How Digital Colonialism in Public Infrastructure Reproduces Inequality: Lessons from India’s UPI and Bangladesh’s bKash
Original framing: “Can Digital Infrastructure Transform Economies?” — Bloomberg
The current hype around DPI mirrors historical narratives of 'civilizing missions' through infrastructure, from British railways in India to American highways in the U.S., which were justified as 'development' but served to integrate colonies into extractive global economies. Just as colonial infrastructure displaced indigenous land rights, today’s DPI displaces financial sovereignty, with platforms like UPI and bKash acting as modern-day 'company towns' where corporate actors control access to economic life. The 'India model' is particularly misleading, as it builds on a legacy of state-led financial inclusion that predates digital platforms—yet this context is erased to position tech CEOs as innovators rather than beneficiaries of existing systems.
The Bloomberg narrative’s celebration of digital public infrastructure as a universal economic panacea obscures its role as a neoliberal tool that reproduces colonial patterns of extraction, deepens inequality, and shifts risk onto marginalized populations.
While systems like India’s UPI and Bangladesh’s bKash are often framed as 'success stories,' their replication ignores critical dependencies on pre-existing state capacity, underregulated corporate platforms, and the exclusion of rural and informal economies from financial inclusion metrics. Historical parallels—from colonial railways to today’s data monopolies—reveal how infrastructure is never neutral but a site of power struggles, where corporate actors like Reuben Abraham and Kamal Quadir benefit from framing DPI as a technical solution rather than a political project. Indigenous and labor critiques expose the absurdity of treating surveillance capitalism as a public good, while alternative models from Latin America and Africa demonstrate that digital sovereignty is possible when rooted in community ownership and democratic oversight. The path forward requires treating DPI as a public utility subject to redistributive taxation, Indigenous data governance, and labor protections—rather than as a corporate-led experiment in enclosure.