Digitalisation has already been a significant game changer for India's economy and society. Digital public infrastructure and digital public goods, or DPIs and DPGs,have emerged in the development ecosystem as a means to achieve population-scale social impact.
We have already seen the potential of DPIs with the success of Aadhar and UPI, solving for identity and payment transfer problems. While we will continue to hear about how additional value gets unlocked, there are 5+ DPIs brewing across the social development sector of education, health, skilling and livelihoods. So what does it take to unlock value from DPIs and DPGs as they emerge in other important and complex social sectors in India?
To discuss this in detail with us today, we have with us Dr. Pramod Varma who is the CTO of EkStep, a not-for-profit creating learner-centric, technology enabled platform aiming to provide learning opportunities to 200 million children in India. He was also the Chief Architect of Aadhaar, and various India stack layers such as eSign, Digital Locker, and Unified Payment Interface (UPI). He is a co-founder of FIDE and the genesis author of the open source Beckn protocol. Pramod is an adjunct faculty, he is the Co-Chair at the global Center for Digital Public Infrastructure at the IIIT-B helping other countries design and architect their own DPIs. He regularly speaks at technology conferences and is part of advisory groups of various national and international projects.
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Host: Rathish Balakrishnan Linkedin | Twitter
Guest: Pramod Varma Linkedin | Twitter
Podcast Producer: Meenakshi Iyer
Audio Engineer & Editor: Abhilash Raikar
Designer: Usha Sondhi Kundu
- 0:00 - Decoding Impact Introduction
- 0:37 - Episode reflection from host
- 1:35 - Episode highlight reel
- 2:32 - Introduction to topic and guest
- 3:49 - What are DPIs and DPGs
- 11:47 - Can entrepreneurs succeed using DPIs?
- 13:52 - Mental models & mindset to build DPIs
- 21:42 - How do you know what infrastructure to build?
- 30:42 - How infrastructure builders need to approach solving problems
- 40:35 - The "Bus List" for DPI today
- 49:23 - How to catalyse entrepreneurship and DPIs
- 56:49 - How do we enable industry adoption?
- 1:02:22 - Summary and Thanks
