DPIs allow for transactions (which could involve money, or information) to be done with trust and security, says anthropologist Nafis Hasan. ‘They are scalable, affordable and open standards software infrastructures for delivering public goods and services. DPIs are often developed by a collaboration between states and private companies, and also philanthropic organisations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who want to effect change among large populations. The idea is that if you want to do better, as a country, you need to have these infrastructures.’

India and Brazil at the forefront

DPIs are a combination of technology and policy, say the researchers, because digital infrastructure requires more than just technology. ‘Think of DigiD in the Netherlands, which is also connected to the Dutch Tax Administration and the municipality, for instance’, says Bidisha Chaudhuri (Media Studies). ‘In order for it to be connected to all these things, infrastructure needs to be in place. And that does not just include the technical infrastructure, but also governance, legal structures, and privacy issues: who owns the data, and who is responsible to secure it? That is all part of the infrastructure.’

An interesting aspect of DPIs is that India, and also Brazil, are currently at the forefront of developing these systems. One of the researchers’ objectives in their project is to map the global entanglement of DPI development. Who are the main actors in the vision and implementation of these systems? What is the role of states, and what are the implications for domestic bureaucracy and for how public services will be delivered in the future?

Digitisation from scratch

The researchers focus on India and Malawi. Hasan explains: ‘Malawi has not seen much digitisation of public services until now, so that will give us an interesting comparison between what was happening before the digital came in, and what might change once the digital is there – from scratch. And in India, we interview the people who are building these technologies there for deployment in other countries. We are working together with the International Institute of Information Technology in Bangalore on this.’

Like all projects within the Responsible Digital Transformations research theme, this project is interdisciplinary, involving collaboration of researchers from different academic fields – Media Studies and Anthropology, in this case. ‘This is beneficial, because we bring in different perspectives,’ says Chaudhuri. ‘My work has focused on how technology changes the role of the state, whereas Nafis’ work has been more about digitisation and bureaucracy. So that fits nicely with what we are doing in this project.’