What’s Driving the Spread of DPI?

Even as much of the world is engulfed by AI mania, another wave—perhaps less visible, but no less potentially transformative—is sweeping through the Global South. Recent visitors to India, in particular, would have been hard-pressed not to notice what the Economist recently called a “digital payments revolution.” At roadside vegetable stands and remote rural tea shops—even among beggars in train stations and street performers—Indians increasingly pay for goods and services by scanning QR codes on their cellphones.

India leads the world in digital payments (its network accounts for nearly half of all global digital transactions), but it is hardly alone. Brazil, China, and Kenya are among the many countries that have overtaken Europe and America in this technology, which is often bundled with a wider set of technical innovations that are collectively referred to as digital public infrastructure, or DPI. Although the specific innovations are contested and vary by country, DPI is generally held to include, at a minimum, technology for digital identities, payments, and data exchange.

Part of DPI’s appeal—and part of the reason for its rapid spread—is simplicity: use cases are clear, the technology requires little expertise or knowledge. People’s first encounter with DPI is typically experiential, even visceral: the wonder of buying a cup of tea with a QR code, the thrill of discovering a welfare payment deposited directly into a bank account. But what, really, is DPI, and what’s driving these types of transactions?

Behind the micro, highly specific interactions lies a broader and far more complex set of phenomena and forces. Here, I want to focus on some of the economic, social, political, and geopolitical trends that provide context and impetus for the hundreds of millions of daily individualized encounters with DPI.

The search for a better internet: If technology works in cycles of euphoria and despair, then attitudes toward the internet have in recent years been at the bottom of the enthusiasm curve. From concerns over teenage mental health and privacy to rising alarm over the unchecked power of Big Tech and the rise of misinformation: there is growing sense that a-once-promising innovation has succumbed to what Cory Doctorow has memorably called a process of “enshittification.”

DPI can be seen as part of a broader effort to reinvent our relationship to the internet—and, more generally, our digital ecosystem. A large part of its normative appeal stems from the “P” in the acronym: the sense that core functionality on the internet (i.e., identity, payments, data exchange) should not merely serve private ends but rather be reimagined as a set of public goods. Nandan Nilekani, the entrepreneur behind India’s highly successful DPI rollout, has written of how the technology could usher in a “new model of how citizens relate to the internet”—or what I have elsewhere called “a potential reworking of the digital social contract,” a rebalancing of agency among citizens, the state, and the private sector.

The rise of a multipolar world: DPI is emerging at a moment of rising geopolitical churn, when technology policy is, increasingly, an instrument of geopolitics. Pushback against the existing model of the internet is intimately tied to a more general resistance against American power. China, under the auspices of its Digital Silk Road initiative, advances its version of techno-political power. The European Union, too, advances its technical, political, and cultural influence (in part by shaping standards and regulations), part of a process that Anu Bradford calls “the Brussels effect.” (Tech companies themselves are often rising powers, vying for authority with nation states in what Ian Bremmer has called a “technopolar” world.)

DPI has risen to prominence within this context, not only as another potential model for technology but as a means to project state power. As evidenced by India’s presidency of last year’s G20 process (and, to an extent, Brazil’s presidency this year), many policymakers see the technology as a way to expand national “soft power” and claim a seat at the table of global governance. As the Economist recently put it, “just as Europe’s influence on global technology has been boosted by its regulatory power, so India’s will grow if many countries adopt Indian-made digital systems.”

Economic development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): The final context within which to understand DPI is the ongoing—and long lasting—quest for economic development, and especially the possibilities of technology-led development. Much has been much written about DPI’s potential to help fulfill the SDGs, or to hasten what its adherents like to call “leapfrog development.” Equally significant, if somewhat less explored, the emergence from the Global South of a new technology with widespread adoption and undeniable impact itself potentially signifies a landmark achievement for previously lower- and middle-income countries (especially as richer countries consider adopting the technology for their own populations). Part of the excitement over DPI, in short, is related to a sense that some of the most persistent development gaps of the last century or more may finally be narrowing.

This context, and this justification for DPI’s usefulness, needs careful watching. The history of tech-led development projects is littered with false promise and failed efforts—from the (perhaps apocryphal) “rusting tractors” of the Green Revolution to more recent efforts, such as under-utilized information kiosks in rural areas that lack basic infrastructure, and Facebook’s ill-fated Free Basics project in India.

Is DPI another false dawn? The technology seems to hold much promise, but much depends on how it is ultimately implemented, and what types of policy and other guardrails are built around it. Late last month, the United Nations Development Programme released its interim report on “safe and inclusive” DPI. The report includes a number of operational and foundational principles—transparency, community engagement, sustainability, relying on evidence and privacy by design—but at the core of its recommendations is a “bias for in-country conceptualization, design, organization, and implementation.”

In other words, the extent to which DPI is a positive force (and even what DPI is) will vary country by country, and region by region. When it comes to this particular technology (or suite of technologies), we are still in the early days. This is both a risk and an opportunity. As different models of DPI emerge around the world, in widely varying contexts, and with varying effects, it will be important to carefully evaluate what works—and, just as important, what doesn’t. 

Akash Kapur is a Senior Fellow in Planetary Politics at New America. He first spoke about these contextual forces at a workshop on DPI that he co-organized at Princeton University, with funding by the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India, where he is a Visiting Lecturer and Research Scholar.