The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved three Memoranda of Understanding with France, Trinidad and Tobago, and Papua New Guinea in digital technology. The pacts were signed with France’s Ministry of Economy, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty; Papua New Guinea’s Department of Information and Communications Technology; and Trinidad and Tobago’s Ministry of Digital Transformation Technology.
The memorandum with France furthers the countries’ stated cooperation goals, such as 2019’s Indo-French Roadmap on Cybersecurity and Digital Technology, and the two countries’ participation in the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence. The MoU is valid for three years, the Government said.
The MoUs with the other two countries deals with ‘sharing successful Digital Solutions implemented at Population Scale for Digital Transformation , and referred to India’s efforts to promote the India Stack, an indigenous set of software and protocols on which Aadhaar and the Unified Payments Interface are built.
The latter two MoUs represent India’s efforts to lead countries of the Global South in building out Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), by way of sharing open source versions of the systems used in India to build digital identity and payments infrastructure. The MoU with the two countries is valid for three years.
