Building on India Stack
Last month I attended Build on India Stack, a pitch competition organised by iSPIRT and Dalberg for startups leveraging the India Stack platform. It was a great event — thanks to the organisers for putting it together!
India Stack is a set of open APIs including Aadhar, UPI and eKYC (a set of slides that give a good overview) that enable digital services for a large chunk of the Indian population.
A good analogue is the set of APIs (maps, payments, smartphone operating systems, cloud infrastructure, GPS) that enabled mobile applications such as Uber, Airbnb and e-commerce. India Stack is a public and open version of these sitting on top of smartphones and mobile internet. It sets up verifiable digital identities, easy payment processing and digital signatures (and more) for a billion people. This puts India in a unique position — this scale, extent and speed of digitisation has not been achieved before. Just as leapfrogging desktop internet to go straight to mobile enabled unique applications in India and China such as Whatsapp commerce, India Stack is poised to enable novel solutions.
Broadly, most applications I’ve seen can be bucketed into two categories (linked to some of the companies that presented) –
Increased Convenience for Existing Users (Journee , KyePot)
Some applications enable easier and more convenient experiences for existing users of services e.g. online submission of documents for financial services, government forms, e-signatures for contracts, quicker and easier KYC. In some cases such as Jio’s expansion or wealth management apps, this can be an important enabler but doesn’t significantly increase the target audience.
Increased Access to Existing Services (EasyGov , GraduFund, Haqdarshak)
1.2 billion people now have digitally verifiable identities and an increasing number have bank accounts which open up various possibilities. Previously underserved populations can now be connected with existing services such as bank accounts, formal credit, government benefits and NGO schemes.
While much of this might seem incremental, I feel that this is the first step towards more significant disruptions.
A lot of early applications on new platforms like computers, the Internet and smartphones started off as incremental (almost toy-like) but become increasingly disruptive as the platforms evolved. Computers were initially used to speed up academic computations and play games; Facebook was a university directory before it enabled people across the world to stay connected; Uber was a faster way to get a taxi before it changed how people commute. Similarly, the most revolutionary advances often start as an incremental convenience.
Even greater potential lies in use cases that can’t be easily envisioned right now and in applications that were unsustainable before this. An example I came across recently was Sahil Kini’s description of a sachetised insurance scheme. Such a business model is only feasible because of the significantly lower customer acquisition and payment processing costs enabled by India Stack!
What is important for India’s digital future is having a vision of such disruptions yet understanding the many small but significant steps on the way.
If you’re working on something that you believe will be one of these visionary applications get in touch at ishaan@lsip.com
