"Digital Public Infrastructure is India's new federal glue." Examine in the context of state credentials being onboarded onto Union-run platforms like DigiLocker.

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) — shared, interoperable, consent-based digital rails — is increasingly performing a coordinating role once left to fiscal transfers and inter-state councils. The onboarding of Rajasthan's Jan Aadhaar (Family ID) onto DigiLocker, a MeitY platform under Digital India, giving ~7.5 crore residents digital access [1][2], illustrates this integrative function, though DPI supplements rather than replaces constitutional federal machinery.

How DPI acts as federal glue

• Shared rails, retained ownership: Rajasthan remains the issuer of Jan Aadhaar; the Union platform only carries it. Integration is bidirectional — citizens fetch the existing ID and can also enrol for a new Family ID with in-app consent [1].
• Standardised architecture: the same issuer–requestor API rail already carries ABHA health records (2022) [3] and UMANG services (2024) [4], so a state joins a proven national stack instead of building one.
• Service-delivery convergence: state welfare schemes keyed to Jan Aadhaar — PDS, scholarships, Chiranjeevi health cover — become portable and paperless, cutting document-loss failures for the poor [1].
• Scale as an incentive: DigiLocker's 53.92 crore users (June 2025) [2] create a network effect pulling more states toward common standards — cooperative federalism by adoption, not directive.

Limits of the metaphor

• Participation is voluntary and uneven; asymmetric state digital capacity produces uneven convergence.
• Union control of the platform layer raises data-governance concerns — mitigated, not settled, by the consent flow that operationalises purpose limitation under the DPDP Act, 2023.
• Digital divides mean the rail reaches only the connected; last-mile assisted access remains a state responsibility.
• DPI cannot substitute for fiscal and legislative federalism, where genuine friction lies.

DPI is thus better read as federal connective tissue than glue: it lowers the transaction cost of Centre–State cooperation without altering the constitutional division of powers. Extending the model through common data standards, capacity support for weaker states, and assisted-access channels would let DPI deepen cooperative federalism while keeping welfare delivery citizen-centric.