Dreamy Stacks: Digital Public Infrastructure, Futurity, and Failure in Startup India

This article develops the concept of Dreamy Stacks to analyze how India's Digital Public Infrastructures (DPIs) and the Startup India program are reconfiguring relations between the state, citizens, and techno-capitalism. It shows how the post-Aadhaar state increasingly renders itself as a stack of data layers that promises digital and financial inclusion, interoperability, and innovation, even as these infrastructures remain materially fragmented, failure-prone, and dependent on public subsidy. Through a relational and intermedial ethnographic approach to data infrastructures, the article maps how the promise of DPIs depends on tethering data-driven governance to entrepreneurial aspiration. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Rajasthan, it examines how “Rajasthan Stack”—a regional analogue of India Stack—is imagined, circulated, and only partially materialized as a set of Application Programming Interfaces and platforms. Attending to the disjuncture between promissory visions and lived experience, the article shows how the state-driven expansion of start-ups, incubators, and data centers in small cities re-spatializes global techno-futurity beyond metropolitan centers. Challenging universalist accounts that privilege scale, seamless platforms, formal markets, and stable data-value relations, Dreamy Stacks names a coeval, speculative, state-mediated architecture of futurity and failure through which global techno-capitalism is made unevenly, partially, and in practice.