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Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) has played a significant role in advancing access to information, services and outreach in India's health, economic, and agricultural sectors.
Digital technology has immense potential in India to empower people by providing open and equitable access to information and resources. Although still in its nascent stage, its application across various sectors shows significant promise. The need for a discussion on expanding and optimising the potential of DPI to democratise information and empower communities for inclusive governance is crucial at the policy level in India.
A panel discussion titled ‘Designing digital public goods in water: Balancing oversight with autonomy’ as part of the 5th India Public Policy Network Conference organised at IIT Mumbai, deliberated on the current experiences on the use of DPI in the water sector in India and the way forward. The conveners were Professor C Shambhu Prasad, Institute of Rural Management, Anand and Trustee, Arghyam, and Manu Srivastava, Chief Operating Officer, Arghyam, Bengaluru.
Navigating threats while leveraging technology platforms for inclusive governance
The first presentation by Sreechand Tavva, Manager, Technology and Anuj Sharma, Chief Executive Officer, Arghyam introduced participants to digital public infrastructure, the important role undertaken by community driven platforms in the digital space in India and the threats encountered.
What is Digital Public Infrastructure
DPI is “a set of shared digital systems which are secure and interoperable, built on open standards and specifications to deliver and provide equitable access to public and /or private services at societal scale and are governed by enabling rules to drive development, inclusion, innovation, trust, and competition and and respect human rights and fundamental freedoms" (UNDP, 2023: p3).
DPI has four important characteristics:
It is interoperable (can be used for a variety of purposes alongside a range of tools, technologies and service providers)
Can be built on open standards (is available to anyone to build on to and integrate services for people)
Operates at a societal scale (is not restricted by geography or demography)
Has robust enabling rules and regulations and unified and coherent governance frameworks to safeguard people and prevent misuse. (UNDP, 2023: p 4).
Technology democratisation, availability of open source tools, mobile phone availability and internet connectivity have greatly helped in increasing the potential to connect communities and represent their voices in the prevalent discourses in India.
Rise in community driven platforms
The rise in community driven platforms in recent years has been an exciting development that has complemented governmental efforts at sharing information and connecting people to help communities improve their livelihoods, deal with crisis such as the Covid 19, floods or share information on current issues in the management of natural resources such as water (for example, the India Water Portal).
The key strengths of these platforms are their potential and ability to represent community or local knowledge, help in transfer of knowledge from the bottom up while representing the voices of the marginalised communities in prevalent discourses and governance mechanisms.
These advantages also come with some threats as technology advances. Newer technologies such as AI while being extremely useful can pose threats to community generated platforms through undermining contributor motivation, spreading misinformation, reducing platform discoverability, blurring the lines between producers and consumers of knowledge etc.
Introduction of checks and balances at the policy level are thus essential such as:
Tracing the original source of information, ensuring appropriate attribution, transparent crediting systems for AI generated content and introducing penalties for unattributed use of community content
Developing culturally sensitive technologies (AI models) in the digital space that help local communities and encourage involvement and contributions of stakeholders at all levels.
Developing community validation mechanisms and regulatory frameworks that encourage human centric technology (AI in this case) implementation based on ethical guidelines or principles.
Having misinformation safeguards and specialised verification mechanisms in place.
Thus enabling community platforms to thrive alongside DPI will need an enabling environment that involves grassroots, protects communities, while making use of the advantages provided by technologies such as AI to support contribution made by communities and advance knowledge.
Bridging the trust deficit with water infrastructure data
Dr Sunder from INREM Foundation shared their experiences of working on water quality data from publicly available and accessible data platforms such as the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM), Public Health Engineering Department (PHED) and the Central Groundwater Board (CGWB).
One of the problems with water quality/contamination issues in India is that there are significant variations and different levels of seriousness in terms of water contamination by region, with some parts having inherently more contamination as compared to others due to natural and geogenic factors.
While data is available on JJM, CGWB and PHED platforms, there is also a large amount of community generated data available at the ground level, but lack of interconnections between the data at the micro and macrolevel leads to lack of trust with this ground level data. At the same time, there are considerable variations in the data available from CGWB, PHED and JJM, as the scale and methods with which the data is collected is different.
While people can access data from these platforms as it is open to public, one of the challenges is lack of data at scale. So how can people then make sense of the data? This creates a level of mistrust with the available data and leaves out the common public from making sense of the data and using it.
The challenge lies in how to build interfaces and connections between people at different levels to help interaction, share data and information in the digital space to make sense of the data and devise solutions at the local level.
INREM has been experimenting with the use of digital platforms such as JJM in Assam by using different modes of sharing information such as visual recognition and exploring if open source information presented in better and user friendly ways can aid better interaction, encourage more informed interactions between the community, government and other actors, empower communities to take action, and enhance trust in public water infrastructure.
Enabling policy considerations for DPI in drinking water security
Manu Srivastava, from Arghyam provided an overview of JJM and the need for identifying policy considerations for effective use of DPI for drinking water security. The JJM has been highly successful in increasing its coverage from 16.7 percent in 2019 to 79 percent as of June, 2024 in providing safe drinking water at the household level. However, the focus of the programme has been on developing infrastructure in terms of how much coverage has been achieved through provision of taps and how much financial inputs have been made to achieve progress.
This focus has now shifted to that on making the effort sustainable in the long run. For this, each village will need to have information on the kind of water sources available, both surface water and groundwater, assurance on continuous and potable water supply through pipes to each of the houses, information on water treatment mechanisms used etc.
Keeping the utility running everyday will require regular supply of water from a diverse range of schemes, ensuring water quality and sustainability in water supply as well as institutional and financial sustainability over the long term through increased local empowerment and collaboration with focus on service reliability and equity.
This will need:
A robust and enabling technology architecture and involvement of more of local actors and stakeholders, and unified interfaces for information exchange and information sharing.
Regular stakeholder engagement and collaboration within the water ecosystem through regular sharing of information in a transparent and open manner, openness in access and sharing of information, trust building at all levels within the programme and unified decision making across stakeholders.
Opportunities for innovation and research through funding research initiatives, providing an enabling environment for testing of new ideas and innovations, facilitation of secure and privacy-compliant data sharing and establishment of uniform standards, protocols and interfaces to ensure seamless interoperatibility.
Training and capacity building of the stakeholders involved, and availability of technical support and technology aiding monitoring, compliance and ensuring sustainability of water resources in the long run.
Building a digital backbone for water sustainability in JJM in Assam
Preeti Kumari from PHED discussed the experiences gained from the process of building a digital backbone for water sustainability for JJM in the state of Assam. The JJM has made great progress in Assam in terms of infrastructure, training and capacity building and the coverage of schemes in the state has increased from 2 percent to 81 percent from 2019 to 2024.
While the focus till now has mostly been on increasing coverage, making the effort sustainable and involving all the stakeholders within the system will require a new approach and technology that would present true and reliable information in a transparent and open manner and be able to mobilise all the players in the system.
These include the consumers, Water User Committees, Gram Panchayats, Jal Mitra, Jal Doots, PHED and P&RD and other stakeholders, contractors, third party agencies, ASHA workers, laboratory officials etc who would need trusted, reliable and interoperable data/information to enable them to understand progress made and help in the resolution of capabilities at a decentralised level.
This has been the idea behind the JJM brain or the digital backbone, a centralised digital platform that has been created in 2022. While the earlier focus has been on monitoring infrastructure, this has now shifted to regular monitoring of scheme efficiency, O &M and source sustenance. Different modules including the Jal Kosh, Litholog, The Jal Mitra app have been initiated as a part of this process to enable people access information and register any grievances through the grievance redressal mechanisms.
The plan for the future is to focus more on modalities of O&M, develop a framework to augment water supply efficiency through decentralised data ownership and knowledge sharing, integration with more web based and mobile based applications through interoperable APIs and developing a stronger database coupled with robust analysis to provide deeper insights into the water situation of any area.
Once infrastructure is laid then the O and M will gradually be passed on to Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs), Water User Associations (WUAs) who will then be empowered to manage water at the village level and take ownership to manage their water quantity and quality.
Design considerations for DPI on water
This presentation by Ameya Naik from eGov Foundation stressed upon the fact that good water governance was a collective effort since the watershed is a common pool resource and multiple stakeholders are thus needed to manage and govern water.
How can the government enable and participate in community led effective water governance is a challenge that has to be addressed.
Thinking about the government role in water governance, the space itself is complicated with many entities functioning at different levels in different hierarchical spaces which have limited or no coordination with each other. For example, central ministries, state departments, para state level agencies and local institutions all are complex institutions with their own modes of functioning and hierarchies and there are multiple tiers and fragmented mandates.
Local institutions often remain invisible in this maze. There is no single body that has the mandate to manage all these entities and make this multisectoral system work. The digital systems too are fragmented with some depending on digital modes while some still depending on paper based systems. Inter operability is also absent in the functioning of these entities.
DPI will need to bring about a shift in its thinking by leveraging services to create or build core registries that can function as building blocks between the services and programmes and are modular, reusable, evolvable, scalable and secure. These can not only help in improving efficiency, but also in gaining better visibility that would lead to improved decision making, help design ambitious reforms through increased interoperatibility and help distribute the capacity to solve local problems through finding the proven best solutions while adapting and iterating it to local conditions and help building trust at the local level.
The discussions ended by highlighting that while digital public goods had an important role to play in the water governance, they needed to be reoriented to include the voices of the marginalised, build trust and empower people by using technologies that are inter operatable, built on open standards enabling access to real data and information at scale that could be converted into action and help in enabling a dialogue between different levels of stakeholders to aid inclusive governance.