Technology changes more than technology. It reshapes how markets work, how governments function, and who gets access to new opportunities. For policymakers, the core challenge is one of timing and scope. Regulate too early or too broadly, and innovation suffers. Regulate too late or too loosely, and real risks go unaddressed until the damage is done. India is making these choices now, often without a precedent to follow.
Technology delivers on its promise only when it is designed and governed with foresight. Nor does it operate in isolation: developments elsewhere shape outcomes in India, and India's choices increasingly shape outcomes elsewhere. Through the Centre for the Digital Future, IDF studies India's technology policy in this global context, with a focus on how technology can drive inclusive growth, strengthen governance, and reach people who have so far been left out.
Two areas make this work urgent. Digital Public Infrastructure and Digital Public Goods are already addressing real governance and development problems, such as identity, payments, health and welfare delivery, at a scale few countries have attempted. Generative AI is advancing just as quickly, with significant implications for jobs, misinformation and market concentration. Both are already in wide use, yet the rules governing neither are settled. How India governs them will determine whether they deliver on their promise or create risks faster than policy can respond.
This work sits within a wider research programme covering competition, online gaming, cloud computing, e-commerce and data governance. Each area is studied on its own terms, using a consistent method: open-ended research to identify the right questions, economic models to frame testable hypotheses, and empirical data to test them before drawing conclusions. Findings are published for scrutiny by policymakers, industry, and researchers, not presented as settled.
A common set of questions runs through all of this work. Where can existing law be extended to cover new technology, and where does it fall short? How do firms and users actually respond once new rules take effect? And what are the trade-offs when a country chooses guidelines over legislation, as India has done for AI? India's technology policy is being written in real time. IDF's role is not to assume the answers, but to test what these choices produce, and to identify what regulation must get right before harms outpace the rules meant to contain them.
India has one of the largest working-age populations in the world. But size alone is not an advantage; it becomes one only when the workforce has the skills a modern economy needs. Much of India's labour force still has low levels of education and skills, and the reasons are not yet fully understood. The central question is what it will take to improve both the quantity and the quality of education and skilling for India's young people.
IDF approaches this question across the life cycle, from birth onwards, rather than at any single stage, because deficits compound over time. A child's nutrition affects their ability to learn; their health affects how well education turns into skills; and those skills determine how productively they work as adults. The foundation is nutrition and early health. Here, IDF's work treats healthcare as public infrastructure rather than a set of fragmented legacy institutions: built on Digital Public Infrastructure and the India Health Stack, closing gaps in diagnostics, and reaching workers in the informal sector, where conventional insurance models fail.
Education involves two problems that are often treated as one: how much schooling is delivered, and how much learning it actually produces. Addressing one without the other leaves the real constraint in place. Skilling follows the same logic. A certificate is not the same as a usable skill, and closing that gap matters as much as expanding access to training in the first place.
The same life-cycle lens extends to ageing. As India's population grows older, ensuring dignity and resilience in later life becomes a policy design question in its own right. IDF examines whether decentralised, community-led models, including self-help groups, can match or outperform institutional care on reach and cost.
None of these links (nutrition, health, education, skilling and ageing) is assumed to work. Each is tested against evidence before it is treated as a solution. The larger argument is straightforward: India's future depends on closing these gaps across a person's whole life, not one at a time. IDF's role is to understand how these gaps operate, test what genuinely closes them, and share what it learns, so that India's demographic scale becomes a lasting advantage rather than unrealised potential.
India's cities are growing rapidly, and this growth is putting pressure on housing and the environment at the same time. Densifying cities are struggling to provide affordable housing, while the same growth strains air quality, water systems and waste management. These are not separate problems for separate ministries. They are the results of the same underlying decisions about how cities are planned, built and governed.
IDF's work on the urban environment focuses on where affordable housing, environmental responsibility and the quality of urban life meet. It starts from the premise that housing is more than shelter: it is part of a city's spatial system, and it must be sustainable, adaptable and responsive to the communities it serves. IDF examines how architectural design, planning strategies and policy frameworks can together deliver affordable housing without compromising on space and quality, improving environmental performance, liveability, community resilience and social equity together rather than trading one off against another.
The same lens applies to the wider environmental pressures facing urban India: air and water quality, waste management and climate resilience. IDF treats these not as standalone pollution problems but as consequences of planning and governance choices: how transport and industry shape air quality, whether water and waste systems are designed to keep pace with density, and where fragmented responsibilities between central, state and municipal bodies allow gaps to persist. IDF is studying this last question in particular, drawing on evidence rather than assumption, and will share what it finds.
This leads to the central question for the programme: what changes in planning and governance would allow housing and environmental goals to reinforce each other rather than compete, and at what point in the policy process does the trade-off become locked in?
Laws and regulations shape economic outcomes. They set incentives, define the boundaries of markets, and influence how firms behave. In India, policy interventions often produce results that differ from their stated objectives, largely because they do not fully anticipate how individuals and firms will respond to regulatory change. These mismatches can distort markets, raise compliance costs, and weaken the credibility of regulators.
The Ambedkar Centre for Law and Economics was established within IDF in 2015 to address governance challenges at the intersection of legal design and economic outcomes. The Centre grew out of IDF's earlier work with the Competition Commission of India (CCI) as it was being set up as India's competition authority, when IDF prepared primers for the Commission on the economics of regulation, grounded in the industrial organisation literature. The Centre's objective remains to bridge the gap in India between doctrinal legal analysis and economic reasoning, so that regulation becomes more predictable and institutions more effective.
The Centre combines legal doctrine with economic analysis to assess both the intended and unintended effects of regulation. It examines how policies work in practice: how firms change their behaviour, how markets reorganise, and where regulatory objectives are diluted or offset. By analysing regulation both before it is introduced (ex ante) and after it takes effect (ex post), the Centre aims to improve the quality of policy design and contribute to stronger, evidence-informed governance.
