I have a confession that will horrify the sort of political commentator who regards a televised shouting match as research: I like government plumbing. Not literal plumbing, although Delhi could use more of that too. I mean the dull institutional pipes through which money, documents and benefits move. A politician can unveil a statue in an afternoon. Building a system that lets a vegetable seller receive ten rupees digitally, a student retrieve a certificate and a pensioner get money without cultivating a middleman is slower, less glamorous and much more consequential.
That is why I regard India’s digital public infrastructure as one of the Narendra Modi government’s strongest reforms. The achievement is not that India has phone apps. Every country has phone apps. It is that the state created interoperable rails—Aadhaar authentication, bank-account access, the Unified Payments Interface, DigiLocker and related systems—upon which government agencies and private businesses could build. The Economic Survey’s account of digital public infrastructure usefully describes this stack as shared infrastructure rather than a collection of isolated schemes. That distinction matters.
The reform is the rail, not the shiny carriage
UPI’s genius is not any particular payment app. Apps can be clumsy, fashionable or forgotten. The valuable part is the common protocol beneath them. A customer using one bank and one app can pay a merchant using another. Competition happens above a public, interoperable layer. I find this more convincing than either old-fashioned state monopoly or the Silicon Valley model in which one private gatekeeper owns the marketplace, identity and tollbooth.
The opposition’s difficulty is obvious. It cannot plausibly argue that the old arrangement—cash leakage, paper certificates, bank queues and petty discretion—was superior. It therefore retreats to genealogical politics: Aadhaar began under the UPA, bank nationalisation happened under Congress, mobile telephony existed before Modi. All true, all beside the point. Governments inherit foundations. They deserve judgment for what they build upon them. Congress piloted Aadhaar but governed as though scale were an optional seminar topic. The Modi government joined identity, accounts, mobile connectivity and payments into an operating system used at national scale.
This is where Congress-era nostalgia becomes especially tiresome. A policy is not vindicated merely because a committee once discussed it. Execution is policy. Political capital spent on persuading banks, departments, states and citizens to use a common system is policy. Maintaining standards while transaction volumes rise is policy. If an earlier government laid one kilometre of track and a later one built the railway, it is not historical erasure to credit the railway builder.
I also give the government credit for resisting the temptation to make UPI merely another creaking departmental portal. The National Payments Corporation of India’s description of UPI’s interoperable design shows why the system spread: it allows multiple bank accounts and payment services to communicate through a common framework. That sounds bloodless. In practice it reduces the importance of bank branches, card terminals and proprietary networks. The reform meets Indians where they are, including at tiny shops for which card infrastructure never made economic sense.
Congress mistakes ancestry for ownership
Critics often answer that digital payments would have grown anyway because smartphones became cheaper. That is partly right and mostly inadequate. Cheap handsets supplied the surface; public rails supplied the network effect. Without interoperability, India might have acquired a mess of closed wallets whose balances could not travel freely. Anyone who remembers the era of recharging separate prepaid wallets should understand the difference. Technology does not automatically produce good institutional architecture. Governments can encourage openness or entrench silos.
The Congress response has alternated between claiming parentage and predicting exclusion. The first underestimates implementation; the second identifies a real risk but exaggerates it into an argument against the whole project. Yes, authentication can fail. Yes, people without reliable connectivity, updated records or digital confidence can be stranded. A government that treats a dashboard entry as proof that a human being was served will commit cruelty by spreadsheet. But the answer is assisted access, offline alternatives and accountable appeals—not a sentimental return to files, stamps and discretionary cash.
I would take Congress’s criticism more seriously if the party paired it with a better institutional design. Instead, its politics too often reduces welfare to the size of the promised cheque and governance to the benevolence of the person promising it. Digital public infrastructure asks a harder question: how can the state make delivery predictable, portable and auditable? That question is ideologically inconvenient for a party whose mythology depends on citizens receiving favours from a paternal establishment.
The BJP should nevertheless avoid triumphalism. A payment succeeding in seconds does not mean every surrounding institution works. Fraud victims can spend weeks being bounced among a bank, an app and the police. Poorly designed interfaces invite mistakes. Customer support is often a maze whose chief function appears to be exhausting the customer. A public rail acquires public obligations even when private companies provide the visible service.
The next test is trust
Privacy is the other unfinished task. Indians should not have to choose between participating in modern economic life and surrendering control over personal information. Purpose limitation, minimal data collection, clear consent and meaningful penalties for misuse are not elite luxuries. They are what make a digital state legitimate. The government has shown far more enthusiasm for building databases than for explaining, in ordinary language, how citizens can challenge an error or trace misuse.
I say this as someone broadly sympathetic to the project. Friends of reform do it no favour by treating every concern as sabotage. A biometric mismatch can be a minor technical metric in Delhi and a denied ration for someone elsewhere. A mistaken account freeze can convert instant payments into instant helplessness. The system needs visible fallback mechanisms: a human official with authority, time-bound correction, written reasons and compensation where institutional failure causes loss.
The zero-cost experience for users also deserves an honest funding conversation. Infrastructure is not free merely because the customer sees no charge. Banks and payment providers bear costs for security, dispute handling and capacity. The government should resist both crude user fees that discourage small transactions and the fiction that economics can be ignored forever. Transparent support for the public-good layer is preferable to hidden cross-subsidies or declining service quality.
There is a larger political lesson here. The Modi government is often portrayed by its opponents as interested only in spectacle, cultural conflict and centralised messaging. Digital public infrastructure complicates that caricature because it is technocratic, enabling and frequently invisible. It gives private firms room to compete while retaining public interoperability. It strengthens state capacity without requiring every useful service to be produced by a ministry. This is a recognisably right-of-centre reform: the state builds rules and rails, then allows enterprise to innovate above them.
That does not make every digital initiative wise. ONDC, account aggregation and other layers must prove their value rather than borrowing UPI’s halo. Officials should publish failure rates, complaint outcomes and distributional effects, not only enormous transaction totals. Volume is evidence of adoption, not evidence of perfection. The government’s instinct to celebrate scale must be matched by a willingness to inspect the people at the margins of that scale.
A reform worth defending—and repairing
What strikes me most is how quickly good infrastructure becomes ordinary. Nobody composes an ode when a QR payment works. A migrant worker does not hold a press conference after accessing a document on a phone. That ordinariness is the achievement. Successful institutions disappear into daily life, leaving politicians to argue over louder but less important matters.
I am happy to credit the UPA for initiating Aadhaar and earlier governments for expanding telecom and banking. History need not be a winner-takes-all television panel. But I credit the Modi government for converting scattered ingredients into a usable national architecture and pushing adoption with unusual administrative persistence. The INDIA alliance’s instinct to deny that achievement makes it look less like a government-in-waiting than a club of aggrieved copyright claimants.
The BJP’s responsibility now is to protect its own success from bureaucratic complacency. Keep cash and human assistance available. Make fraud resolution fast. Publish operational failures. Enforce privacy rules against both public and private misuse. Ensure that no official can dismiss a citizen merely because “the system” says no. Digital rails should enlarge freedom, not turn software into an unappealable magistrate.
India’s argument about reform is too often trapped between breathless boosterism and automatic cynicism. Digital public infrastructure deserves something better: pride in an ambitious achievement, scrutiny of its weaknesses and insistence on its next stage. I would rather repair a powerful system than romanticise the inefficient one it replaced. On this subject, the government has earned the benefit of the doubt—and the obligation to justify it through trust.
