Every civilisation eventually builds the infrastructure that reflects its values. Rome built roads. The British built railways. America built the internet and then handed it to corporations. India is building something different. And most people have not noticed yet.
Digital Public Infrastructure, or DPI, is India’s answer to a question nobody else thought to ask: what if the plumbing of the digital economy were treated like a public good rather than a private monopoly?
The walled garden problem
The dominant Western model of technology is a walled garden. Apple owns the device. Google owns the search. Visa owns the payment. Facebook owns the social graph. Each company captures a layer of digital life and extracts rent from it indefinitely. The user is not the customer. The user is the product.
This is not an accident. It is a philosophy. Centralisation is efficient. Monopoly is profitable. And for two decades, the world simply accepted that this was what modernity looked like. Except India.
Three layers of a different argument
India Stack is best understood as three answers to three questions about power.
Who validates your identity?
Before Aadhaar, the answer in India was: a landlord, a bureaucrat, a bank manager, someone with the authority to vouch for you. For 300 million people who had no documents, the answer was simply nobody. Aadhaar shifted the power of validation from private gatekeepers to a sovereign biometric layer. For the first time, a person could prove they existed without asking permission.
Who controls the flow of money?
In the West, digital payments are an oligopoly. Visa and Mastercard set the rules, charge the fees, and decide who gets access. India built UPI as a public rail - open, interoperable, and free at the transaction level. Any bank, any app, any developer can build on top of it. A vegetable vendor in Varanasi now has the same payment infrastructure as a Fortune 500 company. That is not a fintech story. That is a power story.
Who owns your data?
This is where the argument gets most interesting. The standard digital model is surveillance capitalism: corporations harvest your behaviour, build profiles, and monetise them without your knowledge or consent. DEPA (Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture) inverts this entirely. Your financial data, your health records, your tax history: you own them. Consent Managers ensure that data moves only when you say so, to whom you say so, for as long as you say so. The gaze is flipped.
The comparison that matters
| Western model | India’s DPI model | |
|---|---|---|
| Control | Centralised in Big Tech | Decentralised, open protocols |
| Access | Pay-to-play, subscription or ads | Universal, treated as public utility |
| Innovation | Closed ecosystems, App Stores | Open APIs, anyone can build |
| Data | Corporate surveillance | User-controlled, consent-based |
The Western model is not wrong because it is Western. It is wrong because it concentrates power. And concentrated power, as India knows better than most, is a civilisational risk.
This is not about apps
It is about agency.
India Stack is proof that you do not need to follow the Silicon Valley blueprint to be modern. India’s civilisational memory from East India Company’s unfettered loot turns out to be surprisingly good preparation for building digital systems that serve people rather than extract from them.
The question Nandan Nilekani asked was deceptively simple: can we build the same infrastructure for a billion people that rich countries built for their elites? He built it with volunteers from iSpirt . But the more consequential insight is that in building it, India created something the rich countries never had: a model where the infrastructure is genuinely public.
The next question
If India Stack can do this for financial inclusion, what stops us from doing it for culture?
An open protocol for heritage data. A consent-based layer for oral traditions. A UPI for civilisational memory. The architectural principles are identical: open, interoperable, population-scale, no single owner.
This is the question that animates several of my projects. The India Stack is not a destination. It is a proof of concept. Bharat has always known how to build for everyone. We are only now remembering how.