India Stack: the layers of digital public infrastructure

Prelims and MainsCurrent affairs on this: Digital public infrastructure and platforms

Digital public infrastructure is shared digital rails, built or governed by the State and open to anyone to build on, like roads. India Stack has three layers. The identity layer is Aadhaar, a biometric number for 1.3 billion people, with eKYC and eSign; the Supreme Court upheld the Aadhaar Act, 2016 in 2018 while barring private firms from demanding it. The payments layer is the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), run by the National Payments Corporation of India, which lets any bank account pay any other from a phone. The data layer lets a person share their own data with consent: DigiLocker for documents, the Account Aggregator framework for financial data, and the consent architecture behind them. On top sit the platforms: CoWIN, the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), and the direct benefit transfer that pays welfare into Aadhaar linked accounts.

India Stack, layer by layer

Layer	Rail	Steward	Law	Example of use
Identity	Aadhaar, eKYC, eSign	Unique Identification Authority of India	Aadhaar Act, 2016; Puttaswamy, 2018	opening a bank account in minutes
Payments	UPI, Aadhaar enabled payments, Bharat Bill Pay	National Payments Corporation of India	Payment and Settlement Systems Act; Reserve Bank rules	a street vendor's QR code
Data	DigiLocker, Account Aggregator, consent artefact	Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology; Reserve Bank for account aggregators	Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023	sharing bank statements for a loan with consent
Platforms	CoWIN, ONDC, direct benefit transfer	ministries	scheme rules	vaccination certificates; a small shop on an open network

Identity proves who, payments move money, data shares with consent; the platforms are what people see.Source: India Stack documentation; National Payments Corporation of India

What makes it public infrastructure: open standards and interfaces, so a private app and a government app use the same rails; no fee at the base layer; and a public body, the Unique Identification Authority of India or the National Payments Corporation, as steward.
Direct benefit transfer: the Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and mobile (JAM) trinity, which lets subsidies and pensions go straight to a bank account, with the savings from removing duplicate and ghost beneficiaries as the fiscal argument.
UPI's design: a virtual address instead of an account number, interoperability between apps, and zero merchant fee for small transactions, which is why it displaced cash faster than cards did; the cost is that two private apps carry most of the volume.
Exporting the stack: UPI links with Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, France and others, and the G20 declaration of 2023 under India's presidency, which named digital public infrastructure as a development approach; the Modular Open Source Identity Platform is the open version other countries adopt.
The risks: exclusion when biometrics fail, surveillance when databases link, fraud on UPI, and dependence on a few platforms; the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 is the law that now governs the data the stack collects.

Mains: India Stack turned identity and payments into public goods that private firms build on, which is why India's fintech grew without a monopoly at the centre; the unfinished layer is data, where consent is designed but not yet lived.

UPSC has asked

Prelims 2026: the objective of the Open Network for Digital Commerce
Prelims 2023: digital public infrastructure as a priority of India's G20 presidency
Mains 2022: direct benefit transfer as a reform of delivery, and its limits
Prelims 2017: the likely consequence of the Unified Payments Interface
Prelims 2016: what DigiLocker is and what it allows

Further reading: DPI@2047 for Viksit Bharat: a strategic roadmap (NITI Aayog)