Union Budget 2022 – Imprints of using Digital public infra with Private innovation
iSPIRT Foundation, a technology think-and-do tank, believes that India’s hard problems can be solved only by leveraging public technology for private innovation through open APIs.
This “innovation architecture” is now going mainstream. The Union Budget 2022 mentions five efforts that iSPIRT has been intimately involved in:
- India Stack – Promoting digital economy & fintech, technology-enabled development, energy transition, and climate action.
- Health Stack – An open platform for the National Digital Health Ecosystem will be rolled out. It will consist of digital registries of health providers and health facilities, unique health identity, consent framework, and universal access to health facilities.
- Digital Sky – Use of ‘Kisan Drones’ will be promoted for crop assessment, digitisation of land records, spraying of insecticides and nutrients.
- Digi-Yatra & Logistics Stack – Multimodal Movement of Goods and People. The data exchange among all mode operators will be brought on the Unified Logistics Interface Platform (ULIP), designed for Application Programming Interface (API).
- DESH (Digital Ecosystem for Skilling and Livelihood) Stack – This aims to empower citizens to skill, re-skill or upskill through online training. It will also provide API-based trusted skill credentials, payment and discovery layers to find relevant jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities.
This embrace of the new innovation architecture is a seminal moment for our economy and society. However, more could have been done.
Some low-hanging opportunities missed are:
- A few positive announcements have been made for the funding ecosystem for Indian startups (such as capping the surcharge on long term capital gains and an expert committee to suggest measures to boost venture capital and private equity investment in startups). While these are in line with iSPIRT’s ‘Stay-in-India’ checklist effort, immediate actions on some of these (as well as other) issues in the checklist will help further.
- Ease of Doing Business is mentioned in the Budget speech, but no specific actions are announced.
- 5G is a big opportunity. India can leverage this to become a telecom equipment provider in Radio Access Network (RAN). iSPIRT’s SARANG effort is focused on this. There should have been specific capital allocations and Design Linked Incentives (DLI) for OpenRAN as a strategic area in Mission mode.
Overall, the Budget is well-balanced and ushers in new thinking about innovation in emerging sectors that are strategic to the country.
Sharad Sharma, Co-founder & Volunteer – “In the coming years, India needs to usher in a product economy in Defence, Electronics, BioPharma, ClimateTech (including EVs), FinTech, HealthTech and Software. This Budget sets the stage for this new innings by having a focus on sunrise industries.”
Sudhir Singh, Fellow – Policy Initiatives – “Since the announcement of National Policy on Software Product (NPSP), no Budget has been able to consider making it active and announce measures, e.g. Digital Product Development fund could help bolster “Digital India” and other strategic measures could help galvanise a Software product Industry of India.”
Sanjay Khan Nagra, Member – Donor Council & Volunteer – “Some of the measures announced by the FM for startups (tax parity for unlisted and listed securities, extension of concessional tax regime for startups and manufacturing startups, setting-up a committee for encouraging VC/PE investments in startups, etc) and digital assets/blockchain ecosystem are commendable and in line with long-standing industry demands. We hope the momentum continues with the pragmatic implementation of these policy measures and further regulatory actions building on top of these measures.”
About iSPIRT Foundation – We are a non-profit think-and-do tank that builds public goods for Indian product startups to thrive and grow. iSPIRT aims to do for Indian startups what DARPA or Stanford did in Silicon Valley.
iSPIRT builds four types of public goods – technology building blocks (aka India stack), startup-friendly policies, market access programs like M&A Connect and Playbooks that codify scarce tacit knowledge for product entrepreneurs of India. For more visit: www.ispirt.in
For further queries, reach out to Sudhir Singh (+91) 96505 76567, Email us: [email protected] or [email protected]