Learning from India Stack: Building Interoperable Systems for a Global South Future

When India launched Aadhaar, the aim was simple: give every resident a verifiable digital identity. That single step set the stage for what became India Stack, a layered digital public infrastructure that now underpins payments, document verification, and commerce for more than a billion people.

For countries in the Global South, India Stack is not a template to replicate, but a demonstration of what can be achieved when digital systems are designed to be open, inclusive, and interoperable.

From Identity to a Full Stack

India Stack developed in layers, each addressing a foundational need.

• Aadhaar provided a digital identity to almost the entire resident population, now with well over a billion active numbers and billions of monthly authentications.

• UPI (Unified Payments Interface) created an open payment rail that processes close to 20 billion transactions a month, making it the largest real-time payments system in the world.

• DigiLocker gave citizens a secure platform for storing and sharing official documents, with hundreds of millions of registered users and widespread adoption across universities, banks, and government services.

• ONDC (Open Network for Digital Commerce) is introducing interoperability to e-commerce, with tens of millions of transactions each month across mobility, logistics, and retail.

Each layer has value on its own, but the real power lies in their interaction. Identity makes payments seamless. Payments enable digital commerce. Verifiable documents reduce time and cost in education, mobility, and financial services. Together, these systems form the backbone of India’s digital economy.

India Stack

Why It Reached Scale

Three design choices made this growth possible.

• Open standards. The infrastructure was designed for interoperability, allowing banks, startups, and enterprises to innovate on top of it.

• Public-private collaboration. The state built the rails, while private players created the services that citizens use daily. This balance encouraged adoption at speed and scale.

• Low transaction costs. UPI’s near-zero pricing ensured that even the smallest transactions became viable, which encouraged mass adoption.

The outcome is striking: digital payments and digital verification have become everyday practices, used by street vendors and multinational firms alike.

Lessons Beyond India

India Stack offers lessons rather than blueprints. The most important is that governments can build open, foundational systems and still leave room for private innovation.

• In Africa, where mobile money is widespread but often fragmented, mandating interoperability could unlock broader inclusion.

• In Latin America, ongoing digital ID initiatives can draw from Aadhaar’s focus on portability and scale, adapted with stronger privacy safeguards.

• In Europe, debates about data sovereignty can look to India’s separation of core infrastructure from private applications as a way to preserve choice.

The specifics will differ, but the principles travel well: open standards, public investment in rails, and cost structures that keep participation broad.

Sutra’s Perspective

Sutra sees India Stack as a beginning rather than an endpoint. The next wave of digital infrastructure will be about trust registries in areas such as health, education, climate, and supply chains. Each domain requires authoritative records, and those records must be portable across systems and borders.

Sutra’s work focuses on building the connective architecture for these registries, ensuring that trust can move as easily as identity and payments now do in India.

Looking Forward

India Stack shows that digital public infrastructure can be both inclusive and transformative when designed with openness and scale in mind. For the Global South, the lesson is not to copy the Stack but to adapt its principles to local contexts.

The story continues to evolve, but the central insight is clear. When trust, identity, and payments are made interoperable at low cost, digital systems stop being experimental. They become the infrastructure of everyday life.