Overview

This chapter unpacks the different areas of harm we have identified through the global DPI agenda to date, and how it is unfolding as a narrative and set of practices.

The dangers of the DPI supply push are manifold.

First, the starting point of the discourse is that digital transformations are the main solution for solving development needs. As CDPI suggests these are key to “addressing socio-economic problems at population scale” and do not pause to ask the question of whether structural and political issues of access, equity and inclusion both in and within countries can be meaningfully addressed through technological innovation.

Second, the framing of DPI as defined by the Gates Foundation and Nilekani ecosystems is pushing for “public rails for private innovation” thus creating product pathways for the private sector to enter into public functions of identity, healthcare, [payments](https://inc42.com/buzz/phonepe-google-pay-continue-to-dominate-upi-market-share-in-july/#:~:text=1.1 Bn transactions.-,In July%2C PhonePe held a 48.3%25 market share in the,%25 of the market%2C respectively.), and mobility. For instance, the recent announcement by Google to invest in the export of India’s DPIs which will be anchored on Google Cloud, or the investment of Protean E-Governments technologies into ONDC. The building of a market for the private sector to deepen existing products (such as cloud services) or innovate new products (such as Google Pay) as facilitated by public approval or orchestration enables the same behaviours of technology companies and private capital as the ones DPI discourse is aiming to address.

Third, governance is seen as an encumbrance to the scale and growth of DPIs - and therefore there are two approaches to building safeguards, through techno-legal approaches such as “privacy by design” or through exercises that sit within multilaterals as suggestions in the form of DPI safeguards, which are not enforceable. There are no efforts for democratic governance and citizen participation in the contemplation and design of DPI-processes. Further, where institutions do exist, they do so outside the government/ state ecosystem - such as in India, CDPI (a pro-bono advisory team) and COSS are philanthropic funded organisations in a university, while Carnegie India is an independent non-profit.

From these developments, we suggest there are four critical areas of harm that are emerging around the DPI push, which require urgent attention by those funding, enabling and supporting DPI in its various iterations, from India to Europe.

1. Harm to ordinary people, as they likely are paying for DPI in ways they do not fully understand (both now and in the future) as well as lose channels for democratic accountability
2. Exclusionary and uneven forms of private sector involvement, especially in smaller and lower-income countries where DPI is being pushed
3. On one hand, a loss of state capacity and democratic accountability, given dependencies within the design and implementation of DPI and flows of data while not necessarily delivering on objectives of enabling competition and sovereignty, and
4. On the other hand, reinforcing of particular state capacities as a more authoritarian entity with new potential to exercise targeted harm, as people are recognised, interact and can be acted upon through integrated digital systems

We substantiate how these harms are unfolding in the remainder of this chapter. These harms emerge through a particular confluence of intended and unintended actions by political, multilateral, philanthropic and private sector actors. By showing how harms have emerged, we aim to establish an evidentiary base for thinking about how to approach alternatives to the current global DPI agenda.

2.1 Harm to ordinary people

Stories of how DPI enables a low-income, previously excluded woman to access and participate with government services and market transactions are at the heart of DPI narratives. Yet, even as DPI aims for inclusive digital transformation, it is also important to query who might be excluded and/or disadvantaged with DPI, how and why. Specifically we draw attention to:

• The inattention to exclusion and inequality in the promotion of DPI

2.1.1 Inattention to exclusion and inequality: The DPI agenda is being promoted in ways that fail to challenge inequality or distributional issues, meaning it risks further excluding already-excluded and/or marginalised people.

• The DPI agenda aims to solve for ‘poverty’, but it does so without addressing inequality or distribution. In line with broader critiques of philanthropy, how the DPI agenda has been promoted does little to address the potential for and reality of concentration of wealth and power.
• In consistently marketing potential cost-savings to governments – especially related to “ghost” and ineligible beneficiaries (who may, in reality be legitimate beneficiaries locked out of the system) – there is an implicit narrative emerging that places the government somewhat in opposition to citizens, rather than as an enabler of social services (particularly for the most vulnerable segments of the population).
• Failure rates and exclusion are seen as “teething troubles” and tactics of obfuscation are deployed. For instance, in Malaysia’s MyDigitalID, there are claims of no false acceptance rate, which means no one has been issued with an identity certificate that doesn’t belong to them. However, there are around 14% false rejection rates, which means people with correct information are rejected because the system is unable to read their data.