Digital Public Infrastructure

About the author: Ankit Sahasrabudhe ‘25 is an FSI Global Policy Intern with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, India. Ankit is currently majoring in Mathematics (B.S.), Engineering Physics (B.S. Hons.), and Computer Science (M.S.) at Stanford University.

This summer, I have had the opportunity to work with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s India Office, where I work primarily with the Tech & Society Team. When I began, while many of the topics of focus were familiar to me, there was one which I had never before heard of: Digital Public Infrastructure.

Unsurprisingly, Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is almost exactly what it sounds like — public infrastructure for digital goods and services. Just like public roadways provide a mechanism for people to get around, digital public infrastructure provides a public mechanism for digital goods and services, such as payments as well as commerce more broadly.

This is a relatively new idea — after all the digital realm more broadly is new — however, its impacts can be quite impressive. Several International organizations have created programs on DPIs, from the United Nations Development Program to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This year’s G20, too, has paid particular focus to the topic.

Digital payments are by far the most mature area of Digital Public Infrastructure, and over the past few years, advancements have paved the way for billions of transactions.

India, for one, has developed the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), to facilitate transactions between banks, but also between merchants and customers. Essentially, UPI acts as a base layer, over which consumer and merchant accounts can transfer money, regardless of individual bank account. In use, consumers simply scan a QR code and can directly transfer money from their account to a vendor’s, using UPI as the backbone for the transaction. Anecdotally, over the past weeks, the majority of transactions I have seen at restaurants, stores, and especially at small street-side stalls have been through this mechanism.

Recently, the Federal Reserve has released a similar tool, called FedNow. While hitherto not as widespread as its peer in India, it functions similarly, providing a mechanism for inter bank account transfers, irrespective of a particular bank account.

Importantly, while the word “public” is in the name, DPIs are not strictly government run. With UPI, for example, numerous apps exist to access and transact on the shared public interface.

But plans for DPI go far beyond transferring money. There are plans for commerce, where so called “open-networks for commerce” are being developed, to facilitate inter-platform commerce of goods and services and simplify the overall digital commerce ecosystem, as well as for transportation, as a way to simplify uni and multi-modal public transit.

In July, Carnegie partnered with Meta for an event on “Digital Transformation”, where speakers described the adoption and success of DPI in India, pictured below. While it is still to be seen if such digital infrastructure can be very effective outside of payments, it is a very interesting to watch this new area of technology policy, and practice, unfold.