NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Thursday, August 24, 2017

The first wave of technology entrepreneurship in the country touched the upwardly mobile section of the population. This set the foundation for the emergence of a newer breed of entrepreneurs who could focus on delivering innovative technology solutions for those sections of the population at the bottom of the pyramid. To support such an initiative is the India Stack platform. This is the largest application programming interface (API) in the world supported by the open API policy of the government. The stack is a new technology paradigm that is scalable to handle massive data inflows, and is poised to enable entrepreneurs, citizens and governments to interact with each other transparently, creating an ecosystem to develop innovative ideas to serve the 1.1 billion people on the platform, specifically the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) population. The India Stack comprises API-based infrastructure that allows technologies to be built around Aadhaar authentication and eKYC, eSign, DigiLocker, and a unified payments interface (UPI).

Photo courtesy of Biswarup Ganguly.