Traversing India’s Expedition of Digital Public Goods: Entrepreneurial Learnings for State-led Transformation

Journal Name: Pacific Asia Journal of the Association for Information Systems

What if a government could think like a start-up founder? That is the intriguing question at the heart of this paper, which reframes one of the greatest success stories of our time – India’s digital revolution – through a lens rarely used to study the state: entrepreneurship. Aadhaar, UPI, CoWIN – these Digital Public Goods (DPGs, openly accessible tools built for public welfare) are now woven into everyday Indian life, and most accounts credit their success to clever technology design. This paper argues something bolder: India succeeded because the state behaved like an effectual entrepreneur, not a bureaucracy executing a five-year plan.

The authors draw on ‘effectuation’, the playbook entrepreneurs use when the future is too uncertain to plan for. Rather than fixing a rigid goal and marching toward it, effectual actors start with the means already at hand, accept only affordable risks, let stakeholders self-select into the venture, and treat surprises and crises as raw material for innovation. The paper maps India’s journey onto five such principles: starting with available means, minimizing losses through low-cost building blocks, stitching together a ‘crazy quilt’ of public and private partners, turning contingencies into opportunities, and ultimately piloting its own future rather than following someone else’s script.

Using publicly available records, government speeches and reports, the authors trace this arc across three phases. Inception (2009-2014) saw Aadhaar begin as a modest experiment to assign every resident a verifiable digital identity, with no rigid blueprint for what came next. Proliferation (2015-2022) saw that foundation scale into UPI’s real-time payments and, when COVID-19 struck, into CoWIN, a vaccination platform built in weeks by remote teams during lockdown, stitched from existing digital building blocks, that went on to administer over 1.6 billion vaccine doses. Globalization (2023-2026) saw India begin exporting these systems abroad, from MOSIP identity platforms now used in 26 countries to UPI partnerships with Sri Lanka and Singapore.

From this, the paper distills four lessons for any government attempting similar transformation: build deep contextual understanding before acting; create reusable, interoperable ‘digital building blocks’ instead of monolithic systems; cultivate a diverse ecosystem of public and private partners, and keep citizen trust, consent and welfare at the center of every design choice.

The takeaway is hopeful and academically novel, being among the first studies to bring entrepreneurship theory into conversation with digital governance research. Nations do not need deep pockets or perfect foresight to transform at scale; they just need an entrepreneurial instinct to start small, stay adaptive and turn constraints into creativity – a message with real resonance for countries across Asia and beyond still charting their own digital futures.