Indian technology leaders along with bilateral and international development agencies and prominent philanthropic organisations are energetically deploying Digital Public Infrastructures (DPIs) as stackable, scalable, affordable and open standards software infrastructures for delivering public goods and services in many developing countries in the global south. DPIs are transformative as they reconfigure the state’s responsibility towards building public facing software infrastructures while transferring actual goods and service delivery to private actors. By taking a comparative and relational approach to examine the process of designing and deploying DPIs in India and Malawi, this project asks: how does the design of DPIs shift existing relations between states and technical actors in public services delivery? How does the uptake of DPIs transform regulatory and bureaucratic arrangements of public services delivery? And how do citizens relying on state welfare stand to be affected by these changes?

Project Team:

• Bidisha Chaudhuri (FGw)
• Nafis Hasan (FMG)