Building on our ongoing research project on 'Effective Ethical Frameworks for the State as an Enabler of Innovation', our team authored a policy brief titled 'Recovering the ‘Public’ in India’s Digital Public Infrastructure Strategy'. In this brief, we draw on our investigation of India's digital public infrastructure (DPI) journey, especially in the healthcare and agriculture sectors, and examine how India's policy discourse on DPI has delivered on public value creation. We find that the DPI policy approach in India is consolidating a clientelist digital welfare state and corporate capture of innovation dividends from digital infrastructural ecosystems, and has led to the erosion of the social contract between citizens and the state. The brief concludes with a reflection on what it would take to recover the public value potential of DPI, through the state's allocative, distributive, and stabilization functions.
Read the policy brief here.
