By Harischandra Gunaratna

President Ranil Wickremesinghe recently delivering the keynote address at the Digital Public Infrastructure Conference organized by the Indian High Commission in Colombo at the Taj Samudra Hotel, underscored the importance of digital infrastructure in modernizing agriculture, addressing multi-dimensional poverty and reforming the education system.

Wickremesinghe characterized the country’s economy as a ‘patchwork economy’ calling it a symphony of desperate elements stitched together.

Acknowledging the importance of digitization, the President highlighted the significance of discussions on the digital public economy whilst outlining the government’s plans to establish a new institutional framework to facilitate this transition, moving away from the existing structures such as IT Councils and focusing on creating a Digital Transformation Agency and AI Centre, allocated with a budget of one billion rupees. He said the agency would be building a robust economy, departing from the previous approaches which failed to yield the desired results.

The President expressed gratitude to the Indian government for its support, in advancing Sri Lanka’s digital economy, highlighting plants to collaborate with Indian institutions and leverage their expertise, particularly establishing a campus of the Chennai Indian Institute of Technology(IIT) and additionally planning to launch three universities, two of which will focus on technology.

Indian High Commissioner to Sri Lanka Santosh Jha in his welcome address said India’s own journey stands as testimony to the power of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). The digital transformation in India over the last decade or so has been driven by these inter operable and open protocols of DPI.

The High Commissioner said that India’s DPI journey started with the basic need to provide direct access to public services and Government benefits to its citizen.

“This what gave birth to India’s Digital Identity Number AADHAAR- and the Unique Identification Authority of India in 2016. This became the foundational building block of DPI and the magic began.

At the heart of this magic is what we call India Stack: – government-backed APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, upon which third parties can build software with access to government IDs, payment networks and data Jha said.

This digital infrastructure in inter operable and “stacked together – meaning that private private companies can build apps integrated with state services to provide consumers with seamless access to everything from welfare payments to loan applications and making investments, the High Commissioner stressed.

“Probably even the architects of of AADHAAR didn’t envisage that India was on path to finding a world-beating solution for building out and regulating the online commons that is more equitable than laissez-fare approach, more transparent and more innovative than some of the regulation-heavy models.” he said.