India’s Digital Future | Moving beyond DPI to lasting infrastructure

On paper, DPIs provide the ability to wrest back control of critical digital infrastructures and place them in the public domain. However, the approach to DPI regulation needs to be considered more deeply

India has been at the forefront of the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) movement, spotlighting it during its G20 presidency. Indian DPIs such as the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) are shining examples of what can be achieved through harnessing DPIs.

A brief run through of the agenda of the Global DPI summit held earlier this month in Cairo, Egypt, highlights the prominent role being played by Indian actors in the DPI dialogue as well as the global attention around adopting DPIs.

DPIs are thought of as a means of countering the large-scale private dominance of digital systems that have now come to play crucial societal functions. The importance of these systems is never more evident than when they face outages.

WhatsApp’s global outage a few years back served as a stark reminder of this, with the outage affecting numerous businesses and public service delivery. A global outage to Microsoft based systems on July 19 brought numerous services to a standstill — causing disruptions that hampered various airlines, banks and other essential services world over. These, and many other private platforms, are performing the role of public utilities. However, they play this role without the same level of accountability and transparency that is concomitant within public utilities.

On paper, DPIs provide the ability to wrest back control of critical digital infrastructures and place them in the public domain — thereby enabling digital service delivery in a transparent and accountable manner while unlocking societal value to foster development. However, the approach to the regulation of DPIs needs to be considered more deeply such that the investment in public infrastructure helps transcend one of the core issues it's trying to battle — the dominance of select private providers.

In the case of UPI, the open protocol ensures that multiple service providers can facilitate payments. While there exists a public app that utilises this protocol (BHIM), three private applications (PhonePe, Google Pay, and PayTM) enjoy an overwhelming dominance. This enables monopoly over vast amounts of financial transactional data which should be made available, under strict privacy controls, for public good — not least to ensure better financial stability at a national level.

This effective control over the data generated using digital systems exists across various domains. Insights derived from this data can have significant potential for public good but are often siloed with restricted access and deployed for generation of private value. In the age of AI, control over data takes on added importance, given the need for vast amounts of data to train AI models.

Data is not the only largescale digital system where our governance approach has been blinkered. For instance, cloud infrastructure plays a crucial role in supporting the modern digital ecosystem. However, there are large gaps in the governance of the deepening market oligopolies and threats to environmental sustainability from cloud infrastructure.

India’s approach to governing the digital realm has so far been characterised by fragmentation. Outside of the outdated IT Act, the only marquee legislation that exists is the Digital Personal Data Protection Act which only covers a small sliver of the digital realm.

The newly passed Telecom Act and the proposed Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill also seek to govern specific portions of the digital space. There have also been a host of executive actions such as the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, DEPA, and the India AI Mission. However, these address very specific sectoral issues, and it is unclear how they will work cohesively. These varied governance attempts lay clearly the necessity for a cohesive approach to the governance of the digital realm and the dominance of private platforms within it.

A starting step in this journey is to reimagine the framing of private platforms that perform public utilities as ‘infrastructure’. By this we do not mean simply classifying them as DPIs. Infrastructure is typically understood as the basic systems or facilities that help a society function, and the governance of infrastructure typically accounts for things like access, resilience, and equity. Identifying which elements of the digital economy serve as infrastructure — those systems that are essential to the functioning of the digital ecosystem — can potentially help with the holistic governance of these systems in public interest. We can potentially identify four basic ‘infrastructures’ for the digital ecosystem, namely: data, hardware, the cloud, and standards and protocols. 

The October 24 decision of the World Telecommunications Standardization Assembly to prioritise global standards for DPI and AI based on a push by India exhibits the intent of the Indian government to think more critically about digital infrastructures beyond the framing of DPI.

One hopes that this is a stepping stone in a more sustained effort to reframe our governance strategy centring the idea of infrastructure. Doing so will pave way for the characterisation of certain private platforms as public utilities/infrastructure allowing us to hold platforms accountable for the role they perform in society. It also allows for a more meaningful reframing of data generated by private providers building on top of public protocols, and ensures that it is unlocked for societal good, and not hoarded for private value creation. 

(Vinay Narayan is senior manager, and Astha Kapoor is co-founder, Aapti Institute.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.