India’s Digital Infrastructure Is Going Global. What Kind of Power Is It Building?

During June’s high-stakes meetings in London around the India–UK Free Trade Agreement, India’s Commerce Minister, Piyush Goyal, made a striking declaration for a bold blueprint of UK-India collaboration: beyond tariff lines and visas, the deal aims to show how “the world can benefit from [India’s] skilled talent, cost-effective solutions, and growing capabilities in AI and emerging technologies." By pitching Aadhaar-based systems, UPI-style payments (United Payments Interface) and CoWIN-style (Covid Vaccine Intelligence Network) certification as part of the partnership, Goyal signaled that India sees its digital governance model not only as domestic policy, but as exportable infrastructure and diplomatic leverage on the world stage. The question is whether this infrastructure is a universal engine for development, or a new template of technocratic statecraft.

Since 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has dramatically expanded its digital governance infrastructure. Platforms like Aadhaar (a biometric ID system), UPI (a payments interface), and the India Stack (a set of public APIs) now form the backbone of how services are delivered, populations are tracked, and the state is imagined. These systems are increasingly promoted as models for other countries, especially in the Global Majority. With support from global development institutions and philanthropies, India’s approach is being exported as Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI): low-cost, open-source, and scalable.

Yet beyond the language of inclusion and innovation, this technology demands a deeper set of questions. What kind of state is being built through digital systems? What histories of power do these infrastructures carry? And as other countries adopt India’s model, what kinds of politics are they also inheriting?

Governance as infrastructure

India’s digital transformation is often celebrated as a story of frugal innovation. DPI systems have allowed hundreds of millions to access ID, receive payments, and connect to state services. In a country of immense scale and complexity, this is an achievement. But these systems do more than deliver services; they configure how the state sees its citizens: through biometric records, financial transactions, health databases, and algorithmic scoring systems. They do not just respond to need; they produce legibility. And, increasingly, they produce it in machine-readable terms.

In the post-war period, thinkers like historian and sociologist Lewis Mumford warned of a rising “megamachine,” a convergence of bureaucracy, corporate power, and technical systems that privileges control and efficiency over human needs. Philosopher Jacques Ellul argued that the logic of ‘technique’—what he describes as the relentless pursuit of what is most efficient—can quietly erode pluralism and ethical deliberation. These critiques were not anti-technology, but warnings about what happens when technical systems begin to shape political life instead of serving it.

India’s digital platforms contain many of these tensions. While Aadhaar was introduced to improve welfare targeting, it has also excluded people through biometric mismatches. While UPI has enabled a payments revolution, it is embedded in an ecosystem of surveillance and behavioral nudging. In education, health, and policing, digital dashboards track performance, movement, and compliance. In some contexts, these tools have empowered officials and improved access. In others, they have reinforced exclusion, opacity, and coercive control. The technologies themselves are modular, but their effects are not uniform. They depend on institutional context, administrative capacity, and the broader political environment in which they are deployed.

A model in motion

India’s digital infrastructure is not only reshaping domestic governance, but is being actively exported abroad. From vaccine certification platforms in Sri Lanka and the Philippines to biometric identity systems in Ethiopia, elements of India Stack are being adopted across Asia and Africa. The Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP), developed in Bangalore, is now in use in more than twenty countries. Indeed, India is positioning itself as a provider of public infrastructure for the Global South, offering a postcolonial alternative to both Silicon Valley’s corporate-led ecosystems and China’s surveillance-oriented platforms. These efforts are supported by donors and development banks eager to scale what appears to be a replicable model.

But DPI is not a neutral toolset. It encodes assumptions about how the state should function, how identity is constructed, and what counts as legitimate data. When these systems travel, they bring with them an institutional template that may not align with local democratic practices or social needs. Moreover, India’s claims to digital sovereignty are constrained by deep dependencies. While the India Stack was largely developed in-house, the country’s AI ecosystem remains reliant on foreign-owned cloud infrastructure, advanced chipsets, and proprietary models. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Nvidia continue to provide much of the backend architecture for India’s AI initiatives, including in health and agriculture. As a result, India’s digital diplomacy often conceals the reality of infrastructural dependence even as it projects influence abroad.

Between control and contestation

It would be a mistake to reduce India’s digital governance model to either a triumph of innovation or a tool of authoritarian control. The reality is more of a fragmented and improvisational technopolitics. These platforms operate across a range of sectors and are shaped by diverse actors including bureaucrats, NGOs, software engineers, and civil society activists.

In some states, bureaucrats have adapted digital systems to enhance transparency and grievance redress. Civil society groups have co-designed tools like Rajasthan’s Jan Soochna Portal to disclose welfare entitlements at the village level. Teachers and health workers have used WhatsApp groups and social media to bypass rigid systems and share knowledge. These moments of improvisation and resistance challenge the idea that digital governance is a one-way process imposed from above. Yet the infrastructure also facilitates new forms of centralization. The BJP government’s political project—combining Hindu nationalism with techno-modernism—has used these platforms to reinforce executive power while sidelining democratic institutions. Digital dashboards offer real-time oversight but also suppress discretion. Predictive policing tools promise efficiency but raise serious concerns about bias and profiling. As Mumford warned, the very efficiency that technology enables can mask the erosion of democratic life.

A more democratic stack

If India’s model is becoming a global blueprint, then it is essential to ask what kind of state it makes possible. And what might it take to build a more democratic form of digital governance?

1. First, participation must be foundational. Digital infrastructure should not be designed solely by engineers and consultants. It must include the voices of those who use and are governed by these systems: citizens, frontline workers, and marginalised communities. This should be less of a procedural concern, but a condition of legitimacy.
2. Second, infrastructure must be materially inclusive. The language of openness and scale means little without access to devices, connectivity, training, and institutional support. DPI cannot replace the hard work of building robust public institutions.
3. Third, redress and transparency must be built into systems from the start. If algorithms and biometric matches determine access to food, health, or schooling, then the ability to challenge errors is essential. A truly public infrastructure must support contestation, not only compliance.
4. Finally, the global adoption of India’s digital model must be accompanied by a transparent conversation about its risks, limits, and trade-offs. The export of software cannot be separated from the export of institutional logic. What is promoted as scalable efficiency may, in some contexts, translate into subtle forms of exclusion or technocratic control.

In the 1980s, sociologist Ashis Nandy argued that technology was becoming “an escape from the dirtiness of politics,”—that is, a tool for elite consensus, not democratic engagement. That warning feels prescient today. As digital governance is scaled, exported, and repackaged as a global good, we must ask not just what it can do, but also what it displaces.Who defines what counts as “public” in digital public infrastructure? Whose interests are embedded in the code? And how do we reckon with the power these systems confer and conceal?

India’s model is especially influential because it offers something compelling: a low-cost, modular, postcolonial pathway to digital modernity. But its diffusion also carries risk. When governance is exported as infrastructure, it can sidestep political debate, flatten pluralism, and embed new hierarchies.