The DPI Approach: Infrastructuring Indian vision of Development

Digital Public Infrastructures or DPIs has become the newest technological export from India that is being globally recognised and efforts are being made to replicate its “success” in other countries of the global south (Sharma and Saran, 2023). This global standing of India leading in technologies of governance comes in close succession of its implementation of population-level digital biometric identity database. In fact, DPIs are an expanded and more ambitious version of “India Stack” which received the rebranding with a global vision of replicating Indian’s success with creating a national foundational ID stack. While DPIs, such as Aadhaar, UPI (unified payments Interface) becomes ubiquitous in India’s development trajectory, in this paper, I explore the role of DPI in the political rhetoric of branding India as an software infrastructure power, especially in the Global South