3 of world's largest public digital platforms are from India

The public digital platforms promoted by the Narendra Modi government have created a population scale impact on India's 1.4 billion population, a new report by NASSCOM has said.

Image: Representative photo of a person using a smartphone

The public digital platforms promoted by the Narendra Modi government have created a population scale impact on India's 1.4 billion population, a new report by NASSCOM has said.

Detailing the scale of the impact of public platforms, NASSCOM announced that three of the largest public digital platforms in the world are from India.

These include Aadhar, which is the largest unique digital identity platform, UPI, which is the largest digital payments ecosystem and CoWIN, which is the largest vaccination platform.

According to data released by NASSCOM, over 1.3 billion people out of the country's total population had been enrolled into Aadhar as of June 2021.

Image: Aadhar being verified at an enrollment station

Launched in 2009, Aadhaar is managed by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. The 12-digit individual identification number, issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India through over 29,000 registered enrolment stations, serves as a proof of identity and address, anywhere in India. 

It offers a unique opportunity to the government to streamline their welfare delivery mechanism and thereby ensuring transparency and good governance.

While it provides citizens with reliable biometric identity proof, it enables them to claim subsidies. As for the government, Aadhar acts as an authenticator to confirm entitlement delivered to the beneficiary.

Image: Representative photo of the Bhim App on a smartphone

The NASSCOM data suggests that 3.2 billion transactions worth Rs 600 Billion were conducted using the digital payment application, Bhim UPI.

Launched in 2016 by the National Payments Corporation of India, the Bhim app is a mobile payment platform based on the Unified Payments Interface that is intended to facilitate e-payments directly through banks and encourage cashless transactions.

The Bhim app enables seamless and safe transactions through a single click two-factor authentication. The virtual ID provided by the app offers security without credential sharing.

Image: A person is seeing operating the CoWIN app on his smartphone

CoWIN became a household name during the Coronavirus pandemic. Launched in 2021 by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, the CoWIN government web portal is the gateway for COVID-19 vaccination registration. 

The portal displays booking slots of COVID-19 vaccines available in the nearby areas and can be booked on the website.

To date, there have been over 483 million CoWIN registrations. 

Over 500 Million vaccine doses have been administered through 46,657 vaccination sites.