WE ALL think about Infrastructure as roads, bridges, water and electricity supply hardware.
Sabah is a place where public infrastructure is still insufficient for a state with long distances to the people to access good water, reliable electricity and cheap public transport. There is a saying that if you want to connect people and markets, build roads.
But in today’s world, connecting people to knowledge, money and markets is all about building a digital public infrastructure (DPI) or knowledge commons. Feed our youth knowledge, they can change the future.
Knowledge and data is everywhere, but if you don’t have access to the internet, you can’t use and apply knowledge for learning and earning.
The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) publishes an annual Food Balance Sheet, which shows the pattern of a country’s food supply and use, with free access to food and agricultural data for more than 245 countries and territories, with data going back to 1961. This extraordinary public good is useless if a young person in the heart of Borneo cannot access it.
Moreover, a national food balance sheet can tell us about food availability at the country level, but not whether a specific village has nutritious food access or a household falling below minimum dietary levels; whether local soil health is collapsing, or whether public programmes are reaching the right families at the right time. In this age of satellites, mobile data collection, smart phones, this is a failing of the digital public infrastructure.
If the many cannot enjoy what the few can access, life is not fair.
This is not a criticism of the government or the FAO. Governments or large bureaucracies are by definition behind the market in technology and its application to the public. Meanwhile, the private sector has raced ahead. Consumer technology is now intuitive, predictive, personalized, and addictive.
Private platforms know what we want to buy, watch, eat, and believe before many governments know whether a household has clean water, adequate nutrition, secure housing, or access to primary care. ChatGPT serves more than 800 million users weekly, showing the speed at which AI tools can scale when backed by capital, design, compute, and product discipline.
By contrast, many public systems still ask citizens to download forms, upload scanned documents, visit offices, and repeat the same information across departments. It is bureaucratic costs that slow down digital diffusion and usage.
This imbalance is not accidental.
The private sector takes risks to create a strange civilizational asymmetry: humanity has built exquisite systems for advertising, entertainment, financial speculation, and consumption, while the systems that govern food, water, soil, health, learning, livelihoods, and ecological restoration remain under-designed.
This is a digital tragedy of the commons. Public goods are everybody’s responsibility and nobody’s product roadmap. Data is collected repeatedly by different agencies but rarely integrated and accessible or understood by the common people.
Communities are surveyed again and again, but not empowered with an actionable balance sheet of their own conditions. Ministries operate schemes; NGOs run projects; researchers publish studies; donors fund pilots; citizens submit grievances. Yet the knowledge rarely compounds into a living public intelligence system - data from all, intelligence for everyone.
India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) shows how it can be done. 705 banks went live using the system in March 2026 and processed 22.6 trillion transactions worth ₹29,52,542.05 crore (312.67 Billion USD) that month alone.
Suddenly 1.4 billion users could access the digital public infrastructure. UPI happened because the government set the standards and fostered an ecosystem of banks, fintechs, merchants, and citizens to transact at scale.
Overnight, every young person is empowered to access seamless payment for personal usage.
That is a big lesson for governance. We do not need more government websites. We need public digital ecosystems: shared identity layers, interoperable registries, consent-based data exchange, open standards, public dashboards, community interfaces.
All these can be built by the cooperation of the universities, businesses and governments. The missing step is to apply this philosophy not only to payments and identity, but to the whole architecture of wellbeing.
We can build this in states like Sabah, using whatever tools and infrastructure that we already have. It may not be perfect, but the best is always the enemy of the good.
Better that our village people have access slightly slower than not at all.
The first layer of a modern public delivery system is visibility. Every household, farm, enterprise, water body, forest patch, school, clinic, and community asset should be visible in a secure, privacy-respecting, locally governed data architecture. The purpose is not surveillance. It is about service. If a food balance sheet can show national availability, a local wellbeing balance sheet should show whether food, water, housing, energy, health, income, mobility, education, and ecological conditions are sufficient in each place.
The second layer is intelligence. AI should not only write essays or generate images; it should help governments and communities ask: Which village has the highest nutrition gap? Which crops match local climate, soil, and dietary needs? Which households are excluded from benefits? Which public funds, corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds, philanthropic grants, carbon credits, and local enterprises can be matched to which needs? Which intervention will produce the highest wellbeing return with the lowest ecological cost?
If you have ChatGPT or DeepSeek, you can ask these questions. The answers may not be right, but you can then ask better questions and do something about it.
The third layer is delivery. Today, public systems often fail not because solutions do not exist, but because they do not reach the right place. Data remains in government or corporate files. Knowledge remains in universities. Finance remains in institutions.
Markets reward extraction faster than regeneration. Public schemes remain in departmental silos, while human life is whole. A public digital ecosystem can reduce these transaction costs by connecting data, knowledge, finance, markets, and governance into one operating layer.
This is how wellbeing becomes operational. Not as a slogan. Not as a poster of promise. Not another report. But as a measurable, place-based, continuously updated public mandate. A malnourished child, a degraded watershed, a farmer with falling soil organic carbon, a village without clean energy, or an elderly person without care would no longer be invisible until crisis arrives. They would appear as gaps on a living balance sheet, matched with pathways for response.
The public deserves better public technology. If private companies can build platforms that coordinate billions of daily clicks, governments and public institutions can build systems that coordinate care, nutrition, regeneration, learning, and resilience. The next technology revolution should not merely make consumption smoother. It should make civilization wiser.
The upgrade is overdue. The tools exist. The examples exist. The moral case is overwhelming. Public-sector organizations must now move from portals to platforms, from reports to real-time intelligence, from fragmented schemes to integrated ecosystems, and from passive data publication to active wellbeing delivery.
The future of governance will not be defined by how much data the state collects, but by how intelligently, ethically, and compassionately data is transformed into flourishing for all.
Smart infrastructure = smart state = smart people.
Sneha Poddar is Head, International, George Town Institute of Open and Advanced Studies, Wawsan Open University, Penang. She is a chartered accountant based in India and has worked on village digital transformation plans in India, Bhutan and Sabah. She will be lecturing at the forthcoming Sabah Asia-Pacific Summit on Impact Investing in Sustainable Development, Kota Kinabalu on July 13-14, 2026.
