India Stack & Digital Public Infrastructure

Imagine a country building its own digital identity, payments and data-sharing infrastructure, Aadhaar for identity verification, UPI for instant payments, DigiLocker for document storage, primarily to solve its own domestic governance and financial inclusion challenges, and then discovering other countries genuinely want to adopt similar systems themselves, turning what started as internal government infrastructure into something India now actively exports as a governance and technology model. India Stack and the broader Digital Public Infrastructure, DPI, framework represent exactly this evolution.

The domestic scale underlying this export story is genuinely staggering, UPI alone processed 16.2 billion transactions in a single month, January 2026, up from 12.02 billion the year before, and now handles roughly 49% of the entire world's real-time digital payment transaction volume, a scale that gives India genuine, demonstrated proof that this infrastructure model actually works at massive population scale, not just as a pilot programme.

This proven scale is exactly why other countries have taken interest, India had signed Digital Public Infrastructure cooperation agreements with 24 countries by February 2026, with UPI itself now operational for cross-border payments in 8 countries, and India Stack Global, launched during India's G20 presidency, formalised as a dedicated initiative specifically helping partner nations adopt similar systems.

This DPI export story represents a genuinely distinct category from the traditional IT services and GCC models covered elsewhere on this site, rather than Indian companies selling technical labour to foreign clients, this involves India exporting an entire governance technology architecture and methodology, a considerably higher-leverage form of technology export that could shape how dozens of countries build their own digital governance systems for decades, positioning India's technology sector's global influence well beyond just its services revenue figures.