Note4Students

From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :

Prelims level: Not much

Mains level: Paper 3- Digital diplomacy

India is pioneering the concept of digital public goods, with it, there is an opportunity for India to embark on digital diplomacy.

Built on the foundation of Aadhaar and India Stack, modular applications, big and small, are transforming the way we make payments, withdraw our PF, get our passport and driving licence and check land records, to name just a few activities.
There is an opportunity for India to embark on digital diplomacy — to take its made-in-India digital public goods to hundreds of emerging economies across the world.

This could be a strategic and effective counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Enhancing the productivity of emerging economies: Emerging economies are characterised by gross inefficiencies in the delivery of government services and a consequent trust deficit.
Digital public goods spread speed, transparency, ease and productivity across the individual-government-market ecosystem and enhance inclusivity, equity and development at scale.
Acceptance in emerging economies: India’s digital diplomacy will be beneficial to and welcomed by, all emerging economies from Peru to Polynesia, from Uruguay to Uganda, and from Kenya to Kazakhstan.
Goodwill: It will enable quick, visible and compounding benefits for India’s partner countries and earn India immense goodwill.

Reusability: The code is highly reusable
Low cost: The cost of setting up an open source-based high school online educational infrastructure, to supplement the physical infrastructure, for an entire country is less than laying two kilometres of high-quality road.
No debt trap: The investments required for transporting digital public goods are minuscule in comparison and there is no chance of a debt trap.
Short gestation period: Unlike physical infrastructures such as ports and roads, digital public goods have short gestation periods and immediate, and visible impact and benefits.
It plugs leaks: Digital infrastructure plugs leaks.
It eliminates ghost beneficiaries of government services, removes touts collecting rent, creates an audit trail, makes the individual-government-market interface transparent and provides efficiencies that help recoup the investments quickly.
Processes get streamlined and wait times for any service come down dramatically.
Increases productivity: Productivity goes up and services can be scaled quickly.
Benefits can be rapidly extended to cover a much larger portion of the population.
Compounding instead of depreciation: Above all, the digital public goods infrastructure compounds while physical infrastructure depreciates.

Compounding happens for three reasons.
[1] Growth of technologyy: Chips keep becoming faster, engines more powerful, and gene-editing technology keeps improving.
[2] Network effect: As more and more people use the same technology, the number of “transactions” using that technology increase exponentially — be it Facebook posts or UPI transactions.
[3] Rapid creation of new layers of technology: For example, the hypertext protocol created the worldwide web.
Then the browser was built on top of it, which made the worldwide web easier to navigate and more popular.
Thousands of new layers were added to make it what it is today.
Growth of UPI in India: To give an example, consider the surge in UPI-based payments in India.
This kind of growth doesn’t happen with a few entitled and privileged people using UPI more and more; it happens with more and more people using UPI more and more.
Use of Diksha: The use of Diksha, the school education platform built on the open-source platform Sunbird, has followed the same trajectory — today close to 500 million schoolchildren are using it.

Made in India digital tools can help other emerging economies deal with economic, governance challenges.

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