India Stack: Powering thousands of experiments

Last Saturday was iSPIRT 3rd anniversary meeting and found session “India Stack: Powering thousands of experiments” useful and here is blog on my learning. To understand India Stack, it is good to start with history in India of how absence of legacy era in telecom and internet has become Indian advantage over time. The absence of telecom legacy helped India to skip analog era and leapfrog to digital era of STDs, further leapfrog to mobile. The absence of internet legacy means India skipped PC based internet era and leapfrog to era where internet is available to every Indian via mobile (computing device of choice). One can look this positive with money savings for India by not spending on legacy infrastructure that become obsolete with new technologies and investment goes waste.

Every Indian is able to access and consume service offered by internet software and mobile apps over internet. It is time to dream and create experiments to leverage this leapfrog time as opportunity to enable Indians to leapfrog to using digital applications. Indian government has jumped with Digital India campaign. Here are two fundamental changes .

• Every Indian can access and use mobile apps, with mobile phones in their hands.
• Every Indian is getting used to e-banking and payments fueled by e-commerce.

iSPIRT dreams along with Indian government and believes that this is right time for Indian entrepreneur’s to leverage digital explosion wave soon expected in India . One can dream in terms of how technology can be leveraged to create financial inclusion, how apps can create positive interventions in areas of education and health care. When you dream, you are motivated by potential to leapfrog tech-starved Indians to tech- savvy Indian.

Dreams are ideas to start with. Dreams need to follow with action to reality. For dreams to happen, iSPIRT visualizes role to contribute to seamless working between entrepreneurs and government agencies/regulators and has proactively engaged with government. Working with Indian government stakeholders in joint engagement, iSPIRT has proposed 4 recommendation to serve as backbone to realize the dream of Digital India.

• OpenAPI Policy objectives recommended for Digital India program.
• 7 key principles to be adhered for implementing Digital India programs.
• Technology Stack to serve as baseline for developing apps for Digital India
• India Stack to serve as baseline for implementing Digital India.

The OpenAPI policy objectives are

1. Software interoperability: APIs are recommended for all e-governance applications and systems, enabling quick and transparent integration across these applications and systems.
2. No Government Silos: Information and data shall be shared through a secure and reliable sharing mechanism across various e-Governance applications and systems.
3. Data available to public: Make people’s data public. Provide APIs to enable people to view data.
4. Baseline guidelines for Implementers Provide guidance to Government Organizations to develop, publish and use these Open APIs

The 7 key principles recommended for developing application by government and integration layer with government applications.

Based on OpenAPI Policy and guideline , here is robust technology stack recommended for creating innovative solutions to India’s hard problems.

With payments accelerated by regulatory innovation and a continuous rise of smart phones, here is robust solution stack for developing Digital India applications.

I like about iSPIRT volunteering to support entrepreneur’s with learning that they need (that is not easily available), helping them with focus to get feedback in their initiatives and enabling them to bring a structure to their work, contribution to ecosystem by promoting and evangelizing  IndiaStack creating right curiosity and real interest.

With Open secure APIs made available for developers via sandbox, I see there is more opportunity for iSPIRT to evangelize and promote IndiaStack APIs through Hackathons and developer Events.