Projects / DPI
Digital Public Infrastructure
Governance, openness, privacy and security of infrastructures for identity, payments, credentials and data exchange.
- Status
- Active
- Since
- 2024
The Indian government has deployed a set of technological systems that citizens are de facto required to use to access essential public and private services. Promoted as “Digital Public Infrastructures” (DPIs), these systems mediate identification, payments, credential management, e-commerce, welfare distribution, healthcare and banking.
India has led the deployment of these systems and promotes them abroad, but many of the claims made about their security, privacy, openness and accountability have not been rigorously tested. This project examines the gap between those claims and how the systems actually work.
Updates
- Can digital public infrastructures solve the monopoly conundrum? (opens in a new tab) An essay by Isha Suri examining whether DPIs are an alternative to concentrated digital markets.
- DPI and the Homeless Workers Movement in Brazil: concrete possibilities for broader governance and popular participation (opens in a new tab) An essay by Alexandre Costa Barbosa on sustaining participatory mechanisms in DPI in Brazil.
- Actually existing DPIs as architectures of hegemony (opens in a new tab) An essay by Mila T. Samdub on how India's DPIs encode the distribution of power among the state, software companies, financial institutions and international actors.
- Digital public infrastructure and India's foreign policy (opens in a new tab) An essay by Arindrajit Basu on why India has made DPI the centrepiece of its diplomacy.