Developing Universal Benefits Architecture

Technology Building Blocks

The Universal Business Architecture (UBA) will be constructed by leveraging existing Digital Public Goods (DPG) and a variety of open-source solutions and services.

India Stack: India Stack is a set of APIs that allows governments, businesses, startups, and developers to utilize a unique digital infrastructure to solve India’s hard problems towards presence-less, paperless, and cashless service delivery. By incorporating Aadhaar, UPI, and DigiLocker, UBA can streamline identity verification, payment processing, and document management, ensuring a seamless user experience.

DIGIT: DIGIT is an open-source platform designed to improve governance and service delivery. It provides a suite of tools and modules that can be customized and scaled to meet the needs of various government services. By integrating DIGIT, UBA can leverage these tools to enhance efficiency and transparency in benefit delivery.

ONEST: ONEST, part of ONDC, is based on open, decentralized architecture and Beckn protocol standards. It can be employed to develop a network approach that facilitates interaction between benefit providers and beneficiaries. This network will enable beneficiaries to discover available schemes and allow benefit providers to publish their schemes, thereby creating a seamless and efficient network-based ecosystem for benefit distribution.

An open network refers to a collaborative and interconnected ecosystem where multiple stakeholders can be brought together to discover each other, and exchange information, resources, and services. It aims to serve as an enabler that ensures interoperability across multiple technology platforms via a “set of standardized protocols” for platforms to discover and transact amongst themselves seamlessly agnostic of the technology used to enable access or provide services to the consumers. Built and envisioned along the same lines, ONEST fosters a fair and equitable network that is both open and decentralized, allowing individuals and organizations to offer & consume a variety of services, harness its power to unlock its full potential, facilitating access to employment, financial aid and skilling opportunities across the stakeholders.

ONEST will also provide a robust ecosystem of Business Service Providers (BSP) who provide value added services in the value chain. Some examples of these services could be -

Credential Service Providers - Beneficiaries need to get multiple digital, verified documents that have to be credentialed so that eligibility checks can be system driven. Aadhaar is one such credential that gives identity verification. Other credentials can be caste, income, family background, school/college, disability and more which are issued by various authorities

Profile Cataloging Service Providers - Most of the scholarship needs can be fulfilled by a few sets of credentials and documents. Such service providers provide easy 1-click application as a service to beneficiaries and also other authorities to help the beneficiaries.

Scholarship Cataloging Service Providers - Most of the scholarships today have long non-user-friendly information. Such service providers can improve the readability of the scholarship and its benefits in formats and languages easily understood by the beneficiaries/parents. This will also help multiple smaller beneficiaries including individuals to launch their own scholarships for a set of beneficiaries they are concerned with.

By reducing frictions between beneficiaries and scholarship providers there will be a massive reduction in time and cost to disburse the fund. This will usher in a new era of sachetisation of scholarships for smaller amounts like exam fees, mentoring, skilling courses, etc.

ONEST ran a few pilots to test out this hypothesis. There was a massive drop in cost and time taken to process any scholarship application. It also helped cast a wider net of potential beneficiaries outside the local networks. Here is the value unlocked for the pilots.

From	Metric	To
Rs. 15k-20k	Ticket size of scholarships distributed	Rs. 1k-2k (also)
>6 months	Time taken to find & distribute	7-10 days
Provider Platform > Rs. 1,000	Cost of Finding & Verifying applicants	Provider side Network Players Rs. 50 (Lower CAC)
Social Media/Google	Source of Leads	Seeker side Network Players (Higher ARPU)

Sunbird RC

Sunbird RC (Registry and Credential): Sunbird RC (https://rc.sunbird.org) is one of the vital building blocks of the Sunbird collective, enabling trusted registries and verifiable credentials globally across domains and powering other DPGs such as DIGIT, Inji, Sunbird Serve and Sunbird ED. It has enabled billions of credentials and various registries across domains especially in healthcare and education in India.

Sunbird RC provides microservices for credentials issuance & management, and enables rapid deployment of electronic registries - essential for maintaining accurate, up-to-date, and trustworthy data.

Electronic registries and Verifiable credentials can establish high-trust at low-cost by:

1. Reducing costs of verification through trusted information sources

2. Preventing repetitive data collection through attested & discoverable information sources

3. Enabling instant verification of achievements, certificates and documents through cryptographically signed verifiable credentials

4. Empowering users with multimodal (print or digital) document sharing

5. Creating an interoperable and decentralized source of truth

6. Improving accessibility and inclusion for services by empowering users with their data & credentials

7. Fostering innovation and collaboration within the ecosystem through open-source standards, specifications and APIs

Sunbird RC uses a set of configurations (for attestation workflow, registry and credential schema) to rapidly build out registries, automatically generate CRUD (create/ read/ update/ delete) APIs without any coding, enable registry searches and access via open APIs, issue and manage verifiable credentials, manage user consent flows if required, manage attestation and verification flows, etc.

Sunbird RC is designed to be scalable, enabling organizations to handle large volumes of digital identities and credentials with ease. The system can handle both synchronous and asynchronous updates, making it easy to keep data up to date. It is built on open standards and protocols, making it interoperable with other systems and platforms. This ensures that organizations can easily integrate with other systems and applications without having to reinvent the wheel. Check out the technical overview for further details.