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20 September 2024

A Quad Initiative on Digital Public Infrastructure

Rudra Chaudhuri and Aadya Gupta

In 2024, India will host a Quad Leaders’ Summit. This will be the sixth convening of a high-level dialogue between India, the United States, Australia, and Japan. Following a series of half-starts dating back to 2007, the dialogue resumed in 2017. Since then, six Quad working groups have been created to deepen cooperation in the areas of climate, critical and emerging technologies, cybersecurity, health, infrastructure, and space.

There is an urgent need to create a separate strand within existing working group mechanisms on digital public infrastructure (DPI). Given that each member state offers a set of faculties that can be leveraged for specific projects, the Quad is well-placed to deploy DPI in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. Indeed, DPI could be piloted in at least six countries within 2024 alone.

This essay provides a rationale for our thinking. It draws on discussions the authors have had with DPI builders, states with a DPI demand, including Pacific Island countries, and the different DPI communities that have emerged in the last eighteen months. Much of these linkages were fused during India’s presidency of the G20.

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