When Prime Minister Narendra Modi lands in Jakarta on July 7, the cameras will fixate on the ceremonial handshakes, the trade communiques, the strategic-partnership language that state visits are built to produce. But the piece of this relationship most likely to change outcomes for a warung owner in Yogyakarta or a UMKM textile seller in Solo is already quietly under construction, and it has a name: the Indonesia Open Network.
This visit reciprocates President Prabowo Subianto's state visit to India in January 2025, when he was chief guest at India's Republic Day celebrations. That trip produced, alongside agreements on defence, trade, and pharmaceuticals, a formal MoU on Cooperation in Digital Development between the two governments. It was not a symbolic gesture. When Foreign Minister Sugiono met India's External Affairs Minister Jaishankar in New Delhi in June for the eighth India-Indonesia Joint Commission Meeting, both governments' own readouts confirmed digital cooperation as a standing agenda item, alongside trade, maritime security, and people-to-people ties, with Indian visitor arrivals to Indonesia already touching roughly half a million a year.
The digital-development MoU has already produced something concrete. In February 2026, Indonesia's Ministry for MSMEs, with the Ministry of Communications and Digital, launched the Indonesia Open Network (ION) an open-protocol digital commerce network modeled on the design philosophy behind India's Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC). Its advisory council is a deliberate India-Indonesia bridge: Indonesian business and technology leaders including APINDO chairman Shinta Kamdani, PII chairman Ilham Habibie, and former Communications Minister Rudiantara, sitting alongside two people who built ONDC from its earliest days, its former chairman R.S. Sharma, and ONDC's founding Managing Director.
Two Different Roads to the Same Destination
India's digital public infrastructure, anchored in Aadhaar for identity, UPI for payments, and more recently the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) for digital transactions, has become one of the most closely studied government-built technology stacks in the world. The government has now signed cooperation agreements on India Stack with more than twenty countries, not to sell a product but to share architectural principles: identity, payments, and data exchange built on open protocols that any licensed bank, fintech, or retailer can plug into. UPI alone now processes tens of billions of transactions a year and supports tens of millions of merchants; ONDC's premise is structurally radical, a small shop in one city can be discovered and transacted with through an app it never built, with no platform lock-in and no extractive commission structure.
Indonesia has been building something comparably significant, on its own terms. Bank Indonesia's QRIS payment standard has done for merchant interoperability in Indonesia roughly what UPI's QR layer did in India, a single scan-to-pay standard usable across banks and e-wallets, which has been central to pulling millions of UMKM (micro, small, and medium enterprises) into the formal digital economy. Indonesia's archipelagic geography, its scale (more than 270 million people across thousands of islands), and its own government digital-ID and data-exchange efforts present a genuinely different engineering problem than India's, one Indonesian technologists have already been solving in their own way.
That is precisely why this collaboration is worth taking seriously: not because one side has finished the homework and the other hasn't, but because two of the world's largest, most demographically diverse democracies are arriving at a shared conviction, that digital infrastructure works best as an open commons, not a walled garden.
Why This Matters More for Small Players Than for Big Ones
The real test of any digital public infrastructure isn't whether it impresses a G20 communique. It's whether it changes outcomes for the seller with no marketing budget and the buyer with a limited data plan.
India's ONDC experience, for all the caveats about its early scale and uneven adoption across categories, demonstrates something concrete: when the underlying rails are public and interoperable, small retailers stop needing to win a platform's algorithm to survive. They can be discovered by any buyer on any compliant app. independent tracking of ONDC-onboarded MSMEs in India's smaller cities has found meaningful revenue gains after joining the network, early evidence that open rails translate into real income for sellers who could never have afforded customer acquisition on a closed platform.
Indonesian MSMEs, some 64 million of them, by the government's own count, accounting for the large majority of the country's workforce, face a version of the same problem: fragmented digital access, dependence on a handful of dominant
marketplaces, and limited leverage in commission negotiations. ION is the concrete answer already being built: not goods alone, but potentially healthcare, education, agriculture, and financial services transacted over the same open protocol, with logistics embedded as a network service rather than a bottleneck a small seller has to solve alone. Indonesia has the advantage of not starting from zero. It inherits several years of ONDC's operating lessons, including the mistakes, without having to relearn them at the same cost.
The same logic extends to payments and identity. Indonesia has QRIS and is refining its own interoperable payment ecosystem. What's transferable is India's experience running a population-scale identity and consent layer at low marginal cost, and the hard lessons, including India's own struggles with financial inclusion gaps, digital literacy, and access for populations without smartphones, that Indonesian planners would be wise to study before, not after, scaling their own systems.
The Harder, More Useful Conversation
ION does not need Modi's visit to exist, it has already commenced, with a curtain-raiser behind it and an advisory council in place. What it needs is what a state visit is actually good for: political altitude. A joint statement that treats ION as a named, funded, time-bound priority, a concrete next milestone, and what it would do more for Indonesian and Indian MSMEs than most of what state visits typically produce. The risk, as with any early-stage network, is that momentum from a launch event fades without sustained institutional backing on both sides; a head-of-government commitment is one of the few things that reliably prevents that.
There is also a global argument here that outlasts the bilateral relationship. Most of the digital infrastructure conversation over the past decade has been dominated by a small number of large private platforms, largely from the United States and China, competing to become the default rails for commerce and payments across the developing world. India and Indonesia, together representing well over a fifth of humanity, building a shared open-protocol commerce network and comparing notes on how to do it well, is a meaningfully different signal to the rest of the Global South, a demonstration that population-scale digital economies don't have to default to platform capitalism to achieve efficiency and reach.
It is two large, imperfect, still-building democracies choosing to solve a shared problem in public, with Indonesia's own QRIS-driven payments success and its 64 million MSMEs bringing as much to the table as India's earlier-mover experience. If July 7 gives ION the backing to move from launch to scale, it will have done more for the small seller and small buyer in both countries than most state visits manage.
(The author is the founding Managing Director and CEO of India's Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), a member of the Indonesia Open Network (ION) Advisory Council, and writes on digital public infrastructure and AI governance)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
