Designed for Control: Rethinking infrastructure, power and the public
Across the Global South, Digital Public Infrastructure is being sold as a leap forward for inclusion and modern governance. But as Pamodi Hewawaravita reveals, these systems often deepen exclusion, entrench surveillance, and blur the line between public good and private control.
by Pamodi Hewawaravita
Scan your face using a government-approved app or press your finger to a biometric reader to collect welfare payment, enroll 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. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) goes even further, calling DPI “as essential in the 21st century as railways were in the 19th”. 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.
As the Global South constructs these new digital roads, the need to critically evaluate their building blocks — and the sociopolitical circumstances in which they operate — is increasingly urgent. These platforms aren’t just conduits; they’re also systems of power that are increasingly rewriting the relationship between citizen and state, often without consent or transparency. As Raman Jit Singh Chima, Access Now’s Asia Pacific Policy Director and Senior International Counsel, puts it: DPI is not devoid of political context, especially in South Asia.
Look no further than India, home to the most ambitious DPI rollout in human history.
The India Stack is a set of interconnected digital platforms transforming how citizens interact with the state and the economy. At its core is Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric identification system, assigning each person a unique number linked to their fingerprints and iris scans. Aadhaar is layered with a Unified Payments Interface (UPI) for real-time mobile payments, powering billions of transactions monthly, and DigiLocker, a cloud-based digital vault allowing individuals to store, verify and share documents like tax records and health data.
While the scale of India’s DPI implementation is jaw-dropping, some of its consequences are less positive.
The elderly, the sick and the immobile — people who need government assistance the most — often find themselves locked out of the system due to biometric mismatches or connectivity issues. Rethink Aadhaar, an online platform, documents cases of harm and even death caused by the India Stack. For instance, from 2015 to 2018, Rethink Aadhaar documented twenty-five hunger deaths caused by Aadhaar-related issues. Media reports point to cases of people who were denied food rations because they’d failed to link their food ration cards to Aadhaar.
Chima also points out that digital identities have implications for sensitive issues affecting the rights of diverse communities, religious minorities, and different ethnic and linguistic groups — specifically how they’re recognised (or not recognised) in a country’s political system: “Whether it’s about voting, citizenship or other identity-related issues, we see an increased polarisation on communal lines, sometimes across South Asia. I think we need to be very careful on where they intersperse on digital identity-based approaches to DPI.”
Worse still, India’s DPI architecture has surveillance baked into its DNA. All citizens are at risk of being surveilled by the state as the Aadhaar Act allows the sharing of demographic data and authentication records — including for “national security” purposes — without clear definitions or checks. There are no strong data protection laws. No independent audits. No opt-out button.
Ignoring distress signals
A growing number of voices are highlighting problematic aspects of DPI like Aadhaar, but they’re often drowned out by influential techno-solutionist advocates who are altering the original vision of DPI on the global stage. Initially, advocates dreamt of truly public digital spaces where people would be able to freely express themselves, exchange ideas and engage in discourse without being exploited for profit. However, what started as an ideal of civic engagement in digital spaces through community-driven, decentralised infrastructure has become a narrow tunnel for economic growth.
Instead of fostering civic life and supporting community-led innovation, states and profit-driven entities are more interested in building pathways for private sector growth. This has resulted in powerful governments shipping their digital governance models to their less powerful neighbours without first critically evaluating the potential harm of such transfers. For instance, China’s Digital Silk Road is now making inroads in countries in Africa and Asia eager for economic opportunities — at the cost of digital security. Meanwhile, the European Union (EU) has unveiled their ‘Global Gateway’ strategy, promising to address the digital divide in a quest for sustainable development.
Due to DPI being traded in this manner, smaller states are becoming battlegrounds for global superpowers in new ways. We can see this in Kenya, where China and the US are vying for control, notes Muthuri Kathure, a senior fellow at Tech Global Institute. On the one hand, the Kenyan government is keen on doing business with China. On the other, the US sees Kenya as a hub serving multiple purposes in trade, security and counterterrorism.
Chima encourages smaller countries to learn from the mistakes of Aadhaar — not solely from a technical perspective but also from a societal perspective. “These stories are up online. Access Now, for example, has recommendations on national digital identity programmes, where we say exactly what governments should do and not do when they deploy their own programmes. It doesn’t mean that you don’t build digital systems or programmes, but you ask whom is it being built for, and in what manner? And most importantly, why are you doing it?”
He notes the importance of placing human rights at the centre of DPI to ensure that digital technology empowers individuals and communities, instead of entrenching existing power structures and inequalities.
“To create truly public digital infrastructure, it is essential to prioritise the needs and rights of individuals, particularly those most vulnerable to exclusion and coercion. This requires a shift from viewing DPI as a purely technical solution to understanding it as a social process that must be governed by principles of equity, inclusion, transparency, and accountability. Digital transformation should never be an end in itself but a means to achieve broader social goals.”
Locking in digital colonisation
As DPI crosses borders, it is increasingly being shaped by international rules and agreements. Digital Trade Agreements (DTAs) are a new class of international treaties setting the terms for how data, digital services and technologies move across borders.
Close scrutiny of DTAs reveal how these deals can seriously harm the rights of citizens. Often negotiated and signed without meaningful public consultation, DTAs can prohibit data localisation (keeping data stored within national borders), prevent mandates for open-source software, and ban disclosure of source code, undermining efforts at algorithmic transparency and public oversight.
Take the EU’s first standalone DTAs with Singapore and Japan, for example. One of their most concerning provisions favours cross-border data flows, even when the receiving country offers much weaker protections. The DTA doesn’t simply allow data to flow abroad — it also prevents the EU from stopping such transfers even when rights are endangered. For vulnerable groups like migrants, who are already subject to systemic surveillance and discrimination, this opens the door to data-driven harm with little recourse.
Is DPI really ‘public’?
While DPI is framed as a public good — like roads or electricity — it is, in practice, frequently built, hosted and maintained by private actors, including some of the world’s most powerful corporations. Their involvement in DPI with little transparency or public oversight raises serious questions about how ‘public’ DPI really is, especially when citizens may be subject to commercial surveillance, data extraction and platform lock-in.
For example, in a move that blurs the lines between public infrastructure and commercial service delivery, Mastercard has partnered with the Nigerian government to develop a biometric digital ID and payment system. In Bangladesh, the government’s national cloud infrastructure is hosted on Oracle Cloud, supporting critical systems for health, finance and public administration under the ‘Smart Bangladesh Vision 2041’ initiative.
The next frontier is the integration of AI into DPI. Automated decision-making is already being used to determine who qualifies for welfare, detect fraud, assign risk in healthcare and enhance policing systems. But AI technologies are prone to bias and difficult to challenge. As DPI expands, so too will its entanglement with algorithmic governance — increasing the risk of systemic discrimination at scale.
As states reimagine democracy and governance to fit the digital realm, Kathure stresses the need for genuine citizen engagement, even if it may not make “political sense” at first glance to do so. “Governments and civil society organisations are the lead actors who have the privilege to be in these spaces. We need to find a way in which they’re able to involve the people. It’s a complex conversation. People care about food, shelter and clothes. But this [DPI] is going to affect the basic needs, and so we need to find a way to talk to them about these things in the language that they understand.”
One way of bridging the gap could be through intermediaries from the community, says Shita Laksmi, a digital governance consultant. Even citizens with internet access have different digital literacy levels, so intermediaries could play important roles in helping governments educate the public.
“For example, in the health sector, we have workers who talk with pregnant women, closely monitoring their pregnancy through the nine months and ensuring they take vitamins and attend their doctors’ appointments,” Laksmi says. “These intermediaries are not part of the government, they’re part of the community and they do important work in translating issues to pregnant mothers. We need a similar system for citizens, to help governments with their DPI rollouts.”
With DPI laying the foundation for many fundamental aspects of life — from welfare and education to law enforcement — we must ask: who controls the infrastructure of our digital public life?
In many countries, limited capacity, restricted funding and competing priorities are preventing digital rights organisations from critically interrogating the techno-solutionist drive led by government officials and DPI advocates. The media is also relatively silent on the issue. It’s likely that parts of civil society and the media have already been drawn into — or captured by — the dominant digital development narrative.
While they hasten to develop cutting-edge systems, governments and contractors need to be more transparent about how those arrangements are structured. Who benefits, how is data used, and can members of the public opt out if they don’t agree with the design? Ultimately, it’s up to citizens and civil society to ensure that this new world that’s being built will genuinely serve the public’s interests, instead of those of a powerful few at the top.
Writer bio: Pamodi Hewawaravita works as a Researcher at CommonEdge.Asia. She's also a journalist, exploring stories affecting communities around Sri Lanka. When not writing, she spends her time reading, travelling around the island, or hanging out with cats.
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