This essay is part of a series that highlights the main takeaways from discussions that took place at Carnegie India’s eighth Global Technology Summit, co-hosted with the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India.
In 2024, India will host a Quad Leaders’ Summit. This will be the sixth convening of a high-level dialogue between India, the United States, Australia, and Japan. Following a series of half-starts dating back to 2007, the dialogue resumed in 2017. Since then, six Quad working groups have been created to deepen cooperation in the areas of climate, critical and emerging technologies, cybersecurity, health, infrastructure, and space.
There is an urgent need to create a separate strand within existing working group mechanisms on digital public infrastructure (DPI). Given that each member state offers a set of faculties that can be leveraged for specific projects, the Quad is well-placed to deploy DPI in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. Indeed, DPI could be piloted in at least six countries within 2024 alone.
This essay provides a rationale for our thinking. It draws on discussions the authors have had with DPI builders, states with a DPI demand, including Pacific Island countries, and the different DPI communities that have emerged in the last eighteen months. Much of these linkages were fused during India’s presidency of the G20.
Our reflections are also shaped by the conclusions of a dedicated track 1.5 discussion on DPI in the Quad, convened in December 2023 at the Global Technology Summit in New Delhi. The discussion was attended by officials, technologists, representatives from international institutions and the private sector, lawyers, and others who have built DPIs in India and across the world.
Why DPI?
The DPI approach is a relatively new advance in building digital assets in any country. It can be understood as a set of foundational layers, commonly referred to as railroads, upon which technological artifacts are built and developed. These could be digital identities, digital payment systems, data exchange systems, and other such assets. It offers greater sovereign control over a country’s digital highways. The private sector and open-source communities can build on top of the highways, but no one stakeholder owns the so-called railroads. DPIs are usually built to be interoperable and extendable; that is, they are built using shared protocols, allowing different assets to communicate seamlessly with each other. In this way, DPIs function as a shared technology infrastructure system. There is much that has been written on DPIs already.
DPIs have been successfully implemented by countries like India, Brazil, Singapore, and Estonia. They have proven to be an enabler for rapid financial inclusion. Across the globe, multiple use cases show that DPIs can be applied to accelerate government service delivery, especially during emergencies.
In parts of the Indo-Pacific, there is potential for the Quad to work collectively to offer a digital path to countries that, in turn, allows them to exercise agency while ensuring portability and greater transparency. In essence, the DPI framework is designed to build solutions that are open, portable, and auditable. It carries the promise of bringing together governance, technology, markets, and communities.
Next Steps
First, there is an immediate need to engage in a Quad discussion on DPI governance and standards. India’s G20 presidency produced the first set of multilaterally agreed-upon and suggested frameworks for DPI. Based on this starting point, the Quad could create an approach framework that can be evolved over time. The exercise ought to invest in the process of developing such a framework rather than seek an immediate end state. It could be completed prior to the upcoming Leader’s Summit in 2024.
Second, there is a need to simultaneously discuss DPI deployment and adoption in at least six countries. Six jurisdictions could be chosen on the basis of population—the least populated states with limited state capacities could be prioritized. The relative advantage of each Quad member should be leveraged in this process. India, including the government and different DPI communities, has a clear advantage in offering DPI assets owing to its mature DPI ecosystem. Yet, the United States, Australia, and Japan may have a stronger set of influences in the more remote jurisdictions that have a DPI demand.
The discussion on choosing jurisdictions should also go hand-in-hand with that on financing. In states that have a population of less than 10 million, we estimate that a pilot should not cost more than $2 million.1 This estimate includes the actual buildout of a particular technology asset (such as credentialing, direct benefit transfers, and digital identities), aligning local governance structures with a broader DPI framework, socialization, and training of civil society, the private sector, and technical communities in local jurisdictions.
Quad members could organize a workshop with countries that have a DPI demand and in jurisdictions where a Quad initiative has the potential to succeed. Such a workshop could be hosted alongside or just before the summit in 2024. Given that this effort involves only four countries, all of which have agreed to the G20 DPI framework, the above-mentioned steps can easily be aligned in a short period of time.
Lastly, discussions around DPI are often marred by difficulties in implementation. Convoluted procurement processes and complex requests for proposals (RFPs) bloat timelines and require extensive resources and state capacities. Policymakers prefer to stay away from DPI deployment because of the complexities embedded in the rollout.
Today, there is a potential alternative: the DPI as a packaged Solution (DaaS) model. This is proposed as a cloud-hosted DPI offering designed for faster adoption. It is, in essence, a set of pre-packaged and plug-and-play offerings. From DPI builders to the private sector, there is some confidence in the marketplace that DaaS can be operationalized within six months in most jurisdictions. Of course, this model is still a work in progress. There is nevertheless every opportunity for the Quad to develop a DPI initiative and potentially execute pilots in the Indo-Pacific in 2024.
Notes
1 This estimate is based on discussions with DPI architects, access providers, and hyperscalers.