"If You Build It, Will They Come? Adoption of Digital Public Infrastructure in India in the 2010s"

This paper examines the development and adoption of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) in India through an inductive, comparative study of four domains: (1) e-governance—India’s biometric ID system now covering over 1.3 billion residents, and disseminated abroad; (2) the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), used by more than 300 million individuals and 100 million merchants, integrated across over 1,000 banks today; (3) digital infrastructure for healthcare; and (4) digital infrastructure for e-commerce, both still struggling to achieve critical mass.
The idea of DPI as a state-created platform emerged with the establishment of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) in 2009, which produced Aadhaar as the biometric digital ID. Aadhaar’s mass adoption in the 2010s created the basis for subsequent Infrastructure layers—most notably UPI in 2016, and later health and commerce initiatives—together branded as “India Stack.”
The project adopts an inductive approach, comparing the four cases to explain their divergent adoption trajectories by tracing how each platform achieved (or failed to achieve) uptake by both customers and service providers, and how the composition of these groups, along with strategies to mobilize them, shaped outcomes.
Using historical methods, the project draws on sources ranging from oral histories with policymakers, bureaucrats, and industry leaders to archival materials that include newspapers, legal documents, policy papers, technical specifications, and white papers by the World Bank, IMF, and other multilateral organizations that closely tracked India’s digital experiment.
Existing scholarship emphasizes how private actors create platforms that governments later regulate. India inverts this dynamic: the government built the platforms first, expecting private actors and citizens to adopt them. Comparing successes and struggles of the different elements of the digital public infrastructure, the paper highlights how audience composition, provider engagement, institutional design, and trust shape adoption of state-led digital infrastructures.