Digital Public Infrastructure: An innovative outcome of India’s G20 leadership

From latent concept to global consensus

Not more than a couple of years back, this highly jingled acronym of the present time – DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure), was merely a latent term. However, today it has gained an ‘internationally agreed vocabulary’ with wide-ranging global recognition. This could not imply that efforts in this direction had not been laid earlier, yet a tangible global consensus over the formal incorporation of the term was unattainable. 

The complex dynamics of such a long-standing impasse or ambiguity over a potential consensus-based acknowledgement of DPI, has been prominently highlighted in a recently published report of ‘India’s G20 Task Force on Digital Public Infrastructure’. The report clearly underlines that, 

While DPI was being designed and built independently by selected institutions around the world for over a decade, there was an absence of a global movement that identified the common design approach that drove success, as well as low political awareness at the highest levels of the impacts of DPI on accelerating development. 

It was only at the helm of India’s G20 Presidency in September 2023 that the first-ever multilateral consensus was reached on recognising DPI as being a ‘safe, secure, trusted, accountable, and inclusive’ driver of socioeconomic development across the globe. Notably, the ‘New Delhi Declaration’ has cultivated a DPI approach, intending to enhance a robust, resilient, innovative and interoperable digital ecosystem steered by a crucial interplay of technology, business, governance, and the community.

The DPI approach persuasively offers a middle way between a purely public and a purely private strand, with an emphasis on addressing ‘diversity and choice’; encouraging ‘innovation and competition’;  and ensuring ‘openness and sovereignty’. 

Ontologically, this marks a perceptible shift from the exclusive idea of technocratic-functionalism to embracing the concepts of multistakeholderism and pluralistic universalism.  These conceptualisations hold substance in the realm of India’s greater quest to democratise and diversify the power of innovation, based on delicate trade-offs and cross-sectional intersubjective understanding. Nevertheless, it is also to be construed that an all-pervasive digital transition increasingly entrenched into the burgeoning international DPI approach, has been exceptionally drawn from India’s own successful experience of the domestic DPI framework, namely India Stack.

India Stack is primarily an agglomeration of open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and digital public goods, aiming to enhance a broadly vibrant social, financial, and technological ecosystem. It offers multiple benefits and ingenious services, like faster digital payments through UPI, Aadhaar Enabled Payments System (AEPS), direct benefit transfers, digital lending, digital health measures, education and skilling, and secure sharing of data. The remarkable journey of India’s digital progress and coherently successful implementation of DPI over the last decade indisputably turned out to be the centre of attention during the G20 deliberations. 

India’s role in advancing DPI through G20 engagement and strategic initiative

What seems quite exemplary is the procedural dynamism with which actions have been undertaken to mobilise the vocabulary and effectiveness of DPI during various G20 meetings and conferences held within India. Most importantly, the Digital Economy Working Group (DEWG) meetings and negotiations were organised in collaboration with all the G20 members, guest countries, and eminent knowledge partners, like ITU, OECD, UNDP, UNESCO and the World Bank. As an effect, the Outcome Document of the Digital Economy Ministers’ Meeting was unanimously agreed to by all the G20 members and presented a comprehensive global digital agenda with appropriate technical nuances and risk-management strategies. 

Along with gaining traction in DEWG, the DPI agenda also got prominence in other G20 working groups under India’s Presidency. These include the Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion Working Group; the Health Working Group; the Agriculture Working Group; the Trade and Investment Working Group; and the Education Working Group. 

Commensurate to these diverse group meetings, the Indian leadership also conducted bilateral negotiations with its top G20 strategic and trading partners, namely the USA, the EU, France, Japan, and Australia. Interestingly, the official joint statements of all these bilateral meetings decisively entailed the catchword ‘DPI’. It could be obviously considered whether the time was ripe, or it was India’s well-laid-out strategy that ultimately paid off. Yet, it could not be repudiated that a well-thought-out parallel negotiation process had certainly played an instrumental role in providing leverage to the DPI approach. 

Further, in follow-up to the New Delhi Declaration of September 2023, the Prime Minister of India announced the launch of two landmark India-led initiatives during the G20 Virtual Leaders’ Summit in November 2023. The two initiatives denominated as the Global Digital Public Infrastructure Repository (GDPIR) and the Social Impact Fund (SIF) are mainly inclined towards the advancement of DPI in the Global South, particularly by offering upstream technical-financial assistance and knowledge-based expertise. This kind of forward-looking holistic approach reasonably fortifies the path towards a transformative global digital discourse. 

Building on momentum: Brazil’s role in advancing DPI

Ever since India passed on the wand of the G20 Presidency to Brazil, expectations have been pretty high from the latter to carry forward the momentum and ensure that emerging digital technologies effectively meet the requirements of the Global South. It is encouraging to witness that Brazil is vehemently making a step forward to maintain the drive, with a greater emphasis on deepening the discussion over crucial DPI components such as digital identification, data governance, data sharing infrastructure, and global data safeguards. Although Brazil has seized an impressive track record of using digital infrastructure to promote poverty alleviation and inclusive growth within the country, a considerable measure of success at the forthcoming G20 summit will be its efficacy in stimulating political and financial commitments for a broader availability of such infrastructure. 

Despite the fact that concerted endeavours are being deployed to boost the interoperability, scalability and accessibility of DPIs, it becomes highly imperative to ensure their confidentiality and integrity. This turns out to be more alarming in the wake of increased cybersecurity breaches, unwarranted data privacy intrusions, and potential risks attached to emerging technologies like AI. Hence, at this critical juncture, it is quintessential to foster more refined, coordinated and scaled-up global efforts, or to be more precise, an effective global digital cooperation.