Mozilla Open Innovation Project

From the other two sections we see two large forks in the road of the tech ecosystem in India, with VC funded startups whose focus is on growth and profits and semi-digitized entities that work with final stakeholders to create tech enabled solutions. However, according to our participants funding alone does not guarantee success and the absorption of a larger stake in the ecosystem.

Respondents argue that larger players often grow beyond VC funding and can access more powerful roles through their networks. Thus social capital and internal networks play a huge role in the success of an organisation and the products such an organisation creates for its consumers. Providing them opportunities to create larger tech enabled services that affect a wider variety of stakeholders. This in turn has often led to the absorption of such technology for government projects which is then centralised leading to the problems highlighted in the sections above.

The creators of large scale public digital infrastructure such as India Stack and other platforms have a unique role to play in India. For this study, with the review of experts of the domain, we defined Large Scale Digital Public Infrastructure as any combination of software platforms and products that intends to provide services to the general Indian populace. However, it is distinct from the “walled garden” approach of private BigTech driven ecosystems, as it would have open standards defined through a statutory process which may then be adopted by different stakeholders. The main distinction between traditional enterprise ecosystems and such infrastructure is the “public goods” nature of the latter. While enterprise ecosystems have a clear and central profit motive, transparency, accountability and governance are additional drivers of such a model.

Table taken from unpublished document in circulation

If implemented in the manner promoted by the government, other entities can provide large-scale solutions to the problems faced by different communities. Yet even in it’s ideation, the goal for a centralised tech enabled solution continues to be the focus of such infrastructure.