Deconstructing the Merits of Digital Public Infrastructure for Social Sectors in India: A Policy Handbook

Digital public infrastructure (DPI) has become central to national development strategies in India and many countries across the majority world. With its potential to enable trans-sectoral, population-scale digital services, DPI promises breakthroughs in areas including financial inclusion, healthcare, and agriculture.

Although the term was clearly defined only recently during India’s G20 Presidency in 2023, its key tenets — interoperability, openness, and scalability — have underpinned the Indian government’s many digital initiatives such as Aadhaar and UPI for almost a decade. Recent examples of the DPI approach include the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) for healthcare, the Digital Public Infrastructure for Agriculture (DPIA), and the National Digital Education Architecture (NDEAR). By creating open, interoperable digital modules — including digital identities, data registries, and data exchanges — these initiatives aim to improve public service delivery at scale.

However, while the policy discourse highlights the potential benefits of DPI, there has been limited scrutiny of its suitability for different sectors and its potential risks to vulnerable communities.

To facilitate policy deliberations around many of these critical issues, DFL has built a handbook that aims to support policy decision-makers to critically evaluate the suitability of a DPI approach, particularly in the context of social sectors such as healthcare and agriculture. Through dialogues with digital development and domain experts, DFL has put together a list of guiding questions and prompts that can guide and provide a scaffolding for detailed inquiries into the value proposition and risks of DPI.

As a critical evaluation tool for policymakers, our handbook provides:

• Guiding questions and prompts to facilitate critical discussions on DPI implementation.
• A structured framework for both ex-ante (before implementation) and ex-post (after implementation) assessments.
• An evidence matrix to help assess the relevance and applicability of identified evidence in a given sector.

This document is presented as a 3-segment framework:

• The first segment aims to assess whether the identified sector has the necessary characteristics to support the effective deployment of DPIs.
• The second segment takes stock of existing policy issues within the sector and analyses how the proposed DPI-based intervention looks to address them.
• The final segment examines the specific technological components that constitute the intervention and assesses their suitability, governing frameworks, and potential risks.

Please note that prior communiques from the Indian government categorised DPI-related initiatives under the broader term ‘Digital Ecosystems’, a framing that has since evolved. However, despite these semantic shifts, the core principles of both paradigms remain largely consistent. For this document, we continue to use the earlier terminology associated with Digital Ecosystems.