Running Out of Steam?

India's digital public infrastructure won global praise with Aadhaar and UPI. But its newer platforms are stumbling at scale, exposing gaps in design, delivery and adoption

- By Shruti Tripathi

In the summer of 2022, Sachin (name changed), who owns a grocery shop in the tony Indiranagar area of Bengaluru, was visited by an enthusiastic group of techies.

They convinced him to get on board the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), which would help him sell online at practically no additional cost. He was told it would help him compete with quick commerce platforms like Zepto and Blinkit.

At first he got a few orders every day on ONDC. It rose to around a dozen a couple of months later. But later that dropped again and became more of a hassle to keep up with.

Hundreds of kilometres away in Varanasi, Jyotsana, a homemaker chasing a long-deferred dream of higher education, turned to DigiLocker, the state-owned online document-storage platform, to retrieve her class 10 and 12 certificates for a central university application. The platform failed to fetch her records. With no time to travel to her hometown for physical copies, she missed the admission deadline.

These aren't glitches. They're structural warning signs that India's digital public infrastructure may be losing momentum where it matters most: at the last mile.

Over the past decade, India has built one of the most ambitious digital public infrastructure (DPI) ecosystems in the world. Aadhaar, its biometric identity platform, and the unified payments interface (UPI), have radically reshaped how over a billion Indians prove identity and transfer money. Together, they've driven financial inclusion, curbed leakages in welfare delivery and earned praise from the World Bank and G20.

By the end of 2024, over 1.4bn Indians were registered on Aadhaar. UPI was clocking nearly 18.4bn transactions a month. Both platforms had successfully restructured the relationship between citizens, government and the economy.