Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI): India’s Model for the World

At the closing ceremony of UNCTAD-16 on 23^rd October 2025, the Secretary-General aptly remarked on the digital economy, the technological advances creating new opportunities and new divides at the same time, necessitating member States to build digital infrastructure. This augurs well with India’s DPI rendering a collaborative pathway.

In today’s super-fast-changing world, the two features of a public good that stand apart and remain unchanged are its being non-rivalrous and non-excludable. For the Global South, seeking zero-fine-print non-exploitative collaborations, these remain the buzzwords appealing to the ears of policymakers and consumers alike. Its building blocks, Digital PublicGoods (DPGs), a segment of public goods, avert the free rider problem, and include open-source software packagesoperated by governments.

India’s deeper policy quest for access, equity, affordability, inclusion, and empowerment (AEAIE). As an instance, India’s financial inclusion is equality plus, as it doesn’t stop at merely giving everyone equal opportunity to open a bank account but takes it toward equity by permitting zero initial deposit and zero balance requirement. Access and affordability are taken care of by its public goods nature, leading to inclusion. On empowerment, a vegetable vendor can run her small shop without any constraint to keep physical currency in multiple denominations or face any digital hiccups.

Further on inclusion, DPGs of JAM trinity (Jan-Dhan accounts, Aadhaar and Mobile telephony), as a robust framework, have helped India, financial inclusion and eliminate leakages, eliminating direct benefit transfer (DBT), facilitating social assistance and safety nets, drastically reducing both financial and multidimensional poverty levels.

To share with the Global South, India’s unique identification number Aadhaar has 12 digits, which, on leaving out the last (meant for the correctness-check algorithm), generates the highest possible 99,999.999999 million Aadhaar numbers. This is over 69 times India’s 2023 population and over 58 times its peak population estimated for 2062 (ensuring non-repetition of any numbers assigned to the people no more).^[1]

Furthermore, India’s Aadhaar is not merely a digital card; its non-transferability is in-built by virtue of finger and iris identification, besides a photograph. Moreover, it entails no need to carry it physically or digitally, as the database throws up true identity- a feature its very backbone. Even a newborn can get an Aadhaar using her birth certificate, and the Aadhaar number of either parent, with mandatory biometrics at ages 5 and 15.

Financing for Collaborations

On the financing of DPI, first India, with over 17 per cent of the world population, the marginal cost of any additional expenditure is minimal, especially when fixed costs are already taken care of. Second, emerging apps are also scalable enough to have negligible marginal costs. Third, India ensures non-withdrawal of the collaborations, including for the subsequent versions. Fourth, fintech systems, harnessing synergy between finance and technology, ensure efficiency, quality and timely delivery, for which costs are falling asymptotically.

Fifth, however, out of a large number ‘N’ of investments for innovations, as many as ‘(N-1)’ may not fructify, the cost of which can’t be directly passed on to the successful one. This aspect is endorsed in the citation for the 2025 Nobel Prize for Economics to recipients  Mokyr, Aghion and Howitt, for having explained innovation-driven economic growth. Notably, Aghion and Howitt, in their pioneering Paper published in 1992, had argued the effect of research as the Poisson distribution-based arrival rate of innovations; a distribution known to catch rare events^[2]. Sixth, similarly, another uncertain cost, brought to prominence by recent major outages like ‘Amazon Web Services’ and ‘Microsoft Azure’, necessitates an extra cushion of investments.

Way Forward

5. Indian DPI is well recognised, for instance at the G20 India Presidency 2023, the idea of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakami.e.  ‘One Earth One Family One Future’ was well received and the Para 56 of the Leaders Declaration, on Building Digital Public Infrastructure, welcomed India’s plan to build and maintain a Global Digital Public Infrastructure Repository (GDPIR), a virtual repository of DPI, to be voluntarily shared by G20 members and beyond^[3]. It also took note of the Indian proposal of the One Future Alliance (OFA), a voluntary initiative aimed at building capacity and providing technical assistance and adequate funding support.
6. Indian DPI, evolved from India Stack, is time-tested, as proved by the sharing of CoWIN platform’s source codewithout charging any licensing fee, facilitation of technical know-how and training, organisation of CoWIN Global Conclave on global health collaborations and coverage of more vaccines, as a vaccine hub.
7. India offers a complete bouquet encompassing all the essential features, like robust digital identification, base registration, data-sharing with say, banks, and promptly facilitating digital payments. It includes enablers like interoperability across systems, requisite standards, and an open yet privacy-preserving framework based on need-to-know, as evidenced by its Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP Act), 2023.
8. Financial flexibility is built into it, being neither fully permitting thelaissez-faire to the private sector nor the centralisation to government. The oft-repeated arguments of efficiency of the former and inclusion and data security of the latter manifest the Indian mixed system.
9. It advocates collaborations under SDG 17 target 17.6 to push the Technology Facilitation Mechanism (TFM) to attain SDGs 2030. The Viksit Bharat@2047 vision of a Developed India endorses its quest and perseverance for continued focus on DPGs and DPIs, which adds to its collaborative credibility. Moreover, India is open-hearted to welcome improvements, so essential in today’s vulnerable digital world, ensuring it remains demand-driven for any country adopting it, for the timely upgrade of its local digital framework.

^[1] UN World Population Prospects 2024.

^[2] Aghion, Philippe and Howitt, Peter. 1992. A Model of Growth Through Creative Destruction. Econometrica Vol. 60, No. 2 (Mar., 1992), pp 323.

^[3] G20 New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration 9-10 September, 2023.