On January 31, the Indian government released the ‘National Urban Innovation Stack (NUIS)’ strategy paper, inviting comments that were limited to what the Centre must have thought was a very generous 100 words each. 

The urban stack is familiar. Like India and health stack, it is a set of tools and protocols for building software that allows governments, businesses, and developers to build products and programmes off existing technologies, without having to reinvent the wheel. 

Fundamentally, the ‘stack’ puts forward a digital architecture that enables private businesses to connect governments and citizens more efficiently. 

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The technology and data architecture of the NUIS have been critiqued clearly by urban technology researcher Srinivas Kodali. Kodali asserts that the NUIS, as it stands now, makes the process vulnerable to corporatisation of data, and urban governance processes. He suggests that the design of components (smart procure, data exchange, urban connect etc) can serve to reduce accountability and increase opaqueness of institutions while compromising individual privacy. 

Beyond the challenges with the way the stack imagines data, we find that the stack approach, and especially the urban stack, ignores some critical challenges in the insertion of technology in society. 

The NUIS, with its current focus on data exchanges, code for governance and data markets does not consider how technology interfaces with citizens, restructures power equations or introduces new kinds of inequalities. 

More specifically, what does this architecture means for the informal character of Indian cities? 

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