A Citizenship in Crisis: Voice, Welfare and Other Contestations in the Digital State

"The primacy of the digital over the offline, in a scenario where digital access disparities are stark, has meant that traditional forms of collective representation and action fall by the wayside and are not given their fair due - to emerge, express or move to action....The digital has substantially changed the field in which citizenship is constructed and legitimated."

This paper examines the nature of e-governance in India, presents the implications of the changing nature of governance and state-citizen engagement (particularly for groups at the margins), and makes suggestions for a digitalisation that strengthens participatory democracy in the country.

According to the researchers, the vision, design, and implementation of e-governance in India - with its attendant "datafication" - leads to many questions about the changing nature of governance and state-citizen engagement. The brief argues that data-based decision-making in India is part of a larger trend that seems to displace the core ingredients of participatory governance - dialogue, deliberation, audit, and answerability - in favour of an approach that disempowers citizens. Whether it is biometric-based authentication systems, online grievance mechanisms, or Big Data that is neither objective nor representative, the absence of modes for meaningful rights to be heard, to contest, and to seek accountability decouple citizenship from rights and justice. The transition to a "digital by default" regime, as seen in efforts to revolutionise public service delivery by, say, going cashless and paperless, has seen foundational shifts in governance cultures, including the rise of network governance modalities in which public agencies increasingly replace traditional institutional structures of public administration with more fluid, contractual arrangements with private organisations with sectoral expertise. The private technocrats that can today be encountered in every government office lack the material and legal-institutional means to protect and promote citizen interests, according to the authors.

To illustrate some of their concerns, the authors critically examine the biometric-enabled unique identification number, Aadhaar, which is at the centre of Digital India's attempts to move all public services and transactions to a digital platform. The Jandhan Aadhaar Mobile (JAM) platform that interlinks bank accounts of the economically poorest citizens with their respective Aadhaar and mobile numbers has been introduced as an instrument of financial inclusion for entitlements such as health insurance, government pensions, disability benefits, and rations. Primary research conducted by IT for Change in the state of Rajasthan showed the consequences of JAM-based exclusions. Over 400,000 beneficiaries were struck off the pensions' list on various grounds - wrong Aadhaar seeding, linking defunct/wrong bank accounts with pension transfers, and an innumerable number of failed biometric authentications. For reasons outlined in the brief, "[i]n the emerging structures of digitalised access to benefits, exploitation is embedded into a mystified technology with no recourse for the marginalised to seek accountability. The reconfiguration of citizenship through digitalisation of welfare delivery comprises a subversion of the social contract."

The authors also include a case study on Rajasthan Sampark, a grievance redressal portal of the state government of Rajasthan that anyone can use to go online and log a complaint about a denial of service. While potentially useful in making the process of grievance redressal hassle-free for the citizen, it falls short in being able to capture the essence of state answerability and citizens' right to be heard in any grievance redressal process. Consider this: A woman registers a complaint about the lack of access to drinking water. The response: There is a water pump in her village in working condition that she can use, so her grievance is therefore without grounds. The architecture of the portal's interface is evidently unable to delve into the social context of the grievance. There may well be a larger systemic injustice that is underscored in her grievance: that as a dalit, she is barred access to the water point by the dominant communities of her village. The authors use the study to argue that to be meaningful for local accountability, citizen-centricism needs to be a key design feature of e-governance platforms.

The authors argue that citizen must muster new social capital for the changed terms of engagement with the state. Tackling that which undermines participatory democracy involves a range of strategies – continued investment in backup legacy systems, support and facilitation through public interest intermediaries, active information dissemination, creative partnerships for digital citizenship skill training. "As the exclusion of minority and marginalised view-points becomes reified through technological processes, new institutional mechanisms that can protect and promote democratic values and center the rights of citizens in relation to digitalisation and datafication are the need of the hour. We require carefully thought out institutional norms, rules and practices that extend the guarantees of democratic accountability to the digital paradigm and approach digitalisation from a 'last person first' point of view that bridges rather than deepens the access divide." The authors put forward the Charter on Democratic Accountability in the Digital Age as a step towards consolidating this emerging dialogue on data governance / data in governance.

In conclusion: "The civic-public value of the digital governance paradigm must be co-constructed by citizens; if the much acclaimed openness of the digital movement cannot be put to the service of participatory grassroots democracy, democracy itself runs the risk of being cannibalised."

This research brief is part of the IT-for-Change-led Voice or Chatter? - a multi-country case study analysis about how ICT-mediated citizen engagement can be empowering for citizens and transformative for democratic governance outcomes. Voice or Chatter? was funded by Making All Voices Count.