Digital Public Infrastructure & GovTech

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is transforming how states structure identity, deliver services, move money, and govern at scale. Unlike abstract models of e-governance, India offers a visible and interoperable public digital “stack” — identity (Aadhaar), payments (UPI), registries, DigiLocker, DIKSHA, eSanjeevani, POSHAN Tracker — that can be studied as functioning institutional architecture.

This theme treats digital governance not merely as technology, but as political design. Students examine how digital rails redistribute access, create new inclusion risks, alter bureaucratic workflows, and reshape accountability relationships between citizen and state.

Through seminars on platform architecture, service design labs, stakeholder interviews, field visits to digital service ecosystems, ethics clinics, and policy studios, students conduct rigorous inclusion audits and propose responsible redesigns grounded in governance feasibility.

The emphasis is on studying real systems — not simulations — and evaluating how platform scale intersects with equity, privacy, and institutional capacity.

Students will:

Conduct a DPI building-block analysis (identity, payments, registries, data exchange layers) and map system dependencies.
Apply field methods including service blueprinting, user-journey mapping, stakeholder interviews, and inclusion audits.
Identify and assess exclusion risks (authentication failures, connectivity barriers, literacy gaps, grievance bottlenecks).
Evaluate responsible governance dimensions: privacy-by-design, cybersecurity safeguards, consent architecture, and trust-building mechanisms.
Compare digital-first delivery with assisted-digital or hybrid service models.
Produce a faculty-gradeable service-delivery audit with inclusion risk analysis.
Develop a policy clinic memo evaluating scale, accountability, and regulatory design trade-offs.
Create a mini-case study suitable for classroom adoption on one DPI platform (e.g., DigiLocker, UPI, POSHAN Tracker, DIKSHA).