Data Dialogues
India’s DPI system is viewed as a success story across the globe, be it AADHAAR for identity, UPI for payments or ABDM for health. It has been at the center of conversations on open data, interoperability across data systems and an increasingly liberal digital environment. In parallel, changes have been made in policies governing these spaces, with one of the most impactful being the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP). This led to a recognizable shift in terms of the data management, privacy and consent in the digital information space in India.
Navigating policy design for a new foundational DPI today, as with the DHRUVA Digital Address DPI under the Department of Posts, Ministry of Communications, is based on different foundational principles from DPIs of the past. This session hopes to shed light on the approach taken in designing the DHRUVA Digital Address DPI, its intersection with the DPDP Act, and what designing broad-scale DPIs in the DPDP-era might entail.
Aparajita Mridha is a career civil servant with the Government of India, currently an Undersecretary with the Ministry of Communications. An MPA ’24 from the Harvard Kennedy School, she is a recipient of the Raymond and Josephine Vernon Award and the Lucius Littauer Award at HKS. She has experience in legislative drafting and parliamentary procedure in India, has represented the Indian government in multi-ministerial negotiations, is a former Fellow of the Indo-Pacific Young Leaders Program, and is currently working on building the Digital Address Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) in India. Her area of interest focuses on the intersection of geopolitics and emerging technologies in South Asia.
