India Shows What’s Possible
Over the past decade, India has been steadily transforming fragmented, paper-bound systems into population-scale digital rails that are now analysed, and increasingly replicated, around the world. What began as a bold experiment with Aadhaar and digital payments has evolved into a blueprint for building accessible, affordable, and interoperable public infrastructure at scale.
But the real transformation is not purely technological. It is institutional. India’s embrace of open, interoperable architecture reflects a deliberate shift in how the state designs coordination, service delivery, and citizen interface. Digital public goods are now reinforcing the very foundations of state capacity, reshaping how governments deliver services, protect entitlements, and manage complex systems across health, social protection, and citizen-facing governance.
Digital Public Infrastructure & Digital Public Goods
Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) refers to the population-scale digital systems, such as UPI, Aadhaar, or ABDM, that governments deploy to deliver essential services and enable interoperability across sectors. In contrast, Digital Public Goods (DPGs) are open-source, open-standards-based software, protocols, and digital building blocks that can be used, adapted, and improved by anyone, irrespective of geography. While DPI operates as live national infrastructure requiring governance, regulation, and oversight, DPGs function as reusable digital building blocks that countries assemble into their own systems. In essence, DPI delivers services at scale, while DPGs provide the tools that make such infrastructure possible.
India’s early digital reforms, Aadhaar, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), DigiLocker, demonstrated the power of interoperable public rails built on open standards. The next phase is the globalization of these principles through open-source Digital Public Goods such as the Modular Open-Source Identity Platform (MOSIP) and DIGIT, alongside open frameworks like the Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA), and other reusable components inspired by India Stack.
These tools are now being used or adapted by countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, shifting India from consumer to provider of governance infrastructure. Importantly, DPGs enable nations to avoid vendor lock-in and adopt digital systems aligned with their own legal and cultural contexts.
This “open architecture” approach is redefining the political economy of digital governance. It primarily centres itself on creating ecosystems, rather than products, and that distinction is critical.
Health Systems: A Transformative Use Case
The impact of DPGs is more visible in healthcare. India’s Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) is establishing the world’s largest federated digital health ecosystem, powered by open protocols.
Key enablers include:
- ABHA (Ayushman Bharat Health Account), a portable digital health ID that links patients, providers, labs, pharmacies and insurers
- Health Information Exchange & Consent Manager, enabling secure, permission-based data sharing
- Health Claims Exchange, reducing fraud and lowering administrative burden
- Open networks of registries, Federated provider and facility registries, improving provider discoverability
These foundational blocks are allowing hospitals, health workers, pharmacies, telemedicine providers, and insurers to operate on the same digital language, reducing friction and enabling coordinated care.
For InOrder, this shift aligns with our core work on health systems strengthening, care coordination, public health governance, and evidence-driven improvement. Our core mission with respect to DPGs is instilling them as governance mechanisms that enable better service delivery.
Governance, Trust, and the Architecture of Rights
As digital ecosystems expand, so does the responsibility to build systems that uphold citizen rights. India’s approach includes:
- Privacy-by-design protocols as seen in DEPA
- Trusted digital credential exchange frameworks such as DigiLocker
- Citizen consent managers operationalized through ABDM (health) and Account Aggregator (finance).
- Emerging data protection legislation that formalises guardrails
India’s architecture of digital trust is underpinned by statutory guardrails through the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, which institutionalizes consent, purpose limitation, fiduciary accountability, and citizen rights across digital public infrastructure ecosystems.
The challenge ahead is balancing interoperability with autonomy, speed with accountability, and innovation with risk mitigation. Public trust is the ultimate currency of digital governance.
Inclusion: A driving imperative for Digital Public Goods
DPGs only succeed if they work for everyone. This requires addressing:
- Gendered and geographic digital divides
- Language accessibility
- Assisted-service models through frontline workers and Community Health Centres
- Digital literacy and user experience
India’s experience shows that digital rails must be complemented by strong last-mile human infrastructure. Inclusion cannot be retrofitted, it must be designed upfront.
The next wave of India’s Digital Public Goods story is already taking shape through the IndiaAI Mission, which extends DPI principles into the artificial intelligence era. The initiative focuses on building public compute infrastructure, open and high-quality datasets, sovereign foundation models in Indian languages, and institutional frameworks for safe, accountable AI governance. By treating AI capabilities as public infrastructure rather than proprietary assets, India is laying the groundwork for equitable innovation, ecosystem participation, and population-scale public value creation.
Digital Public Goods are reshaping the foundations of governance in India and beyond. No longer experimental, they are becoming core to how modern states design service delivery, build institutional capacity, and enable inclusive economic participation. As India continues to innovate across identity, payments, health, and data governance, it is not only modernising its own public systems but also offering the world a replicable pathway for building resilient, interoperable, and rights-respecting digital societies.