DPI Deep Dive — Friday | July 31, 2026

India’s Layer 5 — Sectoral Digital Public Infrastructure — covers mission-mode digitisation across healthcare (ABHA/ABDM), agriculture (AgriStack), and the judiciary (eCourts). This week saw decisive moves on all three fronts, with states accelerating ground-level adoption and the Supreme Court signalling an unprecedented infrastructure overhaul.

1. J&K Pushes AgriStack-RBI ULI Integration for Farm Credit

Jammu & Kashmir’s Chief Secretary Atal Dulloo on July 29 ordered a daily monitoring mechanism to fast-track SVAMITVA and AgriStack implementation, directing banks to accelerate API integration with the RBI’s Unified Lending Interface (ULI).¹²

The move is structurally significant: J&K aims to digitise legacy land records (Records of Rights, Jamabandis, mutation registers) into a standardised, interoperable database that feeds directly into AgriStack’s Farmer Registry. Once land records are digitised and linked to the Farmer Registry and Digital Crop Survey data, banks can use RBI’s ULI to perform digital verification — replacing manual, opaque lending processes with authenticated, real-time credential checks.

Scale of the operation is substantial. SVAMITVA drone surveys are complete across all 4,400 villages in J&K, with 67,560 Property Cards already distributed. The Digital Crop Survey (Kharif-2026) is being prepared across 5,383 villages covering approximately 33.9 lakh agricultural plots. Surveyors are being identified for training ahead of the September survey window.

Cross-Layer Connection

This is a textbook example of DPI layer interplay: L1 Identity (Aadhaar-linked verification for Farmer Registry) → L3 Documents (digitised land records via SVAMITVA) → L5 Sectoral (AgriStack Farmer Registry) → L2 Payments (RBI’s ULI for credit disbursement). The Chief Secretary’s intervention — daily monitoring at the district level with dedicated nodal officers — suggests the government recognises that digital infrastructure without enforcement mechanisms remains aspirational.

2. J&K ABHA Hits 1.12 Crore IDs, Targets Universal Coverage

Two days earlier, on July 27, the same Chief Secretary chaired a review of the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) rollout in J&K, revealing that the union territory has created over 1.12 crore ABHA IDs — covering approximately 83% of the estimated population.³⁴

Key metrics from the review:

• 1.34 crore Scan & Share tokens issued, demonstrating active hospital-level adoption
• 100% registration of public healthcare facilities, doctors, and nurses on the Health Facility Registry (HFR) and Health Professional Registry (HPR)
• 85 hospitals onboarded to the Next Generation HMIS, with remaining institutions transitioning
• 100+ facilities live on JK e-Sahaj, the state’s digital health platform
• 15.5 lakh+ users on the JK Sehat App, which integrates ABHA creation, digital health records, tele-consultations, ambulance services, and pharmacy access

J&K recently received a National Award for achieving the highest Health Record Linking per lakh population among medium-sized states/UTs. The Chief Secretary directed districts lagging behind to intensify campaigns and ensure every eligible citizen can create an ABHA ID at the point of service — aligning ABHA issuance with Ayushman Bharat Golden Card distribution.

The Bigger Picture

J&K’s 83% ABHA penetration is notable for a region with challenging terrain and connectivity. The JK Sehat App’s 15.5 lakh user base shows that digital health adoption isn’t limited to urban centres. But the remaining 17% gap — likely concentrated in rural and remote areas — will test whether digital health infrastructure can reach the last mile without physical touchpoints.

3. Supreme Court Constitutes High-Powered Committee for Court Modernisation — Seeks ₹40,000–50,000 Crore

In what may be the most consequential judiciary infrastructure decision in years, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant constituted the Judicial Infrastructure Advisory Committee headed by Supreme Court Justice Aravind Kumar, with a mandate to blueprint nationwide court modernisation and secure government funding of ₹40,000–50,000 crore.⁵⁶

The committee’s composition is deliberately cross-High Court: Justices Debangsu Basak (Calcutta), Ashwani Kumar Mishra (Punjab & Haryana), and Somasekhar Sundaresan (Bombay), alongside the Director General of CPWD and the Supreme Court Secretary General as Member Secretary. It must submit its interim findings and funding requirements to Sanjeev Sanyal of the PM’s Economic Advisory Council by August 31, 2026.

The scope goes well beyond eCourts Phase III. The committee is tasked with:

• Identifying systemic infrastructure constraints for judges, lawyers, litigants, and visitors
• Designing modern court complexes “for the 21st century”
• Advancing technology to accelerate case disposal
• Bridging the digital divide in court connectivity
• Expanding the e-Courts initiative

Budget Context

This push comes alongside the Union Budget 2026–27’s allocation of ₹2,010 crore for judicial infrastructure — ₹810 crore for district court physical infrastructure under the Centrally Sponsored Scheme, and ₹1,200 crore for eCourts Project Phase III (digitisation, training, capacity-building).⁷ The ₹40,000–50,000 crore ask from the Supreme Court committee is an order of magnitude larger, signalling that the judiciary sees the current pace of modernisation as fundamentally inadequate.

4. Punjab Completes e-Filing 3.0 Rollout Across All District Courts

At the state level, Punjab completed the e-Filing 3.0 rollout across all district courts under the eCourts Mission Mode Project Phase III, as confirmed by Minister of State for Law and Justice Arjun Ram Meghwal in a Lok Sabha written reply on July 25, 2026.⁸

The deployment equips district courts with digital infrastructure for electronic filing, virtual hearings, and paperless proceedings. Large-scale hardware deployments — desktops, power backups, printers — have been completed across key districts including Ludhiana, Jalandhar, and Bathinda.

Meanwhile, Odisha reported that 817 of its 845 courts have been equipped with ICT hardware under eCourts Phase III, with 42.96 lakh legacy court records digitised and 7.61 lakh cases processed through digital systems.⁹

The Digitisation Divide

The contrast between states is telling. Punjab has completed district-level e-Filing 3.0 deployment, while Odisha is still digitising legacy records at scale. Both are part of the same national Phase III programme (₹7,210 crore total outlay), but implementation velocity varies significantly — a function of state-level administrative capacity, existing digital readiness, and High Court coordination.

Cross-Layer Analysis

This week’s developments across L5 reveal a common pattern: digitisation is no longer the bottleneck — integration and last-mile adoption are.

• AgriStack has land records digitised and a Farmer Registry built, but the real value unlock comes only when banks actually use ULI APIs for lending — hence the Chief Secretary’s daily monitoring diktat.
• ABHA/ABDM has 83% coverage in J&K, but universal saturation requires physical point-of-service enrolment and state-specific app ecosystems.
• eCourts has ₹7,210 crore in central funding and Supreme Court backing for ₹40,000–50,000 crore more, but state-level implementation varies from complete (Punjab) to still-in-progress (Odisha).

The connecting thread is that India’s sectoral DPIs are past the “build” phase and entering the “force” phase — where administrative willpower, monitoring mechanisms, and cross-departmental integration determine whether digital infrastructure translates into tangible public service delivery.