Digital Public Services

INDIA GOES OFFLINE, DIGITALLY! The Reserve Bank of India has launched the Offline Digital Rupee, a Central Bank Digital Currency that can move from one wallet to another even without internet or mobile network. Imagine paying for a cup of tea in the Himalayas or for groceries in a rural market where connectivity is zero and still completing the transaction in seconds. ✅ Digital trust has reached a new level. Money that works without the internet is not a product of convenience. It is the evolution of trust. When the value can move offline yet remain verified and authentic, we are witnessing the future of financial inclusion, not just technology. ✅ It solves the last-mile problem. For years, digital payments depended on networks, servers, and gateways. Rural India, remote areas, and even disaster zones were often left behind. The Offline Digital Rupee removes that dependency and gives digital money a physical character. This changes how we think of accessibility forever. ✅ It is faster, cheaper, and smarter. No third-party switches. No failed connections. No dependency on payment gateways. The value moves directly from one device to another, just like cash, but secured by blockchain-based architecture and backed by the central bank. The power of digital efficiency now exists without digital dependence. ✅ Programmable money means purposeful money. The RBI’s Programmable Central Bank Digital Currency model means money can be coded for a reason. Subsidies can be released only for their intended use. Corporate payouts can have specific validity. Social benefits can be tracked transparently. It adds responsibility to the currency itself. ✅ It redefines how economies will interact. Offline CBDC is not just a domestic innovation. It opens the door for new models of cross-border settlements, disaster-resilient financial systems, and new layers of fintech innovation. The world will look at this model as a live example of how technology can merge with human need, not just convenience. ✅ It reminds us what innovation truly means. The right innovation is not when a feature gets smarter, but when it becomes more inclusive. When a person in a no-network zone can transact as easily as someone in a metro city, that is when digital transformation turns into social transformation.

Australia ❤️ is good at digital govt. But in a world of rapid change, good isn’t good enough 🤷♂️ When people think of world-leading digital nations, they point to Singapore, Estonia, and increasingly, the UAE. Yes - they’re small, agile, and highly coordinated. But size is no excuse. 🇺🇦 Ukraine (pop. ~40 million) is racing toward Gov 3.0 maturity via its Diia platform - even during a war. 🇮🇳 India (pop. 1.5 billion 🤯) is delivering digital transformation at national scale. The India Stack, anchored by Aadhaar, is enabling inclusion, innovation, and economic uplift for over a billion people. ✳️ Why does this matter? One word: Productivity As population growth and participation rates flatten, productivity becomes the key to prosperity. Treasurer Jim Chalmers is right ✅ to put it front and centre - he’s convening a national productivity roundtable on 25 August to build consensus for reform. Last year, I co-led a productivity roadshow across Australia and New Zealand, asking: Which govt services would deliver the biggest productivity dividend if digitised at scale? The result? The GX5 : Five digital initiatives with the biggest productivity upside We assessed 24 govt digitalisation opportunities and filtered them through three lenses: 1. Citizen-facing – high visibility and public benefit 2. Deployment-ready – proven globally, good to go 3. High productivity impact – across govt, business, and individuals The top five: 🟦 Digital ID – secure, streamlined identity verification 🟦 Digital Skills Wallet – verified, portable credentials 🟦 Digital Front Door – one-stop access to govt services 🟦 Digital Health Record – accessible, coordinated medical data 🟦 Digital Licences & Permits – instantly verifiable credentials 📊 According to the attached GX5 report, Digital ID alone could unlock $19–32 billion per year in economic benefits - up to 1.2% of GDP - based on results from Singpass (Singapore) and Aadhaar (India) . Importantly, the Federal Govt passed legislation last year 🙏 to enable an opt-in digital ID system - a critical reform that will boost security, privacy, and service delivery across the country. This attached report was a collaboration between Ember Advisors and ServiceGen, with support from Amazon Web Services (AWS). If we want to stay globally competitive, we must build and embrace public digital infrastructure. It’s how we move from good to great 🙏🏼

In much of the world, digital financial tools are a daily reality—used to process paychecks, pay for dinner, buy groceries, and more. But 1.4 billion adults in low- and middle-income countries still lack access to these tools.    This isn’t just an inconvenience for them; it's a barrier to economic growth and empowerment. According to a 2023 UN analysis, digital public infrastructure—including digital ID, payments, and data exchange—could accelerate GDP growth in these countries by 20 to 33 percent.    That’s where Mojaloop Foundation comes in: Their open-source software makes it possible for countries to build inclusive digital payment systems that allow anyone with a mobile phone to send and receive money securely, instantly, and affordably. This has the potential to drive economic inclusion—and open the doors to financial freedom—for billions.

Presenting a significant milestone on our journey towards a digitally empowered future: our Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) playbook—a comprehensive resource designed to help nations kickstart their digital transformation journey with a DPI approach. What makes it even more special is that it is written by a bright and young team of ladies at Deloitte: Aishwarya Dixit, Kanika Kishore and Priyanka Yadav. In an era marked by rapid digital advancements, adopting a piecemeal approach to digital systems can leave governments vulnerable to potential risks. Resilient and unified digital foundations, facilitated by a plug-n-play DPI layer, become crucial for equitable and affordable access to digital services and cost-effective sustainability, especially in times of crisis. The DPI playbook can serve as a guide or a compass for nations navigating their digital transformation journey. It explores the intricacies of DPIs, emphasising their role in fostering interoperability, scalability, and growth across sectors. The playbook also equips countries with tools to assess their current DPI landscape, identifying strengths, challenges, and gaps. By focusing on key design principles and a building-block approach, it offers step-by-step guiding principles for a sector-agnostic DPI foundation, ensuring a strategic and sustainable transformation. Top highlights: - Diagnostic analysis for DPI landscape: Enables countries to identify strengths, challenges, and gaps in their technological infrastructure. - Key design principles: Emphasises principles for sustainable and strategic transformation, maximising the impact of DPI initiatives. - Digital Inclusivity at the core: Guides countries to define distinct goals and objectives with digital inclusivity at the forefront. - Best practices/case studies: Valuable lessons and best practices from successful DPI journeys of other countries, offering a roadmap based on proven success stories - Funding and Outreach Strategies: Addresses the importance of financial support and stakeholder engagement. These are general guidelines for setting up a DPI roadmap, the countries should contextualise and consider their local preparedness and diversity while using this as a guide and define their way forward for embarking on a DPI journey to build a robust digital foundation. This DPI playbook is a call to action, inviting policymakers and stakeholders to define a DPI roadmap for their countries, ensuring security and scale in a sustainable, affordable digital transformation strategy. Let's collectively shape a resilient digital landscape that leaves no one behind! Read more here: https://rb.gy/mvl7vy My sincere gratitude to Dr. Pramod Varma, Shankar Maruwada, Dr. RS Sharma, and Srikanth Nadhamuni for their invaluable contributions and expertise in ensuring the playbook serves as a holistic guide for nations embarking on their DPI journey. NSN Murty Sreeram Ananthasayanam #indiagrowthstory #distinctlydeloitte

A substantive policy decision has come out of France, where the government has committed to phasing out US based collaboration platforms across public administration in favor of a domestically developed alternative. The rationale is not novelty or protectionism, but governance. France will require public officials to move away from platforms including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, WhatsApp, and Telegram Messenger, shifting instead to state approved tools such as Visio for videoconferencing and Tchap for messaging. Visio is developed under the authority of the Interministerial Digital Directorate and runs on French infrastructure. It is already used by tens of thousands of civil servants, with a target of broad adoption across government by 2027. https://lnkd.in/efbMG5NN Collaboration platforms are not neutral tools. They structure data flows, determine jurisdictional exposure, and embed long term dependencies into public institutions. In a regulatory environment shaped by GDPR, the EU AI Act, and increased scrutiny of cross border data transfers, these choices are no longer technical. They are political, legal, and strategic. France’s move reflects a broader shift in how digital infrastructure is understood in Europe. Digital sovereignty is being translated into procurement rules, system architecture, and enforceable institutional practice. Similar calls for greater digital independence from the United States have been made by European leaders across Germany, Spain, and at the EU level, particularly in relation to cloud services, data localization, and strategic technologies. A cross-party majority of Members of the European Parliament have explicitly called for reducing reliance on US digital infrastructure and expanding European capabilities in a recent technological sovereignty resolution, framing it as a strategic necessity rather than mere regulation.  https://lnkd.in/eBHQ3YfE What distinguishes the French case is the execution. Policy intent has now been converted into mandatory tools, monitored adoption, and infrastructure level enforcement.

What if you could build a world class AI. Without ever seeing real data? For years, this has been the catch 22 of public sector transformation. We want to use AI to solve huge challenges like fraud, but the risk of exposing real citizen data has been a hard stop. Progress has been trapped between the promise of innovation and the duty of privacy. A new white paper from HM Revenue & Customs, however, offers a brilliant solution They are training advanced fraud detection models without ever using real taxpayer information, all thanks to synthetic data. It's artificially generated information that mirrors the statistical patterns of a real dataset, a high fidelity, privacy safe replica that allows teams to build, test, and innovate with complete freedom. This is a true game changer for government delivery. → It unlocks innovation, allowing teams to build models without navigating months of complex data access approvals. → It guarantees citizen privacy by design, building the public trust needed for wider AI adoption. → It accelerates project timelines, moving from theory to a functioning model in a fraction of the time. This update from HMRC sets out a new blueprint for responsible innovation across the public sector. It proves we can be both data driven and privacy centric. #AI #DataPrivacy #HMRC

In 2021, I became the first woman to head a unicorn in Israel, AKA Startup Nation. In many parts of the world, women are excluded from even the most basic financial services, so leading a fintech company is far from their reality. United Nations data estimates that 3.8 billion women live in the world, 50% of which are adults. According to the World Bank’s Global Findex Database, 1.4 billion of those 1.9 billion adult women, are unbanked. That’s 73.65%. Visit that statistic again. It represents a disturbing gender gap in financial access, with women being far less likely than men to have bank accounts or access formal financial services. This financial exclusion has personal impact. It diminishes women’s economic empowerment by restricting access to education and limiting their potential for personal growth and independence. It makes women more financially dependent, and therefore, more vulnerable. There's economic impact, too. Research by McKinsey highlights the economic loss due to financial exclusion of women, noting that closing the gender gap in labor force participation could add trillions to global GDP. Financial inclusion isn’t just a matter of equality – ensuring the same opportunities for all. It’s a matter of equity - ensuring women have the tools and access they need to fully participate in the global economy. That’s where technology enters the picture to level the field. The rise of mobile banking is a great example of innovation enhancing financial inclusion. According to a report by the International Finance Corporation, mobile money accounts are more popular among women in regions like Sub-Saharan Africa, where access to traditional banking is limited. Various fintechs provide financial literacy resources, helping women understand financial products, budgeting, and saving strategies. Other solutions include AI-driven platforms that offer personalized recommendations and advice, empowering women to make informed financial decisions. Aside from personal apps and solutions, fintechs can facilitate community-based lending and saving initiatives, allowing women to support each other through group savings or microfinance schemes, fostering a sense of solidarity and shared purpose. This International Women’s Day’s theme is "accelerate action". In my mind, nothing accelerates action like innovation. As we mark International Women's Day, let’s advocate and innovate to enhance financial inclusion for women worldwide. #IWD2025 #financialInclusion Papaya Global

When I was teaching infodemic management at the WHO during the pandemic, we asked the CDC colleagues to discuss five communication failures that consistently derail public health efforts: - Mixed messages from multiple experts - Information released too late - Paternalistic messaging - Failing to counter rumors in real-time - Public-facing power struggles and confusion   In the US, all five are now happening at once.   Public trust in health institutions is unraveling. People are adapting by building decentralized, multi-source, often crowdsourced “trust ecosystems.”   This is what the New York Times comment section revealed after a recent article recommended credible health information sources. The comments were not fringe. They reflected skepticism, discernment, and a shift toward self-curated information strategies.   Readers reported: - Turning to Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Wikipedia, and NHS UK over US government sites. - Avoiding .gov domains due to perceived politicization. - Using AI cautiously, as a first filter, not a final word. - Proposing solutions like health site trust ratings, simplified printouts, and community-led education.   Public health needs to meet this moment. Not by restoring the old systems, but by fostering something new for health information search, access and use: - Transparent, independent curation - Tools for triangulation and critical analysis - Localized, multilingual resource hubs - Responsible AI-supported health navigation - Community-led health literacy models   Each of these comes with ethical, practical, and equity challenges.   We need to think big picture and hyper-local at the same time.   I don’t have all the answers. But I believe we need to build—together—a health information ecosystem for a fragmented, fractal, globalized, and crisis-prone world.

#AI in the public sector? And yet it moves! And it’s a prime example of how technological advancement requires the highest social and ethical standards. “Ethical Integration in Public Sector AI”: the new IAB X Center for Responsible AI Technologies study is out. It addresses the ethical design of AI in the public sector, with a focus on #PublicEmploymentServices (PES). While AI is increasingly employed to streamline administrative processes and improve service delivery, its application in employment mediation raises fundamental concerns regarding #fairness, accountability, and democratic legitimacy. The EU AI Act has further underscored the urgency of addressing these challenges by classifying employment-related AI systems as high-risk. We examine how ethical and social considerations can be systematically embedded in the development and implementation of public sector AI. Using the German PES as a case study, we introduce the “Embedded #Ethics and Social Sciences” approach, which integrates ethical reflection and practitioner involvement from the outset. Qualitative insights from interviews with caseworkers highlight the socio-technical challenges of implementation, particularly the need to reconcile efficiency with citizen trust. We propose concrete design elements emerging from the integration of ethical and social considerations into system development: data ethics, bias, fairness, explainable AI. The approach supports compliance with new regulatory requirements but also strengthens human oversight and shared decision-making.

Imagine being in a remote area with no signal—unable to make a call, send a message, or access the internet. For years, this has been a frustrating reality for millions of Indians. However, a new government initiative has now turned this challenge into an opportunity for transformation. The recently launched Inter-Circle Roaming (ICR) Facility enables users of telecom giants like Jio, Airtel, and BSNL to access 4G services through any available network, even if their own provider lacks coverage in a particular area. This breakthrough means that no matter where you are in India, you’ll remain connected, breaking the barriers of network limitations. Why This Is a Game-Changer 1. Empowering Rural and Remote Areas India’s vast geography includes regions where network coverage has traditionally been sparse. Farmers, healthcare workers, and students in these areas often face challenges accessing digital services. With the ICR facility, connectivity gaps are bridged, ensuring digital inclusion even in the remotest corners of the country. 2. A Lifesaver in Emergencies In times of crisis—natural disasters, medical emergencies, or accidents—lack of communication can cost lives. With the ability to use alternative networks, this initiative ensures that help is always just a call away. 3. Boosting Business Continuity For professionals and businesses, uninterrupted communication is critical. This facility not only ensures seamless connectivity during travel but also enhances productivity and operational efficiency. 4. Strengthening Digital India’s Vision This initiative aligns perfectly with the Digital India mission, fostering a more connected and digitally empowered society. It reflects a commitment to making India a leader in telecommunications innovation and ensuring equitable access to technology. The Technology Behind It The ICR facility leverages advanced network-sharing mechanisms, allowing telecom providers to collaborate instead of competing in areas with low signal coverage. It’s a fine example of how public and private sectors can join hands to create a win-win situation for everyone. A Step Towards Network Democracy Connectivity is no longer a luxury; it’s a necessity. By enabling users to access multiple networks without additional costs, this initiative levels the playing field for all telecom users. Whether you’re in a bustling city or a remote village, you now have the assurance of staying connected. What This Means for the Future This is just the beginning. As 5G technology becomes more mainstream, such collaborations and innovations will be key to making India one of the most connected nations in the world. Imagine a future where your device automatically switches to the best available network without you even noticing—and that future starts now. #DigitalIndia #ConnectivityForAll #TelecomInnovation #IndiaRising #SeamlessNetwork