G20-DIA: A worldwide initiative to integrate, accelerate digital start-ups

India is leading the world in digitalisation efforts, where technological innovations have transformed the nature of economy and created a paradigm shift in terms of inclusive, equitable, holistic, and sustainable development of all segments of population and geographies.

India’s innovation capabilities have increased exponentially, putting the country at the 46th rank, according to the Global Innovation Index rank of world economies.

Besides, India is the third-largest start-up ecosystem globally, with more than 81,000 government-recognised start-ups across 656 districts. With 107 unicorns by December 2022, the country is expected to have 250 unicorns by 2025.

As we progress into Amrit Kaal, the deployment of national technological infrastructure and development of digital public infrastructure solves the last-mile socioeconomic challenges. These also aid India in achieving its trillion-dollar digital economy goal by 2026 and becoming a start-up hotspot.

In this context, India’s Group of Twenty (G20) Presidency provides it with a platform to showcase its technical capabilities and innovations through a thriving start-up ecosystem, as well as setting a way forward globally that is collaborative, interoperable, open, and secure.

India’s start-up ecosystem

Start-ups in India are solving real-world issues. With access to high-class technically adept talent, the entrepreneur fraternity is focusing on building high-quality innovative products.

India’s start-up success story over the past decade is driving them to scale their products and solutions on a global level.

India is equipped to use and build products in multiple Indian and foreign languages, so any product that is made in India has easier global acceptance.

For instance, in a demographically, geographically, socially, and culturally diverse country like India, the financial technology (fintech) ecosystem has broken the ceiling in terms of addressing some key social concerns like language barriers, illiteracy, and social stigma to onboard new-to-finance and low-income households.

The Reserve Bank of India is also bolstering this effort of the fintech ecosystem by constituting financial literacy initiatives like the National Centre for Financial Education and the Centre for Financial Literacy project. Moreover, the quality and trust factor in our products are also contributing to their widespread dissemination.

India focuses on making digital architecture inclusive, so that it can become a catalyst of socioeconomic transformation. Its digital public infrastructure architecture is embedded with in-built democratic principles. These solutions are based on open source, open application programming interface, open standards, which are interoperable and public.

Our Unified Payments Interface (UPI) platform is one of the most prominent digital breakthroughs that has transformed the finance and payments infrastructure globally. Last year, over 40 per cent of the world’s real-time payment transactions took place through UPI.

Similarly, 460 million new bank accounts were opened on the basis of digital identity, making India a global leader in financial inclusion today.

It is estimated that around 346 million Indians are engaged in digital transactions, including online payments and e-commerce.

It is forecast that by 2026, an additional $45.6 billion, or 1.12 per cent of India’s gross domestic product, will be boosted by UPI payment.

G20-Digital Innovation Alliance (G20-DIA) programme

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), under the aegis of India’s G20 Presidency, has initiated the G20-DIA with the objective to engage innovators, entrepreneurs, start-ups, corporates, investors, and mentors of the G20 member states and invited guest countries.

The programme is being steered by the MeitY Startup Hub — an agency of MeitY established for coordination, facilitation, monitoring, and integration of all the incubation centres, start-ups, and innovation-related activities of the ministry.

Through the G20-DIA programme, MeitY aims to engage, accelerate, and celebrate global start-ups that are using digital technologies to solve humanity’s most pressing needs in health, agriculture, education, finance, cybersecurity, and sustainable development.

Top start-ups in each of the six sectors from all the G20 and invited guest countries will participate in this programme. A cohort of 174 start-ups will be provided mentoring support, capacity-building workshops, and investor and customer connect sessions for three months before the two-day mega summit to be held in Bengaluru on the sidelines of the Digital Economy Working Group meeting in August.

They will not only receive recognition and awards, but will also have the opportunity to raise funds from investors and get pilot opportunities from corporates.

Moreover, each of the six selected Indian start-ups will get funding of Rs 10 lakh each, along with mentoring support from a unicorn founder and business acceleration support from MeitY-funded accelerators.

To engage start-ups and provide opportunity for maximum participation in this high-impact programme, MeitY, with the support of Indian missions in G20 countries, is organising virtual programmes. Also, to get maximum engagement of Indian start-ups, MeitY is working with state governments to organise physical roadshows in various states.

Potential for global integration

The Indian start-up ecosystem stands unique from its global counterparts due to its maturity through hyper-scalability, usability, and consumer-centricity, supported by market-driven open infrastructure and framework.

Realising the increasing penetration and adoption of digital services in India, the government understood that the investments and growth of digital infrastructure, along with the physical infrastructure, will take the country’s economic development to the next level.

Accordingly, government-initiated projects of establishing various digital public infrastructures like India Stack and Open Network for Digital Commerce democratise innovation.

The Indian start-up ecosystem has the following key characteristics that have the potential for global integration in terms of benefits and the problems they could solve at the global level, especially in the global south:

(i) India has been driving interoperability for a long time at the domestic level. An example of interoperability is India’s UPI systems.

Interoperability has a global integration trait because it helps enhance the effectiveness of data by presenting or storing it in standardised models, coupled with easy data transfer protocols, to enable knowledge and insight sharing.

(ii) In a diverse country like ours, the Indian start-up ecosystem has broken the ceiling, setting global precedence in terms of addressing some key social concerns like language barriers, illiteracy, social stigma, unawareness, and providing robust population scale solutions in the domain of education, health, financial inclusion, and agriculture.

(iii) Technological development in India is advancing exponentially in geometric progression, with innovations like artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, augmented reality, and metaverse, evolving and becoming a part of our daily activities.

These characteristics together showcase how the Indian start-up ecosystem and government initiatives facilitate interoperability, harmonisation, principles of an open network, and humane development. These will help solve key problems faced by the world, such as scaling, interoperability, last-mile penetration, cost efficiency, and agility, paving the way for Indian innovations to be exported to the globe and setting benchmarks to strive for.

The launch of the G20-DIA programme has already opened huge opportunities to unite the innovation ecosystem stakeholders from member states, as well as invited guest countries.

As the programme progresses, it will be interesting for India to recognise and support more start-ups, both Indian and foreign, that are developing innovative digital solutions to reduce the digital divide among different segments of humanity and give a boost to the global economy.

It is an opportunity for the exchange of knowledge, experience, and opportunities for start-ups to collaborate, co-create, and contribute to realising the vision of inclusive and sustainable techno- socioeconomic development for the betterment of global humanity.

The writer is Secretary, Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology. Views expressed are personal