Stacking Up for Resilience: Digital Public Infrastructure: The India Way

Threats to the ability of democratically elected governments to drive and preserve their citizens’ economic development and thus promote their human rights are threats to the confidence of their citizens in democracy itself. Threats to the cyber resilience of critical infrastructure assets — that enable and preserve economic development — are threats to that very confidence. This chapter positions the technical backbones for digital public infrastructure (DPI), which delivers digitally native essential services, as critical infrastructure assets. This chapter uses the approach to DPI of the world’s largest democracy as a case study. It explores how India’s DPI — built per an open standards-based paradigm, implemented by protocols and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that comprise the ‘India Stack’ – operates at the scale of the world’s largest population. It finds the cyber resilience of the technical backbones for India’s DPI vital to India’s democratic resilience. This chapter thus calls on India to prosecute systemic cyber risks to these backbones that stem from the critical software running on them. India must incentivise vendors of that software to invest in the security of their software development life cycles and mitigate software supply chain risks. India must also manage open source software risks to its DPI appropriately. This chapter concludes by putting forward how India can export its approach and the India Stack. Other democracies, especially India’s Global South partners, stand to gain from its experience, including by strengthening the trust and confidence of their citizens in democracy itself, as well as by implementing norms for responsible state conduct in cyberspace that were approved by the United Nations General Assembly. Such benefits will be reinforced by Indian advice on how to deploy DPI in a cyber-resilient manner, informed by the multilateral consensus on DPI, software security and cyber resilience, which India forged as G20 President in 2023.