With rapid advances in wireless technology and mobile devices, we are seeing an interesting development in which some developing countries are moving faster than the developed ones. This is because in the developed world, there exist legacy systems of hardwired connectivity that hinders the adoption of the more flexible wireless systems. Hence many parts of the world that lagged behind in building the hardwired infrastructure because of the cost are bypassing that stage and leapfrogging into the newer, cheaper, and more flexible wireless forms.

For example, I went on a visit to Sri Lanka some time ago, before the use of mobile phones became widespread in the US. I was amazed to see that they were ubiquitous in that country, with so many people of lower socio-economic backgrounds, including street vendors, drivers of the three-wheeler taxis, and others all having cell phones. This was because landline phones were very hard to get and expensive and thus available to only a select few such as businesses and well-to-do people, so when mobile phone technology became available, those who had been shut out of having phones seized on the opportunity because they could easily get one. It is the same with electricity. Many rural parts of the world are going straight to solar-powered electricity generation because the cost of running power grids from generating stations to remote areas is so prohibitive.

Another feature that is getting adopted in many parts of the world is wireless internet connectivity for commerce. India is pioneering in this area and Akash Kapur has an article in the February 5, 2024 issue of The New Yorker about the impressive steps that it has taken and how it is becoming a model for many other countries.

[I]n May, 2009, Rahul Gandhi, the scion of India’s leading political family, and a key figure in the then ruling Congress Party, sent a text to the Indian entrepreneur and billionaire Nandan Nilekani, asking him to fly to New Delhi. Nilekani soon joined the cabinet as head of a new digital-identity program, known as the Unique Identification Authority of India.

At an elementary level, the program was simply an effort to create something akin to a Social Security number—no small achievement in a country as large as India, but hardly revolutionary on its own merits. Under Nilekani’s guidance, the program has overcome public skepticism, bureaucratic inertia, and legal challenges to sign up 1.4 billion citizens. Each now possesses a twelve-digit identity number, known as an Aadhaar (Hindi for “foundation”), which is linked to biometric information such as iris scans and fingerprints. But Nilekani’s real achievement has been to use the I.D. numbers as the underpinnings of an integrated digital ecology (“the stack”). It consists of government-enabled modules (collectively referred to as digital public infrastructure, or D.P.I.) that allow citizens to make online payments, receive welfare, conduct banking, and store and certify official documents (e.g., covid-vaccine certificates). The government, in this way, is building what the World Bank calls “plumbing” for a more controlled—and possibly less toxic—version of the Internet, leaving space for private developers to build platforms and services on top of it.

Ten billion or so payments take place every month in the stack, accounting for almost half of the entire world’s real-time digital payments. The technology has enabled trillions of dollars in commercial activity, and is estimated to have saved around thirty-four billion dollars between 2013 and 2021 by impeding corruption. Beyond numbers, the stack’s impact is increasingly visible in daily life. Mehta’s book is filled with human stories that vividly illustrate technocratic terms like “financial inclusion” and “leapfrog development.” There’s Lakshmi, a fifty-eight-year-old widow, who uses her Aadhaar card and thumbprint to access a monthly pension of eight hundred rupees. There’s the village of Saharanpur, where government money for purchasing new toilets and even homes is directly deposited into residents’ accounts, thus cutting out grasping middlemen. And there are a multitude of small venders—fruit sellers, rural tea shops, thatched roadside restaurants—that now take payments via cell-phone-scanned QR codes, changing the way Indians conduct commerce. Such scenes, familiar to anyone who might have recently visited India, explain why the digital stack has been compared, in its potential consequences, to the Green Revolution of the nineteen-sixties.

As impressive as the stack has been for India, though, its most significant impact may turn out to be global. A growing number of countries, mostly in the Global South, either have started using elements of the stack or are considering doing so. The Philippines has issued digital I.D.s powered by Indian technology to seventy-six million of its hundred and ten million people; a pilot program in Morocco has enrolled seven million citizens. Singapore and the U.A.E. have connected their domestic payment networks to the Indian one. Jamaica used the stack to issue covid-vaccine certificates. For India, the stack represents an opportunity to project soft power and position itself as a global player—alongside China, the E.U., and the U.S. It wasn’t so long ago that the country was being hailed as the land of nonviolence and a birthplace of spirituality; in the twenty-first century, there’s a growing sense that, in the words of Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s C.E.O., the “magic of India Stack . . . is perhaps the greatest contribution that India can make to the world.”

When it comes to the internet, there has been a tension between the ideal of having a decentralized system that is free from government control while yet needing some sort of governing body in order to make it run smoothly. The question is how to have such a system without it being controlled by private giant technology companies or by governments. Many governments would like to be able to control the internet in their own countries in order to enable greater information gathering of their peoples, restrict the flow of information, and thus control them better. While India’s achievement is impressive in the way it has put advanced technology literally in the hands of pretty much everybody, there is concern about the Indian government being the body that controls it.