Brazil has digital public infrastructure that India could learn from

livemint.com:

Last week, I was in Brasilia, speaking at Brazil Innovation Week, 2023. I’d been invited to talk about how India’s digital public infrastructure (DPI) offers a new approach to data governance and I was glad for the opportunity to test for myself whether the ideas I had set out in my new book held good in the Brazilian context.

But while I was expecting to talk about all the cool DPI solutions that India had built, it was not until I got there that I realized that not only was Brazil adept at using technology for public administration, in certain respects, its ministry of management and innovation could teach India a thing or two about digital governance. When I last visited Brazil, absolutely everyone I met was in awe of India’s tech capabilities.

I was constantly being asked to explain to them what exactly it was that had enabled India to become the foremost outsourced provider of software services in the world, and why, despite being in a favourable time zone, Brazil had not been able to replicate India’s success. I remember thinking at the time that it was not as if Brazil’s information technology (IT) ecosystem was under-developed in any way.

Its just that while India had focused its tech capabilities on building export-oriented software service businesses, Brazil’s IT industry chose to focus its energies inwards, providing services to its domestic market instead of working on outsourced solutions. Last week, when I returned to the country after well over a decade-and-a-half, it seemed that all anyone wanted to talk to me about was DPI.