I read budget documents for pleasure, which is either a professional qualification or a cry for help. They have taught me to distrust reforms that exist mainly as adjectives. “Transformative”, “historic” and “inclusive” are words every government uses; the useful question is whether a reform changes the mundane transaction between citizen, market and state. By that test, India’s digital public infrastructure is among the Modi government’s strongest achievements. Aadhaar-linked services, UPI, DigiLocker, electronic know-your-customer systems and the Account Aggregator framework are not glamorous in isolation. Together, however, they have altered the cost and speed of participating in the formal economy. That is institutional reform, not an app launch.
The opposition’s standard response is to perform an archaeological dig. Aadhaar began under the UPA, it says, as though creating an early project permanently assigns ownership of everything later built upon it. Certainly, the UPA deserves credit for establishing Aadhaar. Mature partisans should acknowledge that without suffering an identity crisis. But an identification layer is not the same thing as a functioning digital ecosystem. The political decision to integrate identity, bank accounts, mobile access, payments and public services at national scale came later, amid warnings that Indians would never adopt such systems. The Modi government did not merely inherit a foundation; it built aggressively on it, absorbed political risk and made interoperability a governing principle.
Scale is not a footnote
The difference between a pilot and public infrastructure is scale. India has produced plenty of clever pilots that became conference presentations and little else. Digital public infrastructure became ordinary. A vegetable seller displaying a payment code does not experience UPI as a flagship scheme. A pensioner retrieving a document does not care which ministry coined which acronym. This very banality is the achievement: the machinery disappears into daily behaviour. The government’s Economic Survey discussion of digital public infrastructure describes the stack of Aadhaar, e-KYC, UPI, DigiLocker, e-sign and related services. Read together rather than as isolated statistics, these systems show a state trying to lower transaction costs for everyone.
I am not arguing that every digitised process is automatically humane or competent. Anyone who has watched an elderly relative wrestle with biometric failure knows that technological elegance can become administrative cruelty at the last mile. Connectivity is uneven, grievance systems are often poorly designed, and officials sometimes treat a failed authentication as proof that a citizen does not exist. A government proud of scale must be equally serious about exceptions. Offline alternatives, assisted access and prompt correction mechanisms are not concessions to Luddites; they are part of sound engineering. Yet these shortcomings argue for better implementation, not for retreating to paper files, middlemen and the old discretionary state.
That distinction is lost in much of the commentary. The same people who once lamented leakage now discuss direct transfers almost entirely through hypothetical dystopias. The same political class that complained about informalisation often sneers when a tiny merchant acquires a transaction history. Skepticism is necessary because databases concentrate power, but skepticism becomes unserious when it refuses to compare the new system with the actual old one. The old arrangement was not a privacy paradise. It was frequently opaque, slow and dependent on the goodwill of local gatekeepers. Paper records could be lost, altered or held hostage. Cash-only life did not liberate the poor; it limited their choices and made their economic activity harder to prove.
The reform is architectural
What I find most impressive is the decision to build rails on which public and private services can compete. UPI is not simply another government wallet. Its value lies in allowing banks and payment applications to interact through common rules. That architecture prevents one private platform from owning the entire marketplace. It also gives smaller firms a way to reach consumers without recreating the payment system. The latest Economic Survey goes further, examining how digital payment histories can reduce information gaps in credit. The promise is not that an algorithm will magically make every borrower safe; it is that verifiable activity can give lenders more than a salary slip and a metropolitan address.
Congress has an awkward political problem here. It can claim parentage over Aadhaar, but doing so reminds voters that it did not integrate the wider system with the speed and conviction seen after 2014. It can criticise exclusions, which is legitimate, but its loudest voices too often slide from demanding safeguards to belittling the entire project. Nostalgia then arrives dressed as policy: the implication that governance was more sensitive when citizens queued, photocopied documents and found someone to stamp them. I remember that India. Its supposedly human touch often belonged to the person expecting a favour.
The Modi government’s approach reflects a recognisably right-of-centre instinct at its best: the state should create reliable common infrastructure, establish rules and let enterprise multiply uses that no ministry could plan in advance. This is not laissez-faire fantasy. The state remains central as standard-setter, guarantor and service provider. But it does not need to run every consumer interface. Nor should it. The innovation around payments happened precisely because government-backed rails were available to competing institutions. That combination of public capacity and private experimentation is more sophisticated than the stale argument between nationalisation and abandonment.
Credit is due, scrutiny remains due
Giving the government credit does not require pretending that every extension of the stack is wise. Data minimisation should be a practical rule, not a seminar slogan. Consent screens that nobody understands are not meaningful consent. Cybersecurity must be treated as continuing public expenditure rather than a one-time procurement. When a digital service becomes essential infrastructure, outages and fraud are governance failures with real distributive consequences. Parliament should scrutinise the rules, independent institutions should test security claims, and citizens need simple remedies. A confident government ought to welcome such scrutiny because durable systems earn legitimacy by surviving it.
I would also resist the temptation to turn digital success into surveillance enthusiasm. The fact that government can connect datasets does not mean it should connect all of them. Purpose limitation matters. So does the ability to challenge an automated decision. These are not imported anxieties designed to hobble Indian progress; they are the next stage of institution-building. The BJP’s supporters sometimes answer every concern by reciting adoption numbers. That is inadequate. Adoption proves usefulness, not infallibility. A system used by hundreds of millions needs stronger accountability precisely because exit becomes difficult.
Still, perspective is necessary. India has created public digital capabilities that richer countries have struggled to assemble across fragmented institutions. This did not happen because one charismatic speech changed technology. It required sustained administrative coordination, regulatory work, bank participation, engineering talent and political pressure to deliver. The government deserves credit for making these unromantic tasks central to its development model. It also deserves pressure to make the resulting system safer and more accessible. Those positions are perfectly compatible.
The larger implication is that reform need not always mean selling a public company or changing a tax rate. Sometimes reform is architectural: reducing friction, making records portable and replacing personal discretion with a common protocol. Such changes rarely produce a single ribbon-cutting moment, but they alter economic behaviour more deeply than many headline measures. If the opposition wants to challenge the government seriously, it should explain how it would improve this architecture. Claiming that everything began before 2014 is not a programme. It is a family album.
My verdict is therefore unfashionably straightforward. The Modi government took an inherited identity project, joined it to other public systems and turned digital access into a core instrument of governance. It made mistakes, sometimes serious ones, in inclusion and safeguards. Those deserve correction. But the underlying achievement is real, and Congress-era nostalgia cannot wish it away. The best evidence is not found in a minister’s boast. It is found at the tea stall where a tiny payment arrives instantly, in the document retrieved without a tout and in the citizen who can transact without asking a gatekeeper for permission.
