMF Working Paper — Stacking up the Benefits: Lessons from India’s digital journey (selected excerpts).*

### 1.7 million individual trainings have been completed and certified. More courses are being added and DIKSHA

### wpiea2023078-print-pdf - 1.7 million individual trainings have been completed and certified. More courses are being added and DIKSHA

### DIKSHA training platform and technology
- 1.7 million individual trainings have been completed and certified.
- More courses are being added and DIKSHA is facilitating them.
- DIKSHA is built using MIT licensed open-source technology digital building blocks called Sunbird.

### Health: CoWIN as a DPI and vaccine rollout
- India built its vaccine distribution and management platform CoWIN as a DPI, supporting its ability to scale up vaccine delivery.
- CoWIN was used for the end-to-end rollout of the Covid-19 vaccines.
- CoWIN was built using DIVOC (Digital Infrastructure for Verifiable Open Credentialing), an open-source software for digital certification.
- DIVOC was deployed in four other countries: Indonesia, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Jamaica to help facilitate their vaccination programs.
- Components and functions:
  - An app for residents to apply for a slot to get a vaccine.
  - An app for healthcare providers to manage their vaccine inventory.
  - Centralized issuing of vaccination certificates that were machine-readable, enabling easy use as vaccine passports.
- Operational benefits:
  - The digital backbone allowed India to scale vaccine delivery quickly and manage challenges such as large internal migration from urban to rural areas.
  - Individuals could take their first vaccine dose with one provider and their second with another.
  - The digital vaccination certificate was issued directly to the resident’s DigiLocker, the digitalization service that allows every Indian to access authentic documents directly from the cloud.
  - Availability of CoWIN as a DPI enabled the government to provide vaccination services (slot booking, certificate download, etc.) over WhatsApp by using the CoWIN APIs.

### Financial sector: identification, literacy, and financial services uptake
- Prior constraints:
  - Lack of verifiable identification, low levels of financial literacy and inclusion, and the absence of historical financial data hindered provision of financial services to most of the population.
- Historical account:
  - In 2011, before the full implementation of the India Stack, only 1 out of 3 people had a bank account.
  - Only 1 of 25 people had formal identification in 2008.
- Financial literacy:
  - In 2019 only 27 percent of the Indian adults met the minimum level of financial literacy level as defined by the RBI.
- Take-up of financial products as of 2019:
  - 8 percent were using products related to capital markets.
  - 13 percent leveraged pension related products.
  - 72 percent benefited from insurance products.
- The absence of a proof of identity was a major hurdle for financial institutions to onboard consumers and to fulfill know-your-customer regulatory requirements.

*International Monetary Fund — IMF WORKING PAPERS Stacking up the Benefits: Lessons from India’s digital journey*

### Executive Summary: NCFE Financial Literacy and Inclusion Survey 2019

### Executive Summary: NCFE Financial Literacy and Inclusion Survey 2019

### Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and financial inclusion
- The DPI, particularly the identity layer, "helped significantly enhance access to payment and financial services."
- Since 2011 financial inclusion in India has more than doubled and digital payments increased by 12 percent in 4 years (WBG Findex).
- Aadhaar and NPCI platforms enabled low-cost onboarding and payments:
  - Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AePS) — authentication via Aadhaar for transactions.
  - Aadhar Payment Bridge — direct payments to beneficiaries.
  - UPI — instant, low-cost merchant and firm payments.
- Adoption patterns:
  - Ownership of payment cards increased from 9 to 34 percent of the adult population from 2011 to 2017.
  - Savings at financial institutions rose from 12 to 20 percent (2011–2017).
  - Female ownership of bank accounts rose from 26 to 77 percent (2011–2017).
  - Since 2017, accounts at financial institutions shrunk by 2 percent while uptake of e-wallets rose.
- UPI-specific outcomes:
  - UPI accounts for 75 percent of all payment transactions by volume in January 2023.
  - UPI adoption benefitted from mobile accessibility, aliases, QR codes, universal interoperability, and integration with Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm.
- Account Aggregator (AA) Framework:
  - Enables customers to digitally access and share banking transaction data, tax data, pensions data, securities data, insurance data via registered Account Aggregators (AAs).
  - A consumer provides consent to AAs to request data from Financial Information Providers (FIP) such as banks and share this data with Financial Information Users (FIU).
  - Driven by public sector authorities to enhance competition and deepen inclusion.
- OCEN (Open Credit Enablement Network):
  - Digitizes end-to-end lending, standardizes the loan life cycle, shares credit demand with all potential lenders in an open network to present multiple offers and enhance competition.
  - Less than 40 percent of MSMEs avail credit from formal financial systems per the Standing Committee on Finance; OCEN aims to address this gap.

### DPI applications beyond finance
- FasTag (Electronic Toll Collection):
  - Radio Frequency Identification linked to bank account or mobile wallet.
  - Government incentives and penalties (doubled cash toll) led to FasTag usage responsible for 98% of toll collections in India as of December 2022, with only 2% being cash.
  - Benefits: saves time, prevents leakage, creates verified road-usage data for monetization under Toll Operate Transfer PPP.
- DigiLocker:
  - Single digital locker for government documents using federated architecture and Aadhaar authentication.
  - Enables digitally-signed, tamper-proof downloads across departments; reduces travel/time costs for citizens.
- Health and education DPI examples:
  - CoWin managed COVID-19 vaccination campaign.
  - eSanjeevani served more than 92 million patients between launch in November 2019 and end-January 2023.
  - DIKSHA supported online instruction during lockdowns and resources for teachers/students.

### Macro, fiscal, and development implications
- Growth and inclusion:
  - DPI estimated to boost GDP growth by 1-1.4 percentage points by 2030 in low- and middle-income countries (UNDP, 2022) considering financial inclusion and lower leakages channels.
- Social safety nets and shocks:
  - DPI-enabled timely transfers mitigated pandemic income shocks and can accelerate recovery from climate/natural disasters.
- Human capital:
  - Digital health and education investments support life expectancy and enrollment improvements (Kitsios and Mukherjee, 2022 cited).
- DPI cost-effectiveness:
  - Aadhaar cost: government spent over USD 1 billion; at about USD 1 per enrollment.
  - Subsequent DPI projects (e.g., UPI) required small outlays but had oversized economy formalization impact.
- Fiscal gains from DBT and JAM trinity:
  - Government estimates cumulative savings up to March 2021 of 2230 billion Rs, equal to 1.14 percent of GDP (Table 2 breakdown):
    - Department of Fertilizers Fertilizer: 100 (0.05 percent of GDP)
    - Department of Rural Development MGNREGS: 335 (0.17 percent of GDP)
    - Department of Rural Development NSAP: 5 (0.00 percent of GDP)
    - Ministry of Women and Child Development Others: 15 (0.01 percent of GDP)
    - Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas PAHAL: 729 (0.37 percent of GDP)
    - Department of Food and Public Distribution PDS: 1016 (0.52 percent of GDP)
    - Ministry of Minority Affairs Scholarship scheme: 14 (0.01 percent of GDP)
    - Department of Social Justice and Empowerment Scholarship scheme: 3 (0.00 percent of GDP)
    - Others: 12 (0.01 percent of GDP)
    - Total: 2230 (1.14 percent of GDP)
  - Government caveat: difficult to disentangle DBT effects from coincident policy/macro developments.
- Pandemic support via DBT (PMGKY):
  - In initial three-month phase, PMGKY delivered cash transfers to 320 million beneficiary bank accounts through PFMS.
  - Food rations to 236 million households (nearly 72 percent of all households).
  - LPG subsidies via cash transfers to 80 million households.
  - In the first months of the pandemic about 87 percent of poor households received at least one benefit under PMGKY.
  - Table 3: Coverage of Households under PMGKY (Share of All Households):
    - Food only: All 40; Rural 38; Urban 43; Poor 42; Non-Poor 39
    - Cash only: All 6; Rural 7; Urban 4; Poor 6; Non-Poor 6
    - Food and Cash: All 34; Rural 40; Urban 22; Poor 40; Non-Poor 32
    - At least one benefit (Food or Cash): All 80; Rural 85; Urban 69; Poor 87; Non-Poor 76
- PFMS and TSA improvements:
  - SNA Dashboard of PFMS during 2022 supports Single Nodal Agency distribution of CSS funds.
  - MoF saved around USD 1.2 billion as a result of SNA adoption during FY 2021/22.
  - Government estimated saving of about USD 1.2 billion in interest cost due to introduction of TSA during FY2021/22.

### Revenue administration and digitalization
- Cross-country digitalization gains:
  - Median low-income developing country moving to frontier could increase VAT by 0.9 percent of GDP, PIT by 0.2 percent of GDP, CIT by 0.6 percent of GDP (Kitsios and Mukherjee, 2022).
  - Median emerging market economy: VAT 0.7 percent of GDP, PIT 0.1 percent of GDP, CIT 0.4 percent of GDP.
  - Countries making e-filing and e-payment mandatory collect about 4-5 percent of GDP higher tax revenues on average (Mengistu and Nose, forthcoming).
  - Revenue gains hinge on enhanced digital connectivity and sufficient skilled tax officials.
- India’s relative performance on ISORA indices (as presented):
  - Mandatory e-filing index, mandatory e-payment index, e-service index, composite digitalization index displayed comparatively for India, Asia and Pacific, Advanced Economies, Emerging Market Economies, Low income developing economies (specific index values presented in figures).

### Financial inclusion outcomes and challenges
- Aadhaar and e-KYC:
  - Banks using e-KYC lowered cost of compliance from Rs 1,000 (USD 12) to Rs 5.(US 6 cents) (Hariharan, 2016).
- Broad adoption:
  - Aadhaar was first ID for a minority; almost half used Aadhaar to open a bank account for the first time.
  - Digital payments increased three-fold in volume and by 50 percent in value from June 2020 to June 2022.
  - Mobile money accounts per 1,000 adults quadrupled from 2017 to 2021.
- Account Aggregator uptake:
  - More than 4.5 million individuals and companies have benefited since introduction in August 2021.
  - Adoption increasing rapidly with 0.5 million new linked accounts in the first quarter of 2023.
- Remaining barriers:
  - About a fifth of the population remains unbanked.
  - Major barriers: low digital and financial literacy, low-income levels, connectivity, and digital infrastructure availability.
  - Suggested mitigations: UPI extension to feature phones, offline payment frameworks, simpler interfaces (voice-based).

### Digital divide and access metrics
- Digital literacy and access:
  - Only 35 percent of persons aged 15 and over have made or received a digital payment.
  - Mothkoor and Mumtaz (2021): only 38 percent of households have at least one digitally literate person (2017-18 NSS).
  - Urban vs rural digital literacy: urban 61 percent, rural 25 percent.
  - Internet access: rural households 14.9 percent, urban households 42 percent.
  - Gender disparities:
    - 43.5 percent of urban men know how to use the internet; 30.1 percent of urban women; 8.5 percent of rural women.
    - Only 53.9 percent of women have a mobile phone for their own use; among them, 29.5 percent cannot read SMS messages.
  - Age disparities: two thirds of men aged 20-24 have ever used the internet vs one third aged 45-49; half of women aged 20-24 have ever used the internet vs 13 percent aged 45-49.
  - Wealth disparities: richest households—78 percent of men and 69 percent of women ever used internet; poorest households—25 percent of men and barely 10 percent of women ever used internet.
  - State heterogeneity: Delhi 55.7 percent households internet access; Kerala 51.3 percent; Himachal Pradesh 51.5 percent; Odisha about 10 percent.
- Digital access infrastructure:
  - India has 54 mobile broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants (global median 79; emerging market median 80).
  - Internet subscriptions urban 103 per 100 inhabitants; rural 38 per 100 inhabitants.
  - Smartphone penetration in 2021 estimated at 35 percent (Indonesia 62 percent; Brazil 55 percent).
  - Share of households with a smartphone in rural areas rose from 36 percent in 2018 to 74.8 percent in 2022.
  - Mobile data basket cost USD 1.8 in India (global median USD 11.5; lower middle-income peer median USD 7.6); represents 1.1 percent of income per capita in India.
  - International bandwidth per user in India: 0.06 Mbits/s (global median 0.07; about half the median for emerging market economies).
  - RBI launched UPI for feature phones in March 2022 benefiting 400 million users.

### Data protection and cyber risk
- Cyber incidents and costs:
  - More than 80 million Indian users affected by data breaches in 2021.
  - IBM estimates average cost of a data breach in India in 2021 at USD2.2 million (global average USD4.24 million).
- Legal and regulatory status:
  - Indian Supreme Court (2017) ruled privacy a fundamental right and asked for robust data protection regime.
  - Draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill released for consultation on November 18, 2022; draft Digital India Bill under development.
  - Commentators note draft Bill concerns: excessive exemptions for government, lack of data categorization, many specifics left to regulations.
  - RBI 2018 guidelines mandate storage in India of payment data.
- Policy imperative: robust data protection framework needed to protect privacy, prevent indiscriminate data collection, and incentivize cybersecurity investments.

### Modernizing social protection and exclusion risks
- Potential DPI improvements:
  - Aadhaar unique identifier could enable easier data exchange and access to socio-economic data for targeting.
  - Digital technologies could support alternative targeting methods and mass registration.
- Exclusion risks:
  - Biometric failures and connectivity issues led to exclusion errors; 2019 survey found 2.5 percent of respondents experienced exclusion from a welfare service because of Aadhaar problems.
  - Supreme Court ruled Aadhaar can only be mandatory when citizens owe funds to government but not for distribution of social benefits.
  - Remedies: robust networks (power, internet, mobile), correct Aadhaar linking, alternative verification methods (passwords), investments in digital literacy.

### Fiscal transparency, reporting, and recommendations
- Current gaps:
  - Government of India does not compile/disseminate high-frequency Government Financial Statistics (GFS) and Public Sector Debt Statistics (PSDS) for general government on a high frequency basis as committed under G-20 DGI.
  - Combined Union and State financial accounts produced two years after fiscal year end and are not audited statements.
  - Financial reporting on cash basis with elements of accrual; limited accrual information available.
- Recommendations:
  - Improve timeliness, quality, coverage of budgetary and financial reports.
  - Incorporate user-friendly information and fiscal narratives alongside or ahead of budgets and financial statements at Union and state levels.
  - Adopt a specific DPI data layer focused on government financial reporting, with well-designed interfaces and clear standards for consolidation.
  - Consider lessons from Brazil’s SICONFI platform (XBRL standards) to integrate budget, asset, and analytical accounting across administrative levels.

### New initiatives and future directions
- ONDC (Open Network for Digital Commerce):
  - Public-private partnership to unbundle e-commerce stages, foster competition, deepen e-commerce, and include small retail shops and producers.
  - Pilot launched in 2022 in select cities.
- Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission:
  - Digital backbone with unique health ID, health professionals registry, health facilities registry, electronic medical records shareable with consent.
  - As of early March 2023: over 338 million unique IDs; nearly 61 million linked health records; 200 thousand health facilities; over 150 thousand health providers registered.
  - Next step: automate insurance claim settlement; Unified Health Interface based on UPI to enable appointment booking and teleconsultation across providers.
- Extension and interoperability of payment solutions:
  - Indian Payments Vision 2025: “E-payments for Everyone, Everywhere, Everytime.”
  - UPI and RuPay cards extended abroad (e.g., QR-based UPI merchant payments in Bhutan, Singapore, UAE).
  - Interoperability across borders requires legal and technological harmonization.
- CBDC:
  - India running CBDC pilots since November 2022 for retail and wholesale CBDC.
  - Motivations: cost-savings in cash management, compatibility with tokenized assets, potential cross-border payment improvements.
  - India’s remittance context: received $87 billion in 2021.
  - Key design feature: interoperability and co-existence with current payment infrastructure.

### Keys to success and lessons from India
- Guiding principles:
  - Foundational building blocks approach, supporting an ecosystem, interoperability, fostering competition, minimalist design, government as catalytic actor with strong private sector participation.
- Institutional design:
  - National Information Utilities (NIUs) such as NPCI created as not-for-profit private companies with public purpose to operate and maintain infrastructure.
  - Dedicated agencies (UIDAI for Aadhaar, NPCI for UPI, ReBIT for AA technical specifications, Sahamati industry alliance) ensure continuity and shield operations from political cycles.
- Implementation insights:
  - Minimal data collection and unbundling (e.g., Aadhaar collecting name, age, gender, address, biometrics) aided scale and speed.
  - Open standards and open protocols promoted interoperability and competition.
  - Political support was necessary and coalesced around broad goals (tackling corruption, efficiency gains).

*Source: IMF Working Paper — Executive Summary: NCFE Financial Literacy and Inclusion Survey 2019 (wpiea2023078-print-pdf).*

### Box 2: NPCI’s Positioning and Funding

### Box 2: NPCI’s Positioning and Funding

### NPCI’s role and institutional design
- NPCI focused on providing infrastructure while allowing the private sector to innovate and serve as the main point of contact with end-users.
- NPCI addressed fragmentation in payment systems by unifying multiple payment systems, clearing houses, and networks under its umbrella organization.
- NPCI is a not-for-profit organization (unlike its newly established co-entity NPCI International), which allows services such as UPI to be offered at low cost to consumers.

### Public–private division of responsibilities
- Public sector: provided digital public infrastructure, strengthened payment system regulations, acted as an anchor client (utilizing infrastructure to make transfers to beneficiaries of social support programs), and promoted UPI-based merchant payments.
- Private sector: focused on developing innovations, onboarding consumers, and building large merchant bases (examples cited: PhonePe, Google Pay, PayTM).
- Government policy can further promote DPI use by promoting competition among private sector service providers.

### Funding, subsidies, and budgetary support
- The government removed all fees for UPI transactions to encourage digital payments, formalize the economy, increase access to finance and reduce the usage of cash.
- The Ministry of Finance pays a subsidy to banks in lieu of the fees foregone.
- The budgeted allocation for promoting digital payments (including other initiatives) for FY2023/24 is USD 188 million.
- The hope is that once usage is widespread, the government will be able to reduce subsidies.

### Network effects and adoption incentives
- DPI is characterized as a two-sided market where the value of the platform increases for both participants as the numbers on each side increase.
- High degree of interoperability of UPI magnifies the incentive to adopt, while lowering the costs of adoption for individuals.
- Using Aadhaar and Aadhaar linked accounts to provide Direct Benefit Transfers encouraged take up by individuals and gave service providers comfort of access to a large client base.
- Similar strategy example: Thailand used the Pao Tang mobile wallet application and associated infrastructure to implement pandemic relief measures (OECD, 2022).

### Role of startups and complementary private investments
- The vibrant startup ecosystem and broader private sector were key to India's growth in DPI use.
- High adoption of UPI is in large part due to investments by payment apps (PhonePe, Google Pay, PayTM and others) that attracted large merchant bases and spread customer awareness.
- Payments being a high-frequency use case enabled payment apps to become daily-used financial platforms, opening avenues for cross-selling adjacent financial services or ecommerce products.
- Example of complementary DPI enabling disruption: Reliance Jio’s launch was enabled by the adoption of eKYC, which reduced identity verification time that had previously often exceeded 48 hours.

*IMF WORKING PAPERS — Stacking up the Benefits: Lessons from India’s digital journey*

### References

### References

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*Stacking up the Benefits: Lessons from India’s Digital Journey, Working Paper No. WP/2023/078*

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_Source: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/wp/2023/english/wpiea2023078-print-pdf.pdf_