Defining the Digital public infrastructure approach

This policy brief aims to lay out a common definition of digital public infrastructure (DPI), as understood through India's experience, but one that must be applied and adopted across jurisdictions. The brief argues for the immense merit of building a shared vocabulary on DPI, and its use, values, and governance. It suggests that the G20 is an immensely important forum to give meaning to this approach, and institutionalise it through various means, allowing the DPI approach to flourish in different contexts while building collaborations between G20 countries and their partners.

There is significant agreement on the value of digital public infrastructure (DPI) in development and welfare. For instance, Nigeria’s foundation ID programme now allows citizens to access multiple public provisions, India’s CoWIN platform produced 2.2 billion vaccine certifications during the pandemic, and in Togo, over 500,000 informal workers were able to access Covid-19 relief benefits from the government through a digital identity platform. India’s DPI approach is also increasingly finding mention in multiple multilateral and bilateral conversations including the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which recently adopted India’s approach to DPI. India-EU’s Trade and Technology Cooperation also talks about adopting DPI for development and India-US joint statements also mentioned a collaboration on deploying DPI in low income countries.

However, defining DPI is contested terrain. With multiple concepts and uses embedded within them, DPIs have been defined through the prism of their form, values, and what they seek to do. Germany’s GovStack defines DPI as solutions and systems, which enable the effective provision of essential society-wide functions and services in the public and private sectors. The World Bank’s Identification for Development project defines DPI as digital platforms – including the institutional and legal frameworks around them – that enable the provision of essential society-wide functions and services. Co-Develop, an organisation working toward catalysing the adoption of DPI globally, defines it as a stack, with individual DPI systems playing specific functions as layers and interfacing with each other, and acknowledges the need to contextualise these layers to local realities.

At the highest level, the DPI creates exponential societal outcomes through open, interoperable technology building blocks, along with transparent, accountable, and participatory governance frameworks. DPI are anchored in a robust ecosystem of public, private, and civil society stakeholders that drive innovation, but also ensure accountability of the infrastructure. Digital railroads are a commonly used analogy to refer to DPIs, laid down by the government to accelerate development and used by different service providers (the private sector) and users (citizens). However, the different layers of DPI need to be unpacked considering DPI can be dynamic and shape-shifting based on context, and hard to capture in a fixed definition.

Given both the value of DPI and the difficulty in defining it, it is imperative for a multilateral forum such as the G20 to put forth a consensus-driven understanding of DPI that can be adopted and adapted globally. This can be done from a common starting point which facilitates collaboration and sharing. Therefore, this policy brief aims to expand on the definition of DPI and asserts that the G20, under India’s presidency, should adopt a framework of thinking within which the concept of DPIs can evolve and reflect the different needs and build avenues for collaborating and sharing between G20 countries and beyond.

The paper can be accessed by clicking here.

This paper has been authored by Astha Kapoor and Erin Watson.