Designed for control: Digital infrastructure and public

Across the Global South, Digital Public Infrastructure is being sold as a leap forward for inclusion and modern governance. But as Pamodi Waravita reveals, these systems often deepen exclusion, entrench surveillance, and blur the line between public good and private control.

- By Pamodi Waravita

SCAN your face using a Government-approved app or press your finger to a biometric reader to collect welfare payment, enrol your child in school, access a public health scheme or retrieve land records — all within seconds. On paper, it sounds like a digital utopia, especially across Asia and the Global South, where public services are often slow, opaque or out of reach.

This is the promise of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI): to modernise governance and make interactions between the citizen and the State frictionless. But there's a catch. When the State embeds itself into the device in your pocket, it doesn't just streamline access — it can also centralise control and worsen exclusion, making resistance more difficult.

Non-neutral technology

Policymakers, big philanthropists and tech corporations are actively pitching, promoting and funding DPI. The Gates Foundation, a major backer of DPI, frames it as the modern equivalent of roads and railways, enabling digital economies just as physical infrastructure once enabled the industrial age.1 The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) goes even further, calling DPI “as essential in the 21st century as railways were in the 19th”.2 In the background, corporations like Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Google are positioning themselves to collect the tolls that governments and citizens will no doubt have to pay to use their digital infrastructure.