After Aadhaar, the Productivity Test

On 28 April 2026, NITI Aayog and the Frontier Technology Hub released a roadmap called DPI@2047. The Chief Economic Adviser described India's next phase of digital public infrastructure as a total factor productivity engine. That phrase is doing more work than it looks. It marks the end of one era and the beginning of a harder one.

Reach was the easy part

The first decade of DPI was a reach problem. Could we give 1.4 billion people a verifiable identity? Could we route real-time payments at population scale? Could we plug welfare into a single pipe? JAM, UPI, DigiLocker and GeM answered yes. DPI@2047 quietly concedes that the welfare-delivery question is settled, and sets a different one. The new task is not to reach the citizen; it is to lift what the citizen, the small firm and the small farm can actually produce.

That is a different test, and most departments are not yet measuring themselves against it. The roadmap proposes eight sectoral transformations across MSMEs, agriculture, education, health, credit, energy and social protection, with a state-led, district-executed model and pilots from 2026-27. Notice the language: district-executed. The unit of accountability is shifting downwards. Productivity, unlike inclusion, cannot be claimed in a press release; it has to show up in somebody's actual output.

Why most departments will misread this

The instinctive reading of DPI 2.0 inside government will be: more APIs, more dashboards, more apps. That misreads the brief.

Phase one of DPI worked because it disentangled the rails, identity, payments and data, from the application layer. Phase two is being asked to do something subtler. It must disentangle existing work from existing process. A welfare benefit can move through a new pipe without changing what the benefit is. Productivity gains demand the opposite. The pipe is uninteresting; what changes is the work itself. Deloitte's Government Trends 2026 puts it crisply: the biggest gains come not from automating old processes but from redesigning the work itself. A UK trial of over 20,000 civil servants using generative AI for three months saved an average of 26 minutes a day per person, nearly two working weeks a year. That is not because the AI replaced anybody; it is because the work was finally allowed to be done differently.

Inside Indian government, I have watched well-meaning officers turn a transformative tool into a faster version of the form it was meant to replace. The form persists, the discretion persists, the file persists. Faster, but unchanged. DPI 2.0 will succeed or fail on whether departments are willing to give that comfort up.

Three moves a department should make immediately

Stop digitising forms; redesign the file. The unit of bureaucratic work in India is the file. Every project I have seen that put a digital wrapper around an unchanged file reproduced the same delays in colour. Pick three high-volume work-streams, write down what an ideal file looks like with AI-assisted drafting embedded in it, and re-engineer backwards. The form is downstream; the file is upstream.

Build agents that draft, not bots that retrieve. Most public-sector AI in India today is a chatbot that finds a circular. That was the right starting point. It is now the ceiling. The gain lies in agents that draft an order, prepare a notice, summarise a representation, and present a ready-to-sign output. The officer reviews and decides; the typing is gone. We are using a five-times leverage tool as a 1.2-times search tool, and calling it transformation.

Measure officer-minutes, not transactions. If DPI 2.0 is about productivity, the metric must be productivity. Most dashboards still count transactions: files moved, returns filed, calls answered. None of that tells you whether the work got lighter. The metric that should matter, and that nobody is asked to report, is officer-minutes saved per case. A department that reports this number will, within two quarters, look very different from one that does not.

The harder test is institutional will

The CEA said something else at the launch that has not been quoted enough: India has strong design capabilities, but success will depend on sustained institutional will to move from strategy to execution. That is the polite version of the real problem. Indian bureaucracy is excellent at announcing platforms and indifferent at reorganising work around them. DPI 1.0 succeeded partly because it was built outside the line department, on rails the rest of government had to either ride or be left behind by. DPI 2.0 is being handed to the line departments themselves.

So the productivity test is, in the end, a leadership test. Which Secretaries will decide that their teams write fewer pages, sign fewer files and answer fewer queries by the end of next year? Those are the departments where DPI 2.0 will arrive. The rest will get a new portal.