Fresh off the heels of the storied Global AI Impact Summit in February, India’s Press Information Bureau issued a detailed note proudly titled “India’s Digital Public Infrastructure: Setting a Global Benchmark for Population Scale Digital Public Infrastructure.” Apart from extolling the virtues of India’s domestic DPI systems, the press note listed out several professed outcomes of India’s “Digital Public Infrastructure Diplomacy.” This included a list of Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) signed by India since 2023 with twenty-four countries to “cooperate on India Stack and Digital Public Infrastructure,” along with a re-iteration of the Global Digital Public Infrastructure Repository that had been the brainchild of India’s G20 Presidency.
Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) has been a cornerstone of India’s technology diplomacy since it held the G20 Presidency in 2023. Ministries across New Delhi have effectively coordinated among themselves and roped in the private sector and selected civil society actors to extol the virtues of India’s domestic DPI use cases globally. Rhetorically, DPI has often been touted as India’s offering for the Global South and has been domestically celebrated as evidence of India’s global leadership.
On the face of it, exporting domestic success stories might be par for the course for a so-called emerging “technology superpower” looking to spread its global wings. Yet, as Governance, Openness and Security of Digital Public Infrastructure in India by the internet Research Lab (hereafter, the “GOSDPI paper”) analytically uncovers, India’s domestic DPIs “fall short not only of the aspirational principles of DPI set by academics and civil society, but also of the claims of the Indian government itself.” While the GOSDPI paper is unique in its coverage and cohesiveness of analysis, civil-society actors and academics have long highlighted the shortcomings of India’s domestic use-cases.
Why then has New Delhi placed its technology diplomacy bets on Digital Public Infrastructure? Shyam Saran, India’s former foreign secretary-turned scholar, has described India as a “transitional” or “premature power,” a country with the economic and military scale and ambition of a major power, constrained by significant domestic developmental constraints. Foreign and domestic policy trade-offs must reconcile the dual realities of a large and growing economy and technological capabilities with the persistent domestic challenges in healthcare, education and employment.
India’s status in the world has mattered for policy-makers and the public alike but this has always had to be balanced with domestic developmental challenges, a contested political landscape and a vexed geopolitical landscape. Touting DPI as a success story arguably provides New Delhi a non-controversial entry point into global technology governance discourse without taking on the risk of upsetting foreign or domestic actors.
This essay provides the reader a brief overview of India’s DPI diplomacy, goes on to explain the factors underpinning this diplomacy, and concludes by normatively assessing the value of this diplomatic approach. In doing so, it helps situate the relevance of the GOSDPI paper within broader geopolitical and policy discourse on DPI.
India’s DPI diplomacy
India’s DPI diplomacy has rested on three inter-linked prongs: (1) The attempted export of its DPI architecture; (2) The crafting of a global DPI repository and (3) The normative articulation of what Digital Public Infrastructure means for the global internet governance.
India’s infrastructural export has focussed on inking MoUs with a number (so far 24) other countries in the Global South. While the specific contours of the MoU remain unclear, the Indian government emphasized that the “objective is not export of a product, but collaboration on architecture and design principles.” The same principle does not apply with the export of India’s Unified Payments Interface though, which the same document also proudly proclaims. India’s UPI has been adopted in 8 countries including the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, France, Mauritius and Qatar.
Second, India has set up and acknowledged the value of the Global DPI Repository as an online knowledge hub designed to showcase best practices and DPI use cases around the world where countries can voluntarily submit their own use cases. On the face of it, the repository sounds like a good idea. Countries in the Global South have access to an open aggregation of best practices on digital led-transformation and can participate and contribute with no strings attached. However, these repositories also conceal critical perspectives on each use case uploaded. In doing so, the repository runs the risk of celebrating all DPI use cases as an unquestioned good, undermining the vital work done by civil society and academic researchers to point out real world harms.
Finally, India’s approach to DPI appears to be undergirded by a cohesive narrative vision celebrating its developmental rather than commercial value. “It’s not about making money,” India’s G20 Sherpa Amitabh Kant told the Financial Times in January 2023. Emphasizing India’s homegrown India Stack as a best practice, India ensured that DPI was discussed across various G20 Working Groups. This culminated in DPI being incorporated in the Preamble of the G20 Leaders Declaration in 2023, thereby playing a crucial role in the framing of the final narrative. India’s domestic trajectory on digital transformation and its propagation of DPI globally is seen by policymakers as a possible pathway to stake claims to leadership of the Global South.
In this vein, DPI has also been positioned by experts as a “third way” for global digital governance, between a laissez-faire approach championed by the United States and a regulation driven approach adopted and exported by the European Union. DPI has not been positioned as a regulatory innovation by policy-makers just yet, however. Official government discourse still speaks of DPI as a technological solution that India offers to the world.
Explaining India’s DPI Diplomacy: Balancing status and strategic autonomy
Indian foreign policy has always centered its strategic autonomy, that is the ability to make policy choices free from external influence. This autonomy has been interpreted as crucial to managing various trade-offs associated with its development and security interests. At the same time, as a rising power, India wants to signal to international and domestic audiences that it is playing a lead role in shaping global discourse. Yet, these status aspirations could come at a cost. Taking a clear ideological stance on global governance issues could alienate potential partners on either side of the geopolitical fence. Ideological kinship might no longer matter for a New Delhi actively invested in playing all sides, but it does for capitals both in the geopolitical west and east.
Digital Public Infrastructure and its attendant diplomacy offers a relatively non-controversial entry point. By resisting the urge to directly challenge governance models espoused by leading powers, New Delhi believes that it can continue to maintain pragmatic ties with a range of countries to serve its developmental interests. The rhetoric on DPI does not threaten or antagonize any of the established global state or non-state hegemons. For all of India’s rhetoric claiming that the model challenges the hegemony of large technology companies, it appears that Big Tech has begun to enthusiastically adopt and make money off DPI driven solutions. International organizations have adopted the DPI terminology wholesale and helped evangelize it in the US, China, EU as well as several other countries in the Global South.
India’s DPI diplomacy has been in line with New Delhi’s non-ideological and arguably pragmatic foreign policy of recent decades. India has in the past shared best practices, trained electoral officers and allocated funding to support the United Nations Democracy Fund, focussing on increasing electoral participation among women and other marginalised communities. India’s approach to DPI appears, on the face of it, to bring similar ideological neutrality.
Therefore, without aligning itself clearly with any geopolitical block or staking an ideological claim to global digital governance, DPI diplomacy enables New Delhi to make a contribution that is seemingly appreciated by an external audience. Focusing on DPI allows India to continue working with countries across geopolitical divides without locking in its developmental interests. One might argue therefore that DPI diplomacy is calibrated to serve the government’s perception of the national interest.
DPI diplomacy also enables New Delhi to burnish its status aspirations internationally, especially as a leader of the Global South. A repository of DPI solutions or the sharing of best practices with developmental potential found initial takers from other countries in the Global South who believe that elements of India Stack can serve as a potential model for development. India’s cautious approach to exporting ideology might sit well with other developing countries who are often caught between Washington’s and Brussels supposedly contrasting approaches to technology governance.
The criticism of India Stack is largely occluded in the global narratives built around DPI, including when international organizations like the World Bank. This is why the sober assessment provided by the GOSDPI paper deserves to be read, understood and widely disseminated by brokers with influence. Rather than painting an entirely rosy picture, power brokers would do well to provide decision-makers in countries looking to partner with New Delhi a more realistic assessment of what worked and what did not.
Status aspirations are not just for an international audience. The governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has hailed itself as a party of development, and advancements through technology have been central to the development it professes. Indian technology solutions exported to the world resonate with the Indian public for whom India’s place in the world is a constant concern, even if it does not always influence decision-making at the ballot box. The appreciation of DPI by an external audience enables the government to sell this as a win domestically. The story and its attendant glory consequently play a bigger role in the public imagination than the empirical analysis conducted by the team at the internet Research Lab. Selling DPI as a cornerstone of India’s technology foreign policy enables the occlusion of empirical realities on the ground.
What now?: Building evidence based counter-narratives
India’s technology push has gained appreciation and applause both domestically and worldwide. Pushback by a beleaguered civil society has been unsuccessful in highlighting the drawbacks of adopting this approach to the wider public, as evident in India’s own domestic technology stack. While the underlying infrastructure or global efforts like the DPI repository are yet to receive wholesale acclaim, the expanding MoUs suggest that the narrative has done enough to start conversations and get other countries interested.
For a transitional power like India, starting these conversations is important for asserting global influence. While it is unlikely that India will craft rules that determine the future of the internet, DPI offers New Delhi the opportunity to be an important player in a relevant issue area.
The unfortunate reality is that this successful diplomacy is built on the back of infrastructures that undermine their own stated objectives. Rather than highlighting these factors, DPI entrepreneurs have under-invested in researching and uncovering these inconvenient truths. Evidence-based empirical assessments, like the GOSDPI paper, are essential for framing counter-narratives and providing decision-makers and the public with a more realistic picture.
The GOSDPI paper provides real world analysis of what DPI systems deployed at a global scale could miss if they do not take crucial empirical feedback into account. It is essential reading for decision-makers in states and international organizations adopting or evangelizing the DPI approach.
A sober and realistic assessment would not undermine the theoretical merits of DPI or India’s diplomacy. Instead, it would go a long way towards ensuring that the laudable vision is implemented in practice.
Arindrajit Basu is a PhD candidate at Leiden University.