The honourable Finance Minister presented a much-anticipated budget for FY 24-25, and those who are familiar with Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) will find some topics interesting. The budget mentioned DPI to support farmers by improving access to digital tools. An extension to that is data digitization and reusability through the Unique Land Parcel Identification Number (ULPIN) or “Bhu-Aadhaar” and the digitization of land records in urban areas with contextual GIS data.
Bringing DPI into a discussion around data digitisation, enabling reusable data exchange and creating digital identifiers opens the IT architecture to the concept of “trust layers”. Today, as many citizen services are transitioning from traditional Web 2.0 models to Web 3.0 design patterns, trustworthy data exchange is critical to reducing transaction friction. The “trust” component of data exchange is enabled through distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) such as blockchain. As new service deployments bring about digital identifiers, digital cards, and records, and, more importantly, there is a need to have authentic data sources to query, it is vital to view DPIs from the perspective of Open Trust Infrastructure.
Public instances of a blockchain, such as CORD, form the foundation of the Open Trust Infrastructure. Combining open standards, networks, and protocols with open innovation makes the available building blocks critical for designing applications and services around them. Trustworthy data exchange is enabled through the issuance and acceptance networks of verifiable credentials (VCs) and verifiable data streams, allowing purpose-specific data sharing and verification with a notice/consent design embedded within.
The trust layer of the blockchain will bring about open infrastructure such as data fingerprinting registries, credentialing registries, and key management services. Data registries on the blockchain allow regulatory authorities to openly govern data while ensuring it is accessible to services with high fidelity and quality. Among the nine priority areas highlighted in the Budget 2024 speech, each can have a multiplier impact when DPIs with data registries are enabled for the services and innovative solutions can be incubated around such infrastructure.
Verifiable Credentials are increasingly becoming mainstream – sometimes without the end consumer realizing that the records they manage are secure, tamper-resistant VCs. This is a positive sign that the end-consumer experience can be transformed from a paper-based system of low-trust and low-fidelity to a high-trust and high-fidelity digitally secure method. With this, it is not surprising that organizations and educational institutions are today using credentialing platforms to issue VCs for learning and educational records (LERs), Skilling and Knowledge Records (SKRs) and Workplace Credentials (WPCs). Secure, verifiable credentialing is a natural outcome of an Open Trust Infrastructure.
With DPIs and Open Trust Infrastructure, it is crucial to view the multiple views and access to data services from the perspective of digital trust ecosystems. This, in turn, ensures better governance and operational management of such infrastructure through consortium-like approaches, which provide participants with necessary incentives to maintain and improve these digital rails.
As ISVs and SIs come together to implement the critical parts of the digital infrastructure required to deliver the records such as skilling and knowledge credentials or the Kisan Credit Cards – with the DPI design model, it will be possible to use the CORD blockchain to rapidly prototype and deliver production-ready software that is capable of being used at nation-scale. The CORD Blockchain also allows for a decentralized and federated approach to data governance, data management and data pipelines which addresses the topic of legacy data silos and interoperability.
CORD Blockchain sandboxes allow ISVs to design and deploy applications which follow the guidelines of Digital Public Goods (DPGs) on infrastructure that is aligned with the principles of DPI. The growing number of use cases, an uptick in the number of tenders and RFPs that mention blockchain as the preferred underlying infrastructure, and a better appreciation of the concept of reusable digital identifiers have contributed to the rapid adoption of Web 3.0 models. Together with empowering the data principals with more fine-grained control over the data, such an approach also brings in newer ideas in economic models around sustainable and scalable infrastructure.
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