A conversation with Sharad Sharma, Co-Founder of iSPIRT

Edition #121 interweave sits down with one of the architects of India Stack, one of the global leaders in Digital Public Infrastructure...

In February 2025, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen met bilaterally with Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi to discuss a Strategic Partnership between India and the EU. The meeting’s agenda included increased interoperability between EU and Indian Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI).

India is undoubtedly a global leader in DPI. When holding the G20 presidency in 2023, India’s DPI was consistently highlighted as a global solution, with the country producing a common definition, framework, and task force. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Indian government used their DPI to enable direct cash transfers to 320 million beneficiary bank accounts.

DPI was a major theme during India’s G20 presidency (Source)

This was made possible with India’s unified software platform India Stack, which allows governments, businesses and startups to utilize a common digital architecture to deliver digital services for the country, a pioneering approach to “opening the digital marketplace to the masses”.

Realizing financial inclusion: From 17% to 80% of Indian bank account holders

When I sit down with Sharad Sharma, the co-founder of iSPIRT foundation – the think tank that helped develop India Stack – he elaborates on India’s DPI vision. iSPIRT started in 2012 back when a large part of India was still not served by financial services. Only 17% of adults had bank accounts, partly due to a lack of financial innovation.

Roughly estimated, it would have taken 47 years to achieve 80% of account penetration through traditional processes based on India’s development trajectory. Instead, India chose to create a technology stack in response to the innovation deficit, a foundational digital infrastructure upon which the market can develop innovations.

Today, over 80% of Indians own bank accounts. A Unified Payment Interface (UPI)- a paperless processing platform to verify customers during financial transactions- has enabled more than 350 banks to transact more than $134 billion. 97% of the Indian population make use of Aadhaar - the world's largest biometric ID system, connected to the bank account.

The India Stack (Source)

Even common street vendors can now participate in the financial system, open zero-balance bank accounts and request intra-day loans through a formal process. The provision of an essential, outermost layer by India Stack has driven the cost of opening a bank account low enough that banks are willing to offer one to everyone.

India Stack and the internet: balancing a community-led approach with safety and security

India’s technology stack was inspired by the development of the internet, which was built on three building blocks (called primitives) and developed by the volunteer-led Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Sharma argues: “If the first three primitives for internet were built by volunteers and not by the government, why should these new three primitives not also be built by volunteers?”

He refers to the three basic primitives DPI building blocks must manage: the flow of people, the flow of money, and the flow of information. Once these three are made available as basic infrastructure, product innovators are able to build on top of that. Starting as an idea on paper in 2012, these building blocks have now almost all been built.

The link between public technology and volunteering is historical, Sharma explains: “there is a very strong tradition of public technology in the digital world made by volunteer organizations […] the digital world is all about volunteers creating the public tech and then the market and policymakers doing their bit to make it comply “.

India Stack has had its fair share of criticism when it comes to safety, especially for Aadhaar, the digital ID component of India Stack. In 2018, a reporter from The Tribune was able to access Aadhaar data of over 1 billion Indians for about $7, not the only such data leak. The recent decision to link Aadhaar with Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC) numbers also came under scrutiny over privacy rights.

When asked about India’s leadership position in relation to internet shutdowns, Sharma states that he sees no relation between the quality of a country’s digital infrastructure and shutdowns as a governmental measure. He points to “techno-legal regulation” instead: the right technology needs the right policy, and the two should reinforce each other. Just as relying on policy can lead to technology undermining the system, the same is true the other way round.

Exporting India Stack through adaptation

Many countries are facing similar problems to India in financial inclusion, and DPI building blocks are needed everywhere else in the world.

To determine whether they can be applied elsewhere, Sharma refers to the five DPI Sutras iSPIRT has established, which include non-weaponization of technology, democratization to avoid state monopoly and ensuring privacy by giving data ownership to citizens. These are the principles at the core of Citizen Stack, the DPI platform modelled after the Indian example.

Sharma emphasizes that instead of recommending India Stack as a vendor, they advise that “every country should have a Citizen Stack because the Indian experiment has been so successful [….] We are not saying ‘use the Indian system’; even the Indian system should be tested against the DPI Sutras”.

As to why India does offer a very successful edition of DPI, he refers to the high diversity within India. A country’s DPI is dependent on three key dimensions: trust, state capacity, and market capacity. Some countries would score higher or lower in some of the dimensions, but India encompasses all levels of them.

Recent voices in Europe have suggested building a Citizen Stack for the EU, digital infrastructure that strengthens the region’s technological sovereignty called EuroStack. Many outlets have referenced India Stack as a model approach (ECDPM, CEPS).

Building a country’s DPI is a highly subjective effort, but many lessons can be learnt from the Indian approach. The conversation with Sharad Sharma emphasized that for technology to become a public good, it must be built and maintained through a balanced interplay of government, private companies, and civil society.