UNITED NATIONS (TIP): The Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations organized a landmark event titled “Empowering the Digital Citizen of the Future: Towards an Integrated Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI)” on 24 April 2025 at the UN Headquarters in New York.

All the speakers expressed condolences to the Government of India and families of victims of the gruesome terror attack in Pahalgam, Jam

mu & Kashmir. They reiterated their commitment to fight terrorism resolutely.

The Chief Guest was the President of the General Assembly H.E Mr. Philemon Yang. He applauded India’s digital innovation, noting how such initiatives are instrumental in achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and reducing global digital inequality. He stressed the importance of international collaboration to ensure that digital advances are equitable and accessible to all.

Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology and Commerce and Industry Shri Jitin Prasada, in his keynote address, highlighted India’s success story in building population-scale digital platforms such as Aadhaar, UPI, Jan Dhan Yojana, DigiLocker, CoWIN, ABHA, and ONDC. He emphasized that India’s DPI is founded on principles of inclusion, openness, interoperability, and scalability and reaffirmed India’s commitment to global cooperation in digital transformation, offering to share its DPI expertise and technology with the world.

Ambassador Parvathaneni Harish, India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, underscored India’s unique bottom-up model of DPI, emphasizing that the country’s digital transformation has been powered by its technological talent, institutional strength, and visionary political leadership. He outlined India’s use of DPIs to address structural challenges and stressed on the role of AI integration in enhancing DPI’s reach across sectors like education, agriculture, tax administration, and digital lending.

The event also featured an insightful presentation by Mr. Srikanth Nadhamuni, Founding CTO of Aadhaar and CEO of Khosla Labs, on how India is leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance the impact of its DPI and highlighted that India’s inclusive approach to AI and DPI—built as global digital public goods—can serve as a transformative model for countries worldwide.

Other distinguished speakers included Mr. Amandeep Singh Gill, the UN Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology, Mr. Robert Opp, Chief Digital Officer, UNDP, Prof. Arun Sundararajan of New York University, H.E. Mr. Omar Hilale, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Morocco to the UN and Mr. Norberto Moretti, Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative of Brazil to the UN. The event saw fruitful discussions on how Digital Public Infrastructure, integrated with AI, can bridge the digital divide, empower citizens, and support sustainable development globally.