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Abstract

This paper extends global scholarship on datafication and children’s digital citizenship to the context of India’s expanding Digital Public Infrastructure (‘DPI’). It examines how institutional data infrastructures profile and socially construct the child as both a data principal and a digital citizen. Drawing on an interdisciplinary Interpretive Policy Analysis (‘IPA’) framework, the study captures the perspectives of institutional actors and caregivers, who constitute key intermediaries in processes of institutional datafication. First, expert interviews with specialists across law, data governance and children’s rights are used to interrogate the legal and policy artefacts that define the “child” within India’s DPI ecosystem. Second, a story-completion method is used to surface insights on how parental proxies interpret, negotiate, and resist these constructions in everyday encounters with digital infrastructures. The findings reveal a persistent pattern, which I conceptualise as double paternalism, wherein the state positions children primarily as data objects and consumer subjects rather than as rights-bearing data principals, while caregivers often reproduce these logics in mediating children’s data practices. Together, these dynamics contribute to the emergence of a datafied civic culture in which children’s digital rights are shaped by neoliberal ideals of responsibility and risk management. The paper concludes by proposing two pathways for centring children’s rights and data justice within the DPI, arguing for a shift from paternalistic to participatory, rights-based models of governance. By situating the child within India’s DPI, this study presents a Global South perspective on institutional datafication, with implications for debates on children’s digital rights beyond the Indian context.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.55496/NFYV5618

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