The traditional approach to the digital transformation of governance has been to build full-stack solutions that are narrowly geared to addressing specific problems. This is highly inefficient and unless we commit to designing them so that they use shared, re-useable building blocks we are simply not going to achieve the outcomes we need

This is a link-enhanced version of an article that first appeared in the Mint. You can read the original here.

On 10 March 1876, Alexander Graham-Bell made the world’s first telephone call when he called his assistant, Thomas Augustus Watson, over a copper wire that ran from one room in the house to the next. This one-sided conversation marked the start of a communication revolution that continues to evolve, with steady improvements that keep extending the geographical and spatial boundaries within which we converse.

While the first conversation took place between devices connected to each other with a single wire, as more and more households acquired these new-fangled devices, the complexity of connecting each new telephone to every other forced us to invent the telephone exchange, a central switchboard to which all phones were connected, so that one call could be connected to another.

Sharing Elements of the Stack

But even this was not enough to cater to all the households that wanted to use this new technology. Demand was so high that in the early days of the telecom revolution, multiple homes were often connected in parallel—on the same telephone line (colloquially known as a ‘party line’)—which meant that anytime a call was connected, all phones in that home rang. While talking on the phone, there was nothing to stop anyone else on the party line from picking up another receiver and listening in.

The evolution of telecom technology has always relied on continuous scaling—to optimize the extent to which various elements of the technology stack are shared, so as to unlock greater efficiency. This was even more evident in the transition from fixed-line to mobile telephony, when the development of technologies like Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) allowed us to conduct multiple simultaneous conversations over the same radio frequency band by converting them into data packets and then transmitting them together, separated by time slots or spread across airwave spectrum.

When the Indian government first permitted private-sector participation in the mobile telecom industry, it required telecom companies to build their own infrastructure before enrolling subscribers. This meant they had to erect telecom towers in strategic locations in the circles they had licences for to ensure that any customer could speak to any other no matter where they were located. And since each circle had more than one telecom operator, multiple cell towers were erected in the same area by different operators.

The government later liberalised telecom regulations to permit passive infrastructure sharing. Multiple operators could now install their radio equipment on the same tower so long as quality was not compromised. The regulations continue to be liberalized, with sharing now extended to active infrastructure, such as the antenna, feeder cable, Radio Access Network and transmission system.

The Problem with Digital Governance

This approach, of progressively sharing core elements of a given technology stack has unfortunately not been universally adopted across all sectors. Take the digital transformation of governance, for example. Much of the investment in this space is in vertically-integrated, full-stack solutions designed to solve one aspect of governance without any expectation of being able to integrate it with another solution. This is how the vast majority of identity and payment systems as well as a range of other core government services have been built in the developed world.

According to Gartner, the total information-technology spend by governments in 2023 alone was over $580 billion. If you break this down by country, you will see that  nearly $500 billion of that amount was spent in the developed world. This means that the remaining 150 or so countries, mostly in the developing world, had just $80 billion to spend on building the digital government solutions they need.

If all these countries adopt the full-stack approach that the developed world has used, there would simply not be enough money in the world to fund digital governance. If we want to extend the benefits of the ongoing digital transformation to parts of the developing world that are lagging, we would need a far more efficient approach.

We need to borrow a leaf from our telecom experience and learn to optimise the use of sharing in the governance space. Instead of full-stack solutions, if we can build governance solutions with reusable building blocks, we should be able to assemble a variety of solutions across a number of different sectors at a radically lower cost. This is the only way to bring a digital transformation to the countries that most urgently need it in order to accelerated their development.

Fund the DPI Approach

Thankfully, we already know how to achieve this.

All of India’s digital public infrastructure has been built using modular, reusable building blocks, and it should be possible for other countries to leverage that experience in their own context.

The first step in this direction, however, would be for funding organisations to commit to only fund digital governance projects that adopt the principle of reusability. Projects must not develop a new technology when other building blocks that serve the same purpose exist, and, if no such tech building blocks exist, they should commit that any new one they build will be made available for subsequent reuse.