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Dr. Preeti Raghunath

Dr. Preeti Raghunath, Lecturer, Digital Media and Society, University of Sheffield, UK gave an expert seminar on Tech Stacks in India and EU: Exploring Digital Public Infrastructure and Digital Sovereignty on 27 January. The seminar was moderated by Dr. Aakansha Natani.  

The seminar laid out the contours of discourses in the realm of digital public infrastructure (DPI), a phrase that has gained widespread prominence in recent years and especially at the G20 Summit hosted in New Delhi in 2023. DPI has come to synonymise a certain approach to the building of a nation’s public technology infrastructure – these could be in dematerialised forms as well as draw on physical material infrastructures. They have been invoked as a way for countries to build the digital foundations for welfare and to enable enterprise, and therefore, are seen as a nation’s public digital asset. India has been one of the frontrunners in building its DPI, though not without controversy and neither is it a recent phenomenon. India has witnessed its evolution over the last almost 20 years from its early imagination and avatar as a digital ID for Below Poverty Line (BPL) families in India in 2006 to its expansion into a tech stack that facilitates identification, direct benefit transfers, verification, digital payments, among other things, to its formalized nomenclature as Digital Public Infrastructure at the G20 summit. In the last couple of years, India’s tech stack has gained prominence in the international development community and multilateral organisations, and among countries of the Global South through MoUs and South-South cooperation towards transfer of the technology. DPI is also finding articulations in the US and EU. For instance, Forbes carried a piece that argued for an American DPI. The impetus for a tech stack in Europe has importantly gained more traction. The last year saw important stakeholders in European digital regulation and development speak about the need for Euro Stack, a digital public infrastructure for Europe towards enshrining the region’s digital independence and sovereignty. This is especially important in the context of EU’s efforts in reigning in anti-competition activities of Big Tech corporations, in general, and promoting a single-market regional digital economy based on data exchange.  

The seminar specifically focused on discourses and developments in DPI and Tech Stacks in India and the EU, providing an overview of its trajectory and tracing shifting nomenclature. By drawing on India’s longer journey and the EU’s relatively recent one with DPI, the speaker attempted to understand how notions of openness, publicness and importantly, digital sovereignty are alluded to and have provided the conceptual rationalisations for experiments, innovation and investments towards their further development. 

 Dr. Preeti Raghunath is a Lecturer in Digital Media and Society at the University of Sheffield, UK. Over the past decade, she has traversed academic landscapes in India, Malaysia and the UK. During this time, her theoretical and empirical research has focused on media/technology policies and their making by taking a long view as well as centring lived experiences. Her teaching practice has involved lecturing, programme direction and research supervision as part of UG, PG and doctoral programmes with an interdisciplinary approach to global communication and technology policies. Her first book based on an expansive media policy ethnography in South Asia was published in 2020. In the years after, she has edited four collections on media and technology policies in the Global South. Preeti is a co-editor of the Palgrave Global Media Policy and Business book series, and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Digital Media and Policy. 

January 2025