Innovations in India’s public digital infrastructure ecosystem not only enhanced basic social functions, but also provided a path to democratization of data and a return to people’s control over their data. For many centuries, public and private services have relied on people-to-people and paper-based processes, including delivering services and ensuring compliance with prevailing laws and regulations. Now, digital infrastructure replaces people and paper with code, which leads to greater efficiency. Digital infrastructure operates around the clock at low cost, can be scaled to reach a large number of people, delivering in just a few years gains that would have taken several decades to achieve. Likewise, public digital infrastructure provides community-level services to various segments of the population, including marginalized communities.
The advent of the digital age has also led to a sharp increase in the volume and availability of data and how it is processed. Globally, a few service providers, such as Facebook, Google and Apple, control very large amounts of high-value consumer data, which they collect and profit from. This disparity in data access makes it difficult for people to use their personal data for their own benefit.
This is especially important because public digital infrastructure can greatly enhance data-driven access to finance. It is universally documented that, in the absence of tangible guarantees, a large majority of adults cannot borrow from the financial system. Information captured from people’s daily online activities creates “information capital” that limits transaction costs, information asymmetries between borrowers and lenders, and reliance on physical collateral. When individuals have access to and control over their data, they have the ability to generate information capital.
Many regulators have tried to address the problem of data hoarding in companies by adopting policies to limit misuse of data, but these policies have also prevented the use of data, especially for the benefit of larger segments of the population. However, within India’s digital financial architecture, privacy safeguards are part of the technical design of the public digital infrastructure, rather than being imposed externally by regulatory law and policy. Data benefits are available globally without infringing on the rights of individuals. This approach to data governance is neither excessively state intrusive nor exclusively laissez-faire. This combination of general and specific characteristics encourages better organization and innovation.
India’s public digital infrastructure has grown rapidly since 2009 for three main reasons. First, the strategic vision was to design public digital infrastructure as channels, with each channel meeting a specific need. Secondly, technological innovations across many of these channels have led to the development of a powerful integrated set of applications, often referred to as the ‘India Stack’, that can be scaled to serve diverse segments of the population, more than 1 billion people in 29 states and 22 languages. Third, public digital infrastructure has been implemented across multiple sectors.
