India is rapidly digitising. There are good things and bad, speed-bumps on the way and caveats to be mindful of. The weekly column Terminal focuses on all that is connected and is not – on digital issues, policy, ideas and themes dominating the conversation in India and the world.The recent state visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the United States has generated several debates around democracy and India’s role in the world. The joint statement from both the United States and India expressed several interests of partnerships with shared principles of democracy, freedom and rule of law. The joint statement includes the interest to develop the US-India Global Digital Development Partnership to promote digital public infrastructures in developing countries. The US is not a new entrant in this space with its institutions like United States Agency for International Development (USAID) have been promoting digital technologies across the world including in India. In its latest effort to promote digital technologies, UNDP, USAID helped Ukraine digitise its governance with the on-going war. The Diia app which helps Ukrainians store their digital IDs, access government services, and helps with war-time payments is nothing short of a super app that allows Ukrainians to run a digital government. USAID is also helping Ukraine promote this solution to the rest of the world. Thus when the US wants to bring technology and resources to the digital identity sector, it is bringing these experiences from across the world. The US pushed biometrics and identification technologies on the rest of the world after 9/11 with global travel and specifically identifying people in Afghanistan. In fact, arms of the United Nations promoted iris tests to facilitate the biometric data collection of people in Afghanistan for access to food through the World Food Programme (WFP). This is an experiment that has been continuously used since by WFP to collect biometrics across the globe especially in war torn regions. Experiments had also been announced before the introduction of Aadhaar in India on biometrics for food for targeted public distribution systems. The excuse of experiments on welfare systems to promote digital identities is clear. The commodification of digital identities for the creation of digital economies is being promoted as a developmental model. These experiments always came at the cost of individual rights of populations in the Global South and have undermined democratic institutions in various nations. Even in India, the Aadhaar project has severely affected our welfare systems and undermined constitutional rights of Indians.The US and India’s collaborations to promote solutions around digital infrastructures will continue to undermine the human rights of people in the Global South. While the joint statement from the two countries do promise that safeguards will be developed to protect privacy, data security and intellectual property along with individual rights, reality will be different. In the case of India too, the government has consistently promised to bring privacy legislation, but has failed to uphold Indian fundamental rights. When it comes to privacy, Indian digital infrastructures promote creation of 360° profile databases that the US was able to avoid creating in the 1970s. Super apps like Diia while promoting access to a digital government pose threats to democratic institutions and individual rights by allowing nation states to know everything about populations without any form of privacy. Allowing governments to know everything about us makes it harder for populations to fight back or protest when the same information is used to police the population. This is one of the primary oppositions apart from broken software resulting in errors and failure in implementation of digital infrastructures. US support might not entirely address these issues. While India has been promoting digital infrastructures as part of its plans for a “software diplomacy”, in geo-political terms the lack of economic incentives is limiting their adoption. While India wants to supply the technology and models for digitisation, developing countries still need large scale loans to set up institutions to implement these digital infrastructures with need for internet connectivity. This brings in the need for large scale lenders like the World Bank which have been giving loans to developing countries through their Identity for Development (ID4D) Initiative. Kenya recently showed interest and expected India to give it a line of credit to implement India’s digital infrastructures. Last evening I led a Kenyan delegation to visit Center for Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) in Bangalore, India. The center collaborates with countries to catalyze digitization journeys in order to improve success rate. pic.twitter.com/ofrHHaRTHn— Eliud Owalo (@EliudOwalo) June 15, 2023 The Kenyan scenario is another case where the local population has opposed the country’s plans for digitisation with a unique identity – the Huduma Namba. The Kenyan Supreme Court has halted these plans until the government can get a data protection law in place. Even with all the opposition at play, Kenya is likely to force digital infrastructures from India as India forced them on its own population. No amount of demand for safeguards the US and India promise will be enough when the market ecosystem driving these wants proliferation of personal data.The push for digital infrastructures across the world is not just promoted by India, but by many institutions like the United Nations, USAID, World Bank, Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, Republic of France, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Omidyar Network, Nilekani Philanthropies. The US now formally showing interest to be part of this global setup helps to push these digital technologies on the rest of the world. This could also be the beginning of creation of a global digital identity as being promoted by World Economic Forum. This model of digital identity-based development is gonna make a lot of people invested in this project rich, especially the institutions promoting this project. But there is no guarantee it is going to make the citizens of those nations rich or solve corruption as it was promised to Indians. These solutions will not function the same way in the Global North as they would in the Global South where democratic systems are often fragile. Our privacy and other human rights will continue to be collateral damage in some rich man’s vision for the world. Srinivas Kodali is a researcher on digitisation and hacktivist.