At the BRICS ICT Track in Pune, India outlined plans to share its open-source digital infrastructure stack across developing nations.
India proposes to share its modular and open source Digital Public Infrastructures and train BRICS nations on workforce development to build institutional capacity in the Global South during the BRICS ICT Track in Pune (17-21 Aug 2026). The theme for the meet is ‘Innovate, Cooperate and Transform (ICT) for a Resilient Future’ as mentioned by the Minister of State for Communications, Chandra Sekhar Pemmasani.
India proposes to share open source frameworks so that member nations can adopt their digital public infrastructure needs without having to pay licensing fees or design solutions from scratch while addressing unique challenges in each country like bandwidth constraints, language, varying levels of digital literacy, and rural demographics among others to level the playing field in standards-setting bodies.
India’s open DPI stack encompasses identity, payment, and data exchange systems—notably foundational identity, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT), DigiLocker, ONDC, GeM, and account aggregator portals. Supporting this ecosystem is a robust domestic connectivity push: 4G reaches nearly 99% of Indian villages, over 500,000 5G base stations are deployed, and a US$17 billion investment in BharatNet is taking high-speed fibre to every major village, alongside a US$4 billion saturation mission.
India also highlighted telecom sustainability, achieving 12.4% green energy usage across mobile towers toward a 30% target by 2030, while calling on BRICS partners to advocate for representative international ICT standards.
