India has demonstrated how population-scale digital public infrastructure can complement traditional physical infrastructure and drive inclusive economic growth, Union Minister of State for Communications Dr Chandra Sekhar Pemmasani said on Thursday.
Delivering the keynote address at the BRICS ICT Track Thematic Panel Discussion on “Sustainable and Resilient Digital and ICT Ecosystems: Digital Public Infrastructure for Impact – Global South Insights on Powering Public Services and Economic Growth” in Pune, Pemmasani outlined India’s vision for open, inclusive and resilient digital ecosystems.
Addressing ministers, policymakers, academicians and industry leaders from BRICS countries, the minister said the traditional understanding of infrastructure had largely focused on physical assets such as roads, ports and power grids. India, however, had developed population-scale digital rails spanning identity, banking, payments, verifiable documents and consent-based data sharing, he said.
Pemmasani said the key innovation lay in creating an open and interoperable public infrastructure layer on which banks, fintech companies and government departments could develop a range of services.
Highlighting the pillars of India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), he said the country’s digital identity system had enabled low-cost remote verification across billions of authentications, SIM issuances and banking transactions.
He said the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) had expanded financial access by connecting 720 banks and accounting for 85 per cent of India’s digital transactions. UPI contributes nearly 49 per cent of global real-time payment volumes and has expanded to nine partner countries, he added.
Pemmasani also highlighted the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) system, which integrates 318 schemes across 56 ministries to facilitate the direct transfer of benefits and reduce the role of intermediaries.
DigiLocker, he said, has built an ecosystem of more than 700 million users and issued over 9 billion verifiable credentials. Other initiatives, including the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), Government e-Marketplace (GeM) and the Account Aggregator framework, are helping expand market access and strengthen individual control over data.
The minister said India’s digital transformation was supported by rapid expansion in telecommunications infrastructure. According to Pemmasani, 4G mobile coverage now reaches nearly 99 per cent of villages, supported by a USD 4 billion saturation initiative.
India has also undertaken one of the world’s fastest 5G rollouts, with more than 500,000 base stations deployed, he said. At the same time, the USD 17 billion BharatNet programme is expanding high-speed optical fibre connectivity across villages.
On environmental sustainability, Pemmasani said 12.4 per cent of energy used across mobile towers in India currently comes from green sources. The government has set a target of powering 30 per cent of the country’s telecom infrastructure through renewable energy by 2030.
Concluding his address, the minister said Digital Public Infrastructure was not a luxury limited to advanced economies but a key requirement for sustainable development across the Global South.
He called for stronger digital cooperation among BRICS countries, including the sharing of modular and open-source technology frameworks to reduce prohibitive licensing costs. He also stressed the need for joint capacity-building initiatives and greater representation of developing countries in international ICT standard-setting bodies.
The session was attended by BRICS representatives and global technology leaders, including Frederico de Siqueira Filho, Minister of Communications of Brazil, and Mondli Gungubele, Deputy Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies of South Africa, among other ministerial delegates.
