JanDPI is a flagship call-for-action initiative by the Digital Empowerment Foundation, grounded in the principle that public infrastructure must be, and is, designed to serve people. Notably, every case story of a DPI that is popularly told reflects people’s efforts to get included in the DPI system, rather than the DPI reaching the masses at their doorsteps.
JanDPI is a defined framework, based on the real-life needs of people, outlining how a DPI must serve those who remain unconnected.
Osama Manzar, Founder & Director, Digital Empowerment Foundation
Centering People in Digital Public Infrastructure
Digital systems are reshaping how citizens access services and interact with the state. From identity verification to welfare delivery, from financial transactions to healthcare access, Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) has become the invisible backbone of modern governance. As this transformation accelerates, however, a critical question demands our attention: are we building these systems for people, or are we expecting people to adapt to them?
JanDPI is a movement to reframe Digital Public Infrastructure as a public good, one that is rooted in equity, dignity, and accountability. It is a call to ensure that the digital revolution unfolding across India and the world does not leave behind those it most needs to serve. At its heart lies a simple, uncompromising belief: a right without meaningful digital access is no right at all.
Across the world, Digital Public Infrastructure has become the backbone of governance, payments, and identity systems. From Aadhaar to UPI to DigiLocker, India is celebrated as a global leader, with its India Stack inspiring digital transformation in dozens of countries. International forums hail these platforms as templates for inclusive, scalable digital governance, and the numbers of billions of transactions, hundreds of millions of authentications are genuinely impressive.
Yet beneath this expansion lies a growing tension that the celebratory headlines rarely capture. As digital systems scale at unprecedented speed, efficiency is often prioritised over equity, and access is assumed rather than ensured. The metrics that policymakers celebrate, including users registered, accounts opened, transactions processed, etc., measure activity, but not always inclusion.
For millions of Indians, those excluded by poverty, geography, disability, language, or digital illiteracy, these systems remain distant, complex, or inaccessible. A rural citizen navigating welfare schemes, a small artisan seeking market access, a first-time user trying to interact with a government portal: for them, the promise of DPI often remains unrealised. The infrastructure exists on paper and in policy, but not in their lived reality.
The question, therefore, is no longer whether technology can reach millions. We have already proven that it can. The question is whether it can meaningfully include them.
While India is hailed for its digital leap, beneath the celebration lies a quieter, harder truth: hundreds of millions of citizens remain on the wrong side of the digital divide. The numbers tell a story that no celebratory press release can erase.
Of the 915 million people living in rural India, only about ten percent use UPI, India’s flagship payment system, regularly and successfully. India’s vast informal economy is sustained by an estimated 200 million rural artisans, the majority of whom remain unconnected to digital markets and digital tools. Approximately 200 million Dalits navigate digital welfare systems that were rarely designed with their realities in mind. Around 144 million agricultural workers form the backbone of India’s food security, yet most remain outside the digital fold. 104 million tribal community members live in regions where connectivity is patchy, content is rarely in their language, and assisted access is scarce. 3.5 million handloom and handicraft workers sustain India’s cultural heritage and export economy, often without digital access to markets, credit, or information. Even the 2 million ASHA workers who carry rural healthcare on their shoulders remain underserved by the very digital systems they help administer.
“If DPI is like a road, but the road does not reach me — how does it help?”
Taken together, an estimated 40 to 50 percent of India’s population is excluded from digital systems, not by choice, but by circumstance. They are excluded by limited availability of infrastructure, by physical inaccessibility of services, by unaffordability of devices and data, and by insufficient capacity to use systems designed without them in mind.
This is not a glitch in the system. This is the system until we change it.
WHAT IS JanDPI?
The word Jan means people. It is a deliberate, grounded choice, rooted in the languages and lived realities of the communities JanDPI seeks to serve. It signals that this is not another technocratic framework imported from abroad, but a movement that begins where people are, in the languages they speak, with the priorities they hold.
JanDPI challenges the dominant narrative that treats citizens as passive users of systems built elsewhere by experts they will never meet. It calls for a fundamental shift toward people-centric infrastructure — where systems are designed to respond to the diverse realities of communities, rather than expecting individuals to adapt to systems that were not built for them. The burden of adaptation, JanDPI insists, must rest on the systems, not on the citizens — and least of all on those with the fewest resources to adapt.
A people-centric DPI, in this vision, is one that enables the poorest of the poor — the unconnected, the illiterate, people with disabilities, and marginalised communities to access services as a matter of right, not as a matter of luck or privilege. It is infrastructure designed for those who have no alternatives, ensuring that technology reduces inequality rather than deepening it.
JanDPI is, fundamentally, a constitutional-rights-based vision. Just as we recognise the right to food, the right to water, the right to education, and the right to information as foundational entitlements of citizenship, we must now recognise the right to meaningful digital access. Public digital infrastructure, in this framing, is not a service to be optimised for efficiency, but a public good to be guaranteed for all. It must be of the people, by the people, and with the people, designed with their voices, accountable to their needs, and accessible in their lives.
A right without access is meaningless. A right without meaningful digital access is futile.
THE GLOBAL CONTEXT
When India assumed the G20 presidency in 2022, Digital Public Infrastructure was placed at the centre of its development agenda. DPI was positioned as a powerful tool to advance the Sustainable Development Goals — ‘no poverty’, ‘zero hunger’, ‘quality education’, ‘good health and well-being’, and ‘affordable clean energy’. The signal could not have been clearer: DPI was meant to serve the poorest first. It was framed not as a technological achievement to be admired, but as a developmental instrument to be deployed in service of the most pressing human needs.
This framing has only grown in importance. As the India AI Impact Summit 2026 unfolds in Delhi, the world is watching how India shapes the next generation of DPI, particularly as Artificial Intelligence becomes layered onto the foundational digital systems already in place. Countries from Singapore and Estonia to nations across Africa and Latin America are adopting interoperable digital frameworks inspired by the India model, looking to India Stack as a blueprint for their own digital transformations. Multilateral bodies, the Digital Public Goods Alliance, and global development institutions are all aligned in their enthusiasm. What India builds today, the Global South will mirror tomorrow.
This is precisely why JanDPI matters. The conversations shaping the global future of DPI are too often dominated by perspectives from the centre — from capitals, from boardrooms, from international forums where the realities of the last mile are abstractions rather than experiences. JanDPI brings a vital corrective to this conversation, rooted in villages, panchayats (elected village committees), and last-mile realities where DPI must ultimately prove its worth.
If DPI is to fulfil its promise as a tool for global development, it must be designed for the last citizen first, not the early adopter, not the urban professional, not the technologically fluent. JanDPI exists to insist on this truth, to bring the Global South perspective to the global DPI conversation, and to ensure that the next chapter of digital governance is written with, and for those who have most to gain or lose from how it unfolds.
