CEO of National e-Governance Division discusses challenges, opportunities of scaling up digital public goods

New Delhi [India], October 27 : For better accessibility of digital public goods the design must be in line with the core principles and basic tenets that these products have to be architected in such a way that it's scalable and robust, said Abhishek Singh, National e-Governance Division President in Ministry of Electronics and IT during his address at CyFY 2022 on "Making user-citizens the core of the digital G20."
"Not having clear proof of identity leads to a lot of leakages in public governance systems. And for better targeting of services we needed something to establish one's identity which helps us to access services. And while doing so, when the design of the project has otherwise been done, the core principles we can see become the basic tenets of which are public goods, whether it has to be simple, it has to be architected in such a way that it's scalable. It's robust. It's based on open standards, based on open source software systems. It's based on open API's, which allow the exchange of information through a lot of verification or services," said Singh.
"We found that identity was one key problem which was not allowing people to access financial services, access credit, access any other kind of service for getting government benefits."
He said, "It should be interoperable, and it should be something which is minimalist. After we came up with UPI, which revolutionized the way we do digital payments, and then also the basic tenets of open standards, open source and interoperability were built in like how you enable even small value venture transactions between various financial institutions that we came up with somewhere digilocker, which again, allows seamless exchange of documents between various systems so that citizens instead of running as courier systems, getting documents from one government system submitting to another, the government systems, start talking to each other and again, based on same interoperable, open standards, robust, scalable kind of architecture."
Singh highlighted the basic tenets of digital public goods should remain especially with India's experience, be done in a scalable manner, they should be robust, will be based on open standards and open source, and they should be interoperable.
"It should be based on the consent of the citizens so that when data or information of any citizen which has been collected for a particular service is being shared with any other system for with any other system or a department so that he can access citizens get to access services that department consent or decisions should be taken in. So these are the basic principles on which we have like kind of design our digital public goods, and these are led to large scale digital transformation in almost all walks of life in India."
A three-day conference organized by ORF here in the national capital to discuss technology, security and society had commenced on Wednesday.
Over three days, over 28-panel discussions including 150 speakers and Q&A sessions from 37 countries are being held during the conference called CyFy 2022.
Fighting cybercrimes can be complex, often involving multiple jurisdictions, and international cooperation is therefore essential for ensuring and promoting safe, secure cyberspace. "We have total three days session in which we discussed under theme of 'Conform or cancel', over the course of nearly 50 sessions, to examine the narratives and currents marking our relationship as individuals, communities, states and enterprise with new emerging technologies," organiser ORF said.
"Cybercrime today is a major threat not only to the private sector and individuals but also to the government and the country as a whole. State-sponsored attacks are expected to increase as we move into 2022, with attacks on the critical infrastructure of particular concern."
ORF said recent years had seen massive growth in the incidence of cyber-attacks and data breaches, costing businesses and governments around the world millions of dollars.
India alone witnessed an 11.8 per cent increase in cases of cybercrime in 2020.
"Similarly, in the EU too, cyber-attacks have continued to intensify both in terms of vectors and numbers, and also in terms of their impact," it added.