Hampi G20 sherpa meet to focus on digital public infra, green growth

Digital public infrastructure (DPI) and green growth will remain key focus areas as G20 Sherpas meet for the third time this year in Karnataka’s Hampi later this week, officials said.

India will also continue to stress on the need for leveraging these to create multilateral policy that can benefit the global south, they added.

The government has not published any outcome document from the previous two meetings that focused on policy intentions. The meeting starting July 13 will set the ground for incorporating these into a joint statement that will be endorsed by the leaders in September.

But while the Sherpas will discuss dozens of policy objectives, India will look to steer the conversation towards DPIs and green development. The previous two Sherpa meetings in Kumarakom (Kerala) and Udaipur (Rajasthan) have had separate high-level side events on these two subjects.

India is batting for the G20 formally adopting DPI as a key measure to address crucial issues, such as digital identity, financial inclusion, and equitable access to education and health, the officials said.

“Some of the characteristics of the DPI facilitate interoperability, harmonisation, principles of an open network, humane development, etc. These characteristics solve the key problems faced by the world within the financial ecosystem, such as scaling, interoperability, last-mile penetration, cost efficiency, etc. paving the way for the Indian model of DPI to be exported to the globe and setting benchmarks to strive for,” said Kazim Rizvi, founder of emerging policy think tank The Dialogue.

The previous Sherpa meets have demonstrated various population-scale DPIs of the India Stack, a set of open application programming interfaces that allows governments, businesses, start-ups, and developers to utilise a unique digital Infrastructure to solve many of India’s hard problems. The upcoming meet will see India promote key DPIs, such as Aadhaar, Co-Win, UPI, DigiLocker, and India’s Artificial Intelligence-based language platform Bhashini to the G20 nations, officials added.

Green-led development

The Sherpas will also turn their attention to the issue of green transition of energy systems and economies, the urgent need for which has been acknowledged by all nations even if they disagree on how to ensure it, a NITI Aayog official said.

Under green growth, India is pursuing specific objectives such as ensuring “green tech and energy efficiency”, and the older target of securing sustainable climate and development finance for developing and poorer nations, he added.

“India needs to leverage the strength of its economy, and consumption potential of its market to ensure that it gets technology which will specifically address its sustainable development goals, on reasonable terms,” said Samrat Sengupta, former programme director (climate change & renewable energy) at the Centre for Science and Environment. 

India is also trying to form a consensus on the building of a separate pool of funds involving multilateral banks and international financial institutions aimed at meeting the energy transition needs of the global south.

Under the Sherpa track, India’s G20 priorities also include an accelerated, inclusive, and resilient growth for emerging and poor economies under the development agenda and technological transformation under the digital economy agenda.

The Sherpa track of discussions oversees 13 separate working groups on specific areas such as agriculture, tourism, development, education, corruption, and trade, among others.

“Broad level of consensus has emerged in many areas, such as a commitment to advancing existing and new G20 collective actions that will contribute to bring on track the implementation of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal Agenda. There have also been commitments helping the Net Food Importing Developing Countries (NFIDCs) achieve food security,” the official mentioned above said.

Russian question 
 

Major differences remain over potential language used to criticise Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
 

At the second Sherpa meeting, G20 Sherpa Amitabh Kant said there was 99 per cent agreement on all substantive issues, leading to speculations that a condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine remained the only major point of difference among the member nations.

The yawning gap in positions on the issue remains hard to bridge given that two crucial meetings of G20 Finance Ministers and Foreign Ministers held earlier this year were unable to agree on consensus outcome documents because of opposition from China and Russia to the text describing the war in Ukraine.

“Outcome statements issued after ministers’ meeting in various working groups have specifically kept out references to Ukraine, and recognized the G20 is not the forum to resolve security issues. It will be difficult to reverse this position,” a Delhi-based foreign diplomat who has been party to the discussions said.