Digital Public Infrastructure’s Promise of Financial Inclusion and the Reality of Digital Lending: A Comparative Approach

In the past decade, digital lending has become central to a new developmental imaginary in India. The introduction of the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) approach in India has been narrativized as a revolutionary feat, drawing praise from international institutions and private sector alike. The rollout of these state-promoted platforms for identification, payments, and data sharing is said to be creating new possibilities for micro-entrepreneurship and market participation, lifting the poor out of poverty. Yet in reality, digital lending’s reach among women is limited, and instead its main market is among men. In this article, we ask: why, despite the developmental claims and ambitions of DPI, does the reality of digital lending in India remain limited in reaching women? The paper compares digital lending with two earlier “financial inclusion assemblages”, public banking and microfinance to identify how each organizes credit, whom it reaches, and what kinds of social futures it imagines. It finds that the limited reach of digital lending among women reflects not a limitation of digitalisation itself, but rather a mismatch between the architecture of DPI-enabled digital lending and the needs of women and other marginalized communities. Addressing these failures, the paper concludes, requires a significant realignment of the role of DPI in relation to digital lending. Problems of reach and access are reframed as issues of structure and conditions of access.