From scale to ecosystem: Rethinking DPI maturity in India : Dr. R Srinivasan

In their latest Forbes India feature, Dr. Vikas N Prabhu, Post-doctoral Fellow, and Dr. R Srinivasan, Chairperson, Centre for Digital Public Goods, IIM Bangalore, argue that impressive scale metrics alone don’t define the maturity of India’s digital public infrastructure.

Drawing on the State of India’s DPI Report 2025, in the piece ‘Transforming India’s DPI: Shift from scale to ecosystem impact,’ they propose a three-stage maturity model, Implementation, Adoption, and Leverage, to explain why UPI and Aadhaar have become economy-wide transformation platforms while others remain in early growth phases. The real test, they contend, is not transaction volume but whether a DPI becomes generative: impossible to build without.