NSDL e-Governance Infrastructure Ltd plans to set up a healthcare repository as part of a multi-pronged plan to diversify into new verticals and geographies. The company is also building products and services platforms for education and agriculture sectors, in addition to undertaking projects outside of India.
“The logic builds upon our present infrastructural capabilities and puts them together to create a value-added product or platform that can provide a higher mark-up. We are also looking to move beyond the Indian government being our primary target and focussing more on the enterprise level and expansion into markets that are growing” Suresh Sethi, Managing Director & CEO of NSDL e-Governance told BusinessLine.
National projects
The company has so far built infrastructure for national projects, including Tax Information Network, PAN Card-issuance service, record keeping for Central Pension System, and Aadhar authentication services.
Going forward, healthcare will be a key vertical for the company. NSDL e-Governance is aligning with the National Health Stack to create open repositories and registries that enable exchange of health information between clinics and hospitals. This infrastructure will be built in compliance with inter-operable protocols dictated by the National Health Stack. NSDL e-Governance is also looking into telemedicine and digitisation of clinics with pilots ongoing with the National Pediatrics Academy.
Sethi also revealed that the company is setting up a new cybersecurity advisory, in addition to setting up a subsidiary for the proposed account aggregator business, for which it has applied for license from the RBI. Account aggregators eliminate the existing process of physical document submission, enable individuals and SME customers to share their financial information digitally with regulated financial institutions such as banks and NBFCs.
In terms of geography, the company is exploring a foray into the African and South-East Asian markets, where governments are interested in the tax modernisation and digital identity capabilities of the company.
A key focus for Sethi is to build the platform on open architect solutions. Therefore, for the education sector, NSDL e-Governance has created a Centre of Excellence that will work on making products on the open-source platform Sunbird, which is powering Diksha, India’s largest online K-12 portal. They are also partnering with the National Skill Development Corporation to build a platform upon which skill development content can be hosted.
Partnership
The organisation is also partnering with the Ministry of Commerce to create a gateway upon an open platform system to build e-commerce capabilities at scale. Here, stakeholders such as retailers or kirana stores can self-register and operate their businesses online. This open-source platform will be built in compliance with Beckn protocols (an open protocol for distributed commerce) to enable other providers to contribute to the platform as well.
“The sectors that we are looking into are growing massively, almost doubling based on the compound annual growth rate. The technologies that we are investing into are not very capital intensive and massively scalable if applied at a population level” said Sethi.