DIGIT is an open-source software platform, consisting of multiple digital building blocks, which can be assembled & reassembled to create solutions for a wide range of governance and service delivery functions. This enables rapid collaboration, leading to the creation of a wide range of contextual solutions that can be rapidly scaled – such as the e-Pass. The team was able to adapt existing building blocks from DIGIT, reassembling them into the configuration ePass needed.

 

This is the power of digital public goods: once the foundational building blocks are in place, the power to solve increases exponentially.

 

Digital Public Goods: From Point Solutions to Platforms and Ecosystems

Given the urgency of the pandemic, it’s easy to see the ePass as a story about rapid solutions. The deeper story, though, is about what digital governance can achieve when it understands people’s needs and meets them where they are. Sadly, this is not yet the norm in most of India: only a handful of towns offer omni-channel services, and even there the citizen experience tends to be poor.

 

A simple task, like paying one’s municipal taxes, is unduly hard. Even where a digital solution ostensibly exists, the first step — generating the OTP — can fail and stall the entire process. The user experience is confusing and complex. As my 82-year-old father often says, “Son, you work with governments, why can’t you ask them to make it as easy as using PayTM?” He obviously does not look forward to the 16 km round trip he is going to have to make to the municipal office.

 

At eGov, for nearly 12 years, we worked in the trenches with city and state governments on this problem — “easy, accessible, & transparent citizen services”. We built deep knowledge of the context of the particular city and worked with a missionary zeal to create and implement solutions that work there. As a philanthropic mission, we felt the weight of responsibility in making life easier for citizens.

 

We had islands of success, but overall progress remained slow; the challenge was to improve governance at a national scale, and point solutions – effective in their own right – weren’t getting us there fast enough. This, was while digital platforms were becoming the norm globally, and companies in India made giant leaps in leveraging these platforms to improve access and ease of service for consumers. We celebrated the changes brought by UPI, delivery apps, ride-hailing; we kept asking ourselves, why should getting services from your local government be any harder?

 

In 2016, I joined eGov, as part of a new leadership team. We started thinking deeply about what makes it “hard” to solve at scale and speed. We realised building and implementing solutions by ourselves would exhaust us, with nowhere near the scale of impact we need. Instead, we started asking: how do we increase the capacity of the ecosystem to solve?

 

What If?

What if eGov becomes a catalyst – rather than a doer – to spur massive, open, easy collaboration between Samaaj (citizens), Sarkar (governments), and Bazaar (market enterprises)? What if eGov as a mission invests in building open, free-to-use digital building blocks, to increase the capacity of this Samaaj-Sarkaar-Bazaar ecosystem — empowering them to solve problems at scale.

 

eGov 2.0 was born from this question, and the idea of DIGIT was conceived. An open, interoperable, free-to-use platform that offers solutions for citizens, first-mile employees, administrators, commercial players, policymakers, innovators – every stakeholder in effective governance. States, cities, and commercial players can use the building blocks from DIGIT to tailor solutions and programs that meet their needs, and continuously innovate on top of it to solve emerging problems. The wide range of solutions and even new building blocks they develop in turn widen the range of possibilities for all stakeholders using the platform.

 

Proposing the Shift

We had our model – now we had to build the muscles to implement it. That wasn’t something eGov could do alone; we needed allies and supporters, including people who were ready to invest in this new approach. Creating a digital platform as a public good is foundational work; it takes time and commitment, and – until it reaches its tipping point – results are sub-linear. We have to have faith to get to that point. At eGov, we were lucky – we found investors who shared this mindset.

 

On an unusually cold January morning in 2017, we presented our vision, strategy and operating plan to a group that included Tata Trusts, Omidyar Network, Nandan Nilekani, and our trustees. We had a 3-member team that worked on the strategy and operating plan for over 2 months, and we were all nervous going in. What we were proposing was clearly a moonshot: to transform 2000 cities and towns by 2020.

 

In the first 30 minutes – as we presented the approach and vision – there was a broad agreement. But no deep questions, no signs of enthusiasm. In the second half of the hour, we presented a 5-year operating plan, with details on demand generation, platform build, key operating principles, key milestones and markers we would hit along the way — and financial projections for the next 5 years.

 

Something clicked. People in the room started leaning forward, asking questions, and advising us based on their experiences. Then we made a clear ask for the capital: Rs. 120 Crores over five years. Silence. Then one of the investors said: “This is the kind of investment needed to make systemic changes.” That was the ‘release’ moment – suddenly the discussion turned from why to how the capital can be arranged, how it can be sequenced and phased, and so on.

 

Faith and Patience

Over the next nine months, all three investors came on board, and we raised a total of Rs. 60 crores (~$9 million) for the first phase of the plan. In hindsight, two things worked for us – the boldness of the vision, and the fact that it was backed by a 5-year operating plan. The ‘2000 by 2020’ mission got investors excited about the impact possibility, and the operating plan assured them that the team can execute.

 

Our investors brought more to the table than funding alone. Nandan Nilekani’s experience with digital platforms, including Aadhar and UPI, was a useful reference point and source of guidance; he was also able to connect us to others in the ecosystem who could share first-hand knowledge and experience. The emphasis that both Omidyar Network India and Tata Trusts placed on last-mile access aligned with and shaped how we looked at this mission: it is not just about making cities more capable, but rather about ensuring citizens receive the services to which they are entitled.

 

These shared values and experiences built on, and in turn, fed back into, a key factor that has let us make this journey: the trust that we repose in each other. Being aligned on the vision and strategy helps eGov be confident that our investors have got our back. They understand that improving urban governance, especially when one is building the capacity to solve rather than scaling solutions, is a slow and complex process — and they are with us for the long haul.

 

The Moment of Truth

In turn, our investors know that we are committed to the mission, and will persist with our efforts to understand, catalyse, and develop the ecosystem. This resilience to stay the course, especially in the early days, is crucial when undertaking the foundational work of building a digital public good.

 

As with the e-Pass, the rewards of doing this work – patiently and persistently – can be remarkable when they materialize. In Punjab, for instance, the state government had unsuccessfully gone through multiple rounds of trying to procure e-governance software for their urban local bodies (ULBs). The bids they received tended to be both too expensive – in the range of Rs. 200 crores, with additional costs anticipated around data migration – and too time-consuming, with the estimated time to completion starting at 2 years at the minimum.

 

In 2017, the Punjab government and eGov began speaking about how DIGIT could be an alternative for the state, leading to a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) being signed in February 2018. The implementation plan was developed with the objective of rapid, cost-efficient roll-out, together with the creation of capacity within the state government itself to implement and maintain the system.

 

The results speak for themselves: DIGIT was implemented statewide at the cost of Rs. 7 crores (~ $1 million) – barely 4% of the cost cited in other bids. It was implemented in record time – going live in 100 of the state’s approximately 170 ULBs in 90 days, and across the entire state within a year of signing the MOU. As of Dec 2021, the platform has already handled more than 1.5 million service requests & grievances, and Rs. 1010 crores in revenue collections.

 

Punjab was able to launch its own COVID response leveraging some of DIGIT’s capabilities as well, piloting a WhatsApp chatbot for persons in self-isolation/home quarantine during the lockdown. Building on this experience, Punjab has now brought substantial portions of its public grievance redressal (PGR) service on to a WhatsApp chatbot as well. With more than 400 million users in India, WhatsApp is far more familiar to citizens than any specialised app, and creating a channel for filing requests & grievances there helps bring the government even closer to citizens.

 

Citizens have real time visibility of the status of their request, who is handling it, and when they can rightfully expect it to be resolved. In addition they get to rate how well the service is delivered. As Reena Kaur, a young woman running a small food stall in the state of Punjab says “Earlier I had to constantly follow up with municipal employees, now they follow up with me and request me to provide a star rating”.

 
This is where the journey has brought us today. Poornima Dore, Head of Data-Driven Governance at Tata Trusts, reflects on the process:
 

“The ability of Digital Public Goods to elevate reach, quality, and accountability of public service provision is immense. For us, DIGIT represented an opportunity to invest in systemic improvement of public service delivery, despite legacy structures. As early-stage investors, we recognized the opportunity that patient capital could open for the creation of public goods (digital and knowledge), contributing to a citizen-centric development journey, beyond a single intervention. As the adoption of the platform grows, its open source and interoperable nature lends itself to something beyond transactional support. The learning journey of enabling DIGIT could become the vessel or conduit for shared knowledge (process & data) that can enhance our ability to trace development paths and benchmark them.”

Roopa Kudva, Partner and Managing Director, Omidyar Network India, sees this as a validation of the investment thesis:

“When we began our partnership with eGov, their work was mainly focused on working with individual ULBs. The pivot to building an open source digital governance platform was essential to creating impact at scale, and we were thrilled with the potential. We believed that by helping many more ULBs become more effective and by setting a benchmark for delivery of citizen-focused services, eGov was poised to create a paradigm shift. Looking back, it is fair to say that eGov has delivered on every dimension of our thesis and at a staggering scale. At Omidyar Network India, we invest in bold entrepreneurs helping create a meaningful life for every Indian. Viraj and his team are the textbook definition of ‘bold entrepreneurs’ and we are proud to have played a small part in their journey.”

 

Today we are actively working with more than 100 stakeholders, across Samaaj, Sarkaar, and Bazaar. We find that end results are far better through this ecosystem-based approach, compared to the time we did everything ourselves. Not only do we get a scale advantage, as multiple programs run in parallel – as of today there are 7 programs in progress in 14 states – but speed has improved as well. In Feb 2021, the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs announced the National Urban Digital Mission, recognising the importance of the DPG-based approach to bringing efficient and inclusive service delivery to every city and town in India by 2024.

We have come so far, still miles to go

We now look at all our work, both with DIGIT and with newer platforms, through the lens of Digital Public Goods. A DPG-based approach frees up resources to focus on critical non-technology elements of governance reforms, such as improving service delivery, or enhancing ease of doing business, that seldom get enough focus and funding.

 

Our journey started with the question – “why should it be so hard?”. Why should anyone have to struggle to get simple things done? Our response was to build a DPG and to catalyse an open ecosystem where governments, NGOs and commercial actors collaborate to build solutions & programs that deliver accessible, timely, and transparent services to citizens.

 

In this journey, we’ve learned that real magic happens when the ecosystem comes together, re-imagines new possibilities, and creates impact in ways far greater than our beginnings might have suggested. Five years ago, who could have thought that the DPG we are building for urban service delivery can extend to a sanitation platform, or become a key part of COVID response?

 

Next time you encounter a wicked societal challenge, work hard on understanding the pivotal problems that restrict the agency and capability of the actors involved and think about creating a set of tools and infrastructure that can truly bring the actors together to build solutions and programs that solve the problems at scale.

 

Also, think hard about non-technology components like enablement, playbooks, and market catalysis; in our experience, these often play a larger part than technology in solving at scale. Finally, one should keep in mind that while tech can help solve problems and increase the capacity to act, there are social challenges around trust and collaboration that need to be addressed to truly realise the societal value of DPGs.

 

This is all foundational work, slow and iterative. If you are interested in large-scale, tech-enabled transformational change, your horizon should be at 5 or even 10 years. Investing in this work requires a lot of patience because impact tends to be non-linear. When it all clicks – when the openness of the system catalyzes collaboration and innovation – the value delivered to society can be significantly greater and can come in more forms, than what we initially imagined.