Partial digitisation: on digital service delivery in India.
Despite increase in online services, cumbersome processes from analogue era remain.
Digitising citizen services is a process full of promise and empowerment. In India, making processes faceless carries the added benefit of relief from the rent seeking that is rife in government offices. The more services are available online, the better. It is possible; in December 2024, Estonia digitised the last citizen service that only remained possible on paper: divorce. In this light, participation of private firms such as WhatsApp in getting digital services delivered to more people, as in Gujarat, is welcome. This being said, the digital service delivery in India has several issues: a lack of trust towards the citizen, in spite of the citizen-centricity touted as the reason for their existence; systematic underinvestment leading to lapses in availability and reliability; and lax cybersecurity. In many cases involving the most dysfunctional online services, the responsibility lies with States, such as property records registration and civil acts such as marriage. But even in those where the remit lies with the Union government, there are serious issues.
While lip service is paid to the importance of securing key cybersecurity infrastructure, serious vulnerabilities remain. Security of data residing on public databases is taken for granted, and institutions such as the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-in) have failed to rise to the challenge. Also, on myriad forms online, users are forced to type and submit the same details repeatedly, even though systems such as Digi Locker exist that are purported to ease this process. A shadow of a “mismatch” can anyway result, and few if any processes allow citizens to cure defects without redoing the entire process — a shocking lapse punishing routine variations in names and spellings. Scant regard is paid to the accessibility and intuitive design, leaving persons with disabilities and vast swathes of the population dependent on outside assistance to go through a self-service process. Some systems are left defunct or sputtering years after their launch: take e-Sanad, launched a decade ago to help people legalise personal documents while travelling abroad or emigrating. Few States have been on-boarded, leaving other residents to deal with middlemen and touts in the pre-verification process that precedes the so-called Apostille stamp they need on a time-bound schedule. As with this process, the analogue equivalents of broken digital services remain inaccessible and cumbersome, such as updating details on Aadhaar, which requires visiting a physical office. The creation of Digital Public Infrastructure such as UPI and Aadhaar are of little use without reciprocal trust by the government and a commitment to uptime and service quality.