DA Editorial Team
India’s approach to building foundational digital systems, Aadhaar for identity, UPI for payments, and the broader India Stack architecture connecting them, has quietly become one of the country’s more significant exports of ideas, even as the technology itself remains largely domestic in origin. A growing number of developing countries are now studying, and in some cases directly adopting, this model of publicly built, openly accessible digital infrastructure. That interest deserves more attention than it typically receives in India’s own domestic policy conversation.
The core insight behind India’s Digital Public Infrastructure, or DPI, model is straightforward but was not obvious a decade ago: rather than leaving foundational digital capabilities, identity verification, payments rails, data exchange, entirely to private platforms, the state builds and maintains the basic infrastructure as a public good, open for private companies to build services on top of. UPI’s explosive growth, now handling billions of transactions monthly at negligible cost to users, demonstrates what this approach can achieve at scale in ways few purely private payment systems have matched globally.
For much of the developing world, this model offers a genuine alternative to two less attractive paths: dependence on foreign private technology platforms that extract data and value with limited local benefit, or the costly, often failed attempts to build comparable digital capability from scratch without India’s decade of iterative experience to draw on. Several countries across Africa and Southeast Asia have already begun exploring DPI frameworks modelled explicitly on India’s approach, sometimes with direct Indian government or corporate technical assistance.
India should treat this growing interest as a genuine strategic opportunity, not merely a diplomatic talking point. Positioning itself as the primary technical partner and standard-setter for DPI adoption across the Global South would extend Indian technological and diplomatic influence considerably further than traditional aid or infrastructure financing typically achieves, while also creating substantial commercial opportunities for India’s own technology sector. Doing this well will require sustained government investment in technical assistance programmes and a willingness to share India’s institutional learning openly, including its genuine failures and course corrections, rather than presenting only a polished success narrative to prospective partner countries.