Perspective · Digital Public Infrastructure
Digital public infrastructure needs physical infrastructure
India exports its DPI model to the world. The part that rarely gets mentioned is the hardware, power and people that make it work on the ground.
When India talks about digital public infrastructure, it talks about protocols and platforms: open APIs, consent layers, interoperable payment rails. Those are real achievements. But anyone who has rolled out a government programme knows that the platform is only half of it.
An eKYC system needs a verified tablet in the hands of a field executive. A digital classroom needs a panel on the wall, a stable power supply and a teacher who knows what to do with it. A surveillance mandate needs approved cameras at every station, connected and maintained. The software scales instantly. The physical layer has to be built one site at a time.
The layer nobody puts in the brochure
Our teams have installed more than 80,000 interactive flat panels in state school programmes and supported tablet fleets for bank branches across the country. In each case, the question that decided success was not "does the software work?" It was:
- Who delivers the device to a school four hours from the district headquarters?
- Who replaces it when it fails, and how long does that take?
- Who trains the people who will use it every day?
Those questions do not appear in most DPI frameworks. They should.
Why this matters for the countries adopting India's model
India is now offering its DPI approach to other countries, especially across the Global South. Many of them face the same physical constraints India faced: uneven power, long distances, limited local support. Exporting the software without the know-how for the physical rollout risks repeating every mistake India has already learned from.
Indian companies that have delivered at state scale have something useful to offer here. Not a product, but a playbook: how to stage devices before they ship, how to set up regional spares, how to write support contracts that hold vendors to response times in remote districts.
A suggestion for policymakers
When India signs DPI cooperation agreements, the physical deployment layer should be part of the conversation from the start. That means including integrators and field-service firms alongside platform builders, and measuring programmes by uptime and reach as well as by launch dates.
Digital public infrastructure is public infrastructure. It deserves the same attention to construction and maintenance as a road or a power line.