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A Budget with Good Intentions but lacks drive to realize Viksit Bharat & EODB

iSPIRT Foundation, a technology think-and-do tank, believes India’s hard problems can be solved only by leveraging public technology for private innovation. iSPIRT, as a think-and-do-tank, pioneered the concept of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI)

Industry watched and waited to see if this budget will have bold, strategic announcements with long-term vision, aiming for Viksit Bharat 2047. Instead the budget has become more a tactical prescription for handling short-term economic correction.

Three themes capture our attention in the 2025 budget: The Investment in Innovation, Regulatory Reforms and MSME Credit.

Given our Product Nation initiative at iSPIRT, we were looking for bold steps in two major areas: Private sector R&D funding and Ease of Doing Business.

The funding for R&D made incremental progress in this budget. Under the theme ‘Investing in Innovation” the Finance Minister announced Rs. 20,000 Crore to be allocated from the policy announcement of 1 Lakh Crore made in previous budgets. There is no major decision or clarity on how this funding will be routed. In addition, intent is expressed to explore a Deep-Tech fund in the future.

Similarly two welcome announcements towards achieving strategic autonomy are, an outlay for 20,000 crore to develop Small Modular Reactors (SMR) and operationalise at least five indigenously developed SMRs by 2033 and, a National Geospatial Mission to develop foundational geospatial infrastructure and data.

There is a marked improvement in intent to solve the Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) problem in the budget made evident by yesterday’s Economic Survey.

We have been pursuing the Government of India (GOI) on EoDB to implement a comprehensive three-pronged approach, to bring India into the top 5 or 10 EoDB countries. This includes decriminalising 1200 provisions; rationalising multiple laws and implementing a National Regulatory Compliance grid at the center and then extending it to states. Our approach gels with the “Whole of Nation” thinking given by the Honorable Prime Minister.

The GOI appears to reflect this thinking in the statement, “A light-touch regulatory framework based on principles and trust will unleash productivity and employment. Through this framework, we will update regulations that were made under old laws. To develop this modern, flexible, people-friendly, and trust-based regulatory framework appropriate for the twenty-first century…”.

However, the specific action of forming a High-Level Committee for regulatory reforms that “will be set up for a review of all non-financial sector regulations, certifications, licenses, and permissions”, is welcome but appears to be incremental in nature and a slow-moving approach.

The Janvishwas 2.0 announcement has also been repeated stating 100 items to be taken up instead of 1200 reported by us.

Sudhir Singh, iSPIRT’s policy expert volunteer said, “The concept of digital transformation through National Regulatory Compliance Grid (NRCG) has been ignored in the budget. However, another idea of “Digital Port”, pursued by iSPIRT for more than two years now, on digital transformation of cross border trade has received attention and GoI seems to have framed it as ‘BharatTradeNet’ in the budget 2025.”

The budget speech states, “a digital public infrastructure, ‘BharatTradeNet’ (BTN) for international trade will be set-up as a unified platform for trade documentation and financing solutions”. This indeed is an important and welcome announcement.

The Finance Ministry’s move to separate R&D funding and Startup funding is encouraging. The startup-related announcements reflect the government’s continued support to startups.

The government has taken several steps to boost credit enablement for SME and Nano enterprises, a significant part of Priority Sector Lending. Some good announcements were made such as the Kisan Credit Card (KCC) limit increasing from INR 3 lakh to 5 lakh, which in three states – Karnataka, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh – is based on Open Credit Enablement Network (OCEN), an initiative of iSPIRT. Other welcome announcements include an increase in credit guarantee cover for MSMEs from INR 5 crores to 10 crores, introduction of customized credit cards for MSMEs, and capital infusion into select public sector banks.

A new Fund-of-Funds with a fresh contribution of another 10,000 crore has been announced. It is encouraging to see the time limit for u/s 80-IAC to avail income tax exemption benefit for startups has been extended by 5 years to 01.04.2030. Another announcement of interest for startups is an extension of credit credit availability with a guaranteed cover of INR 10 crores to 20 crores, with the guarantee fee being moderated to 1 per cent for loans in 27 focus sectors important for Atmanirbhar Bharat.

iSPIRT cofounder Sharad Sharma said, “It is heartening to see private sector R&D funding rolling out with a 20,000 crore fund allocation. Formation of Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) committee is also welcome. However, there is a need to take big moves and expedite these steps to meet 2047 deadlines. BharatTradeNet is a welcome announcement and we hope there will be a thorough and transparent industry consultation on it. Overall we are missing bold and specific actions on Strategic Autonomy and Product Nation. “

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 what DARPA or Stanford University did in Silicon Valley for startups. 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 please reach out via email: tanuvi@ispirt.in , amit@ispirt.in , or regina@ispirt.in

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Digital Public Infrastructures

This workshop was organized by the Indian think tank iSPIRT Foundation, French Embassy in India, Consulate General of France in Bangalore, and La French Tech in India, based on the following principles:

  • Gathering high level contributors from India and France: industrials, transdisciplinary academics, diplomats, officials, business founders, think tank members, technology makers;
  • Pushing a Workshop format (not an event, not a round table, not a scientific conference), organizing 3 different days with 3 different viewpoints:
    • Philosophical/epistemological/ human sciences,
    • Economical/techno-legal/social sciences/adoption,
    • Application domains and use cases (Health, Culture, Creative Cities, Agriculture);
  • Targeting recommendations toward the AI Action Summit (Paris, February 2025).

Results:

  • More than 80 speakers, 100 participants in person (in Bangalore or in Paris), 200 participants online;
  • 14 different countries represented all over the world (India, France, Canada, USA, Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, Germany, Netherland, Italia, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Thailand);
  • An opening session figuring the Ambassador of India to France H.E. Mr. Jawed Ashraf, the French Digital Affairs Ambassador H.E. Mr. Henri Verdier, the Consul general of France in Bangalore Mr. Marc Lamy;
  • A rich repository of content, including speaker presentations, slides and recordings (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1eTDbRgw1g8EOBtXS7uRim9I6gtQRbCZB).
Summit Brochure
File “Program V10”
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Interim Budget 2024 – DPI’s the new factor of productivity

This being an interim budget, much was not expected as far as new announcements and taxation changes. However, for iSPIRT and the Product ecosystem of the country, it is heartening to know that some of our initiatives and thoughts as a ‘think-tank’ have become central to thinking of Government at the leadership level. The following are important to note

The Finance Minister mentioned that “DPI (digital public infrastructure), a new factor of production in the 21st century, is instrumental in the formalization of the economy”. She also mentioned the G-20 successes. ISPIRT pioneered the concept of DPI and played a vital role in rolling out many DPIs and covering the DPI advocacy as a knowledge partner to the Digital Economy Working Group. 

The second announcement that can hugely impact product nation-building is the funding of Research. FM announced that, “A corpus of rupees one lakh crore will be established with a fifty-year interest-free loan. The corpus will provide long-term financing or refinancing with long tenors and low or nil interest rates. This will encourage the private sector to scale up research and innovation significantly in sunrise domains.” Also, the thought of generating employment and empowering youth was central to this announcement. We hope that post-election a robust mechanism can be developed to implement this and capitalize on nation-building. This announcement is also important from iSPIRT’s thought process where a continuous push under its “Vishwamitra” initiative is being out on funding R&D in multiple ways at scale. 

Also notable is,  a new scheme for deep-tech technologies for defence aiming at expediting ‘Aatma-nirbharta’ is on the anvil. 

Although nothing new has been announced, Start-ups are central to the Government’s thinking for economic development. 

Overall it is a futuristic thinking budget speech with an emphasis on deep-tech, research funding, Capital inflows and startups along with capex and infrastructure. 

Though there was a mention of ‘Reform, Perform, and Transform’ as a guiding principle, the budget did not touch upon any specific reform or intent on Ease of Doing business. We wish this becomes an important agenda item along with funding research for our businesses to succeed in global competition. 

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Open House on DPI for AI #4: Why India is best suited to be the breeding ground for AI innovation!

This is the 4th blog in a series of blogs describing and signifying the importance of DPI for AI, a privacy-preserving techno-legal framework for AI data collaboration. Readers are encouraged to first go over the earlier blogs for better understanding and continuity. 

We are at the cusp of history with regard to how AI advancements are unfolding and the potential to build a man-machine society of the future economically, socially, and politically. There is a great opportunity to understand and deliver on potentially breakthrough business and societal use cases while developing and advancing foundational capabilities that can adapt to new ideas and challenges in the future. The major startups in Silicon Valley and big techs are focused first on bringing the advancements of AI to first-world problems – optimized and trained for their contexts. However, we know that first world’s solutions may not work in diverse and unstructured contexts in the rest of the world – may not even for all sections of the developed world.

Let’s address the elephant in the room – what are the critical ingredients that an AI ecosystem needs to succeed –  Data, enabling regulatory framework, talent, computing, capital, and a large market. In this open house

we make a case that India is the place that excels in all these dimensions, making it literally a no-brainer whether you are an investor, a researcher, an AI startup, or a product company to come and do it in India for your own success. 

India has one of the most vibrant, diverse, and eager markets in the world, making it a treasure chest of diverse data at scale, which is vital for AI models. While much of this data happens to be proprietary, the DPI for AI data collaboration framework makes it available in an easy and privacy-preserving way to innovators in India. Literally, no other country has such a scale and game plan for training data. One may ask that diversity and scale are indeed India’s strengths but where is the data? Isn’t most of our data with the US-based platforms? In this context, there are three types of Data: 

a. Public Data,
b. Non-Personal Data (NPD), and
c. Proprietary Datasets.

Let’s look at health. India has far more proprietary datasets than the US. It is just frozen in the current setup. Unfreezing this will give us a play in AI. This is exactly what DPI for AI is doing – in a privacy-preserving manner. In the US, health data platforms like those of Apple and Google are entering into agreements with big hospital chains – to supplement their user health data that comes from wearables. How do we better that? This is the US Big Tech-oriented approach – not exactly an ecosystem approach. Democratic unfreezing of health data with hospitals is the key today. DPI for AI would do that even for all – small or big, developers or researchers! We have continental-scale data with more diversity than any other nation. We need a unique way to unlock them to enable the entire ecosystem, not just big corporations. If we can do that, and we think we can via DPI for AI, we will have AI winners from India.

Combine this with India’s forward looking regulatory thought process that balances Regulation for AI and Regulation of AI in a unique way that encourages innovation without compromising on individual privacy and other potential harms of the technology. The diversity and scale of the Indian market act like a forcing function for innovators to think of robustness, safety, and efficiency from the very start which is critical for the innovations in AI to actually result in financial and societal benefits at scale. There are more engineers and scientists of Indian origin who are both creating AI models or developing innovative applications around AI models. Given our demographic dividend, this is one of our strengths for decades to come. Capital and Compute are clearly not our strong points, but capital literally follows the opportunity. Given India’s position of strength on data, regulation, market, and talent, capital is finding its way to India!

So, what are you all waiting for? India welcomes you with continental scale data with a lightweight but safe regulatory regime and talent like no place else to come build, invest, and innovate in India. India has done it in the past in various sectors, and it is strongly positioned to do it again in AI. Let’s do this together. We are just getting started, and, as always, are very eager for your feedback, suggestions, and participation in this journey!

Please share your feedback here
For more information, please visit depa.world

Please note: The blog post is authored by our volunteers, Sharad Sharma, Gaurav Aggarwal, Umakant Soni, and Sunu Engineer

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iSPIRT’s response to Union Budget 2023

Budget 2023 – Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) the ‘Mantra’ for New India

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. iSPIRT as a think tank pioneered the Digital Public infrastructure (DPIs)

India is at the cusp of what could be the most exciting quarter century of its post-independence existence, referred to as ‘Amrit Kaal’ by the Economic Survey yesterday and today in the Budget speech. The Economic Survey also mentioned that GDP could be boosted by 1% by Digital Public Infrastructure (DPIs), where India is stealing a March on the world for sure. 

The second testimony to the important contribution of DPIs to the economy comes in the budget speech today when the finance minister stated, “India’s rising global profile is because of several accomplishments: unique world class digital public infrastructure, e.g., Aadhaar, Co-Win and UPI” in the forefront. 

Development of DPIs, Stay-in-India Checklist (for Ease of Doing business of Startups), and a ‘jugalbandi’ between public technology and private innovation, through techno-legal regulations, are central to iSPIRT’s work in an attempt to build Product Nation. 

The union budget 2023, brings in cheer to see attempts on the following:

  • Digital Public Infrastructure: The resolve to deepen the DPI and the belief in their role in economic growth. India Stack to build the DPIs has become central to the thought process. Taking the queue ahead the budget 2023 announced the development of DPI for Agriculture, which will be an open source, OpenAPI digital public good, to build inclusive farmer-centric solutions, credit & insurance, farm inputs market intelligence. An Agriculture Accelerator Fund has been announced to promote Agritech start-ups.
  1. Vigyan Infrastructure: efforts to boost R&D, though limited to some sectors right now. Notable among these are – It encourages private sector R&D teams for encouraging collaborative research and innovation in select ICMR labs in the PPP model
  2. One hundred labs for developing applications using 5G services will be set up in engineering institutions. 
  3. Center of Excellence for AI for “Make AI in India and Make AI work for India
  • MSMEs funding & growth is part of the budget thought process, which may lead to the use of another DPI called Open Credit Enablement Networks (OCEN) for enabling MSME funding.
  • The importance of Ease of doing business is reflected in some announcements like using PAN as a Common digital identifier and entity DigiLocker for MSMEs.
  • Wanting to keep the startup revolution going is reflected in the intent to use Startups to build technology in multiple sectors and also use the policy for a new India.

However, beneath all the euphoria, some chronic issues remained to be addressed. The disappointment is on the Stay-in-India checklist (a list of Ease of doing business issues for Startups) to stop startups from slipping from India, which has not been addressed. The checklist is being continuously pursued by iSPIRT and is much needed to provide a competitive edge for India to refrain startups from leaving her jurisdiction.  

Overall it’s heartening to see the vision statement in budget, “Our vision for the Amrit Kaal includes technology-driven and knowledge-based economy”.   

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 Email:  sudhir@ispirt.in or karthik.ks@ispirt.in.