The digital economy: platforms, data and India's public digital infrastructure

The digital economy covers more than e-commerce and apps. It includes digital payments, online services, platform work, data-driven business models and the public infrastructure that makes them possible. In India, a distinctive feature is public digital infrastructure, often called India Stack: identity through Aadhaar, payments through the Unified Payments Interface, and consent-based data sharing through the Account Aggregator framework. These are shared rails on which private firms can build, rather than services owned by a single company.

Aadhaar, a 12-digit unique identity number issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India, is used to verify identity for bank accounts, subsidies and services, though its use has been the subject of privacy litigation, notably the Supreme Court's 2018 judgment in Justice K. S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India and the Aadhaar case, which upheld Aadhaar with limits. The Unified Payments Interface, launched by the National Payments Corporation of India in 2016, allows instant bank-to-bank transfers through mobile phones and has become a dominant retail payment method. Direct Benefit Transfer, which sends subsidies and benefits directly to bank accounts, aims to reduce leakages, though critics note exclusion errors when authentication fails.

Digitalisation brings gains and risks together. It can lower transaction costs, expand markets for small sellers, and improve tax and benefit administration. It can also concentrate market power in a few platforms, create algorithmic management of gig workers without employment protections, deepen the digital divide for people without smartphones, connectivity or digital literacy, and raise risks of fraud, surveillance and data misuse. India's data protection law, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, sets rules for processing personal data, but its enforcement framework and exemptions for the state remain debated.

For civil studies, the digital economy raises classic regulatory questions in new form: who owns data, who is liable when a platform fails, how competition is protected, and how labour law applies to platform work. The answers will shape whether digital growth widens opportunity or reproduces old inequalities in digital form. A careful reader therefore asks not only how fast digital transactions grow, but who can access them, who profits from the data, and who bears the risk when systems fail.