Risks of digital governance and measuring governance

Detail

1. Digital divide

• Digital divide means the gap between people who have devices, internet and digital skills and people who do not.
• It has three layers:
• Access: whether a person has a device and a network.
• Affordability: whether they can pay for data and handsets.

• Skills: whether they can actually use online services.

• The divide runs along several lines:

• Rural–urban: villages have weaker networks and fewer devices.
• Gender: NFHS-5 (2019-21) found that only about a third of women had ever used the internet, against over half of men.
• Age: older people are less able to use apps and online forms.
• Disability: many portals do not work with screen readers.

• Language: many services are offered mainly in English or Hindi.

• "Digital by default" welfare means services are delivered online first, and offline routes are dropped or weakened.

• The people who most need welfare are often the least connected.

• So the system can shut out the very people it is meant to serve.

• Misinformation: low digital literacy helps fake news spread. Fake news weakens public trust in democratic institutions (NCERT Class 9).

• Remedies:
• Common Service Centres (CSCs): village-level kiosks where an operator helps citizens use e-services.
• Assisted access: a helper or official fills in the forms for the citizen.
• Offline options: paper forms and counter services stay available as a legal right, not as a favour.
• Digital-literacy drives: training aimed at women, older people and rural users.

2. Exclusion through biometric and digital systems

• Exclusion error happens when an eligible person is wrongly denied a benefit. In digital systems this is often caused by a technical failure.
• Aadhaar authentication failures:
• Fingerprints of manual workers, farmers and older people are often worn out, so the scanner rejects them.

• Weak mobile networks in remote areas cause authentication to fail.

• Biometric failures in PDS (Public Distribution System, the ration shop network):

• Failed authentication meant no ration. Ration cards not linked to Aadhaar were cancelled.

• These failures were linked to the Jharkhand starvation deaths (2017).

• Payment mandate for rural wages (1 January 2024):

• From this date, wages under the rural employment guarantee scheme had to be paid through the Aadhaar-based payment system.
• Workers whose details did not match lost their job cards (the document that proves a household is entitled to work), which were deleted.

• The same worry applies to the biometric requirements of VB-G RAM G, the new rural employment framework.

• Remedies:

• Exception handling: OTP, iris scans or manual registers when fingerprints fail.
• Human override: an official can approve the benefit without a digital match. The official stays answerable for that decision.
• Social audits and grievance redress before any card or name is deleted.

3. Surveillance

• Surveillance means the State watching, intercepting or collecting people's communications or data.
• Lawful interception (the legal routes):
• IT Act 2000, Section 69: the government can order interception, monitoring or decryption of computer data. Permitted grounds include sovereignty, security of the State, public order and preventing offences.

• Telecommunications Act 2023: it replaced the Indian Telegraph Act 1885. It allows interception of telecom messages on similar grounds.

• State systems:

• CMS (Central Monitoring System): a centralised system for lawful interception of telecom traffic.
• NATGRID (National Intelligence Grid): links government and private databases (travel, bank, telecom) so that security agencies can search them.

• The concern is that neither has a dedicated law passed by Parliament, and neither faces independent judicial oversight.

• Pegasus case — Manohar Lal Sharma v. Union of India (27 October 2021):

• Background: reports said that Pegasus, spyware (software that secretly takes over a phone) made by the Israeli firm NSO Group, was used against Indian citizens. [10]
• Holding: the State does not get a "free pass" every time it raises national security. National security cannot stop the Court from looking into the matter (judicial review, the power of courts to examine government action).
• Remedy: the Court set up a three-member Technical Committee of experts in cyber security, digital forensics, networks and hardware. Its work was overseen by Justice R.V. Raveendran, a former Supreme Court judge. [10]
• Terms of reference: the committee was to find out whether Pegasus had been used on citizens' phones to:
  • access stored data;
  • listen in on conversations;
  • intercept information. [10]
• Findings (August 2022):
  • Malware was found on 5 of the 29 phones examined.
  • The committee could not confirm that it was Pegasus.
  • It recorded that the Centre did not cooperate with the inquiry.
• Link to rights: the right to privacy is part of Article 21 (protection of life and personal liberty), as held in K.S. Puttaswamy v. UoI (2017). Any surveillance must pass the tests of legality, legitimate aim and proportionality (no more intrusion than is necessary).

4. Data security

• AIIMS ransomware attack (November 2022):
• Ransomware is malware that locks up data until a ransom is paid.
• The attack crippled the servers of India's top public hospital for days.

• It showed how centralised health data can be a single point of failure.

• CERT-In (Indian Computer Emergency Response Team): the national agency for responding to cyber incidents, working under MeitY.

• CERT-In Directions of 28 April 2022:
• Legal basis: issued under Section 70B(6) of the IT Act 2000. [2]
• Six-hour rule: cyber incidents must be reported to CERT-In within 6 hours of being noticed.
• Other duties:
  • synchronise the clocks of ICT systems;
  • keep logs of ICT systems;
  • data centres, VPS, VPN and cloud providers must record subscriber details;
  • virtual-asset service providers, exchanges and custodian wallet providers must follow KYC norms. [2]
• CERT-In issued FAQs to explain the directions. [3] The deadline for MSMEs, and for checking subscriber details, was extended to 25 September 2022. [4]

5. Measuring governance

(a) Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) — World Bank

• WGI are yearly composite scores of governance quality published by the World Bank. They go back to 1996. [11]
• Six dimensions: [11]

Dimension	What it asks
Voice and Accountability	Can citizens choose their government and speak freely?
Political Stability and Absence of Violence	How likely is violence or unrest?
Government Effectiveness	How good are public services and policy-making?
Regulatory Quality	Do the rules help the private sector grow?
Rule of Law	Are contracts, police and courts trusted?
Control of Corruption	Is public power used for private gain?

• Perception-based: the scores are built from opinion data drawn from about 35 cross-country sources. These include household surveys, firm surveys and expert assessments. [11]
• Coverage: more than 200 economies, from 1996 to 2025. The method was revised in 2025. [11]

(b) Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) — Transparency International

• The CPI ranks about 180 countries by how corrupt their public sector is perceived to be.
• Scale: 0 means highly corrupt and 100 means very clean.
• India: scored 38 and ranked 96th in CPI 2024.
• It measures perception, not actual cases of corruption.

(c) Good Governance Index (GGI) — DARPG

• GGI is a tool of the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG). It compares states and UTs on governance.
• GGI 2019: launched on Good Governance Day, 25 December 2019. [6]
• GGI 2021:
• Launched on 25 December 2021 by the Union Home Minister. [5]

• Covered 10 sectors and 58 indicators. [5]

• The 10 sectors: [5] 1. Agriculture and Allied Sector 2. Commerce and Industry 3. Human Resource Development 4. Public Health 5. Public Infrastructure and Utilities 6. Economic Governance 7. Social Welfare and Development 8. Judiciary and Public Safety 9. Environment 10. Citizen-Centric Governance

• 2021 leaders: Gujarat, Maharashtra and Goa topped the composite ranking. [5]

• Gujarat was strong in 5 of the 10 sectors and improved 12.3% over its GGI 2019 indicators. [5]

• Goa improved 24.7% over its GGI 2019 indicators. [5]

• District Good Governance Index (DGGI):

• Jammu & Kashmir was the first. It was released by the Union Home Minister in Jammu in January 2022. [7]
• Arunachal Pradesh (2023) followed, prepared by DARPG with the state government. [9]

• Gujarat released its first DGGI in 2023. [8]

• NeSDA (National e-Governance Service Delivery Assessment): a DARPG assessment that rates how well e-services work at the Centre, in states and UTs, and on state portals.

(d) Critique of governance indices

• Perception bias: WGI and CPI measure opinions, which may lag behind reality or reflect what elites and investors think.
• Data gaps: indicators depend on administrative data, which may be missing, out of date or reported by the governments being ranked.
• Ranking-driven behaviour: governments may chase their score and ignore real outcomes, much like "teaching to the test".
• Scope: governance indices are different from democracy indices such as V-Dem and EIU, which are covered under democracy-forms-outcomes.

Prelims Hooks

• CERT-In's 2022 cyber-security directions were issued under Section 70B(6), IT Act 2000, not Section 69. They require incidents to be reported within 6 hours.
• Section 69, IT Act covers interception, monitoring and decryption of computer data. Section 70B sets up CERT-In.
• Pegasus case: Manohar Lal Sharma v. UoI (27 October 2021). The Court said there is no "free pass" on national security. The technical committee was overseen by Justice R.V. Raveendran.
• Pegasus committee (August 2022): malware on 5 of 29 phones. Pegasus was not conclusively identified. The Centre did not cooperate.
• WGI has six dimensions and runs since 1996. Trap: WGI is perception-based, not built from hard administrative data.
• CPI is published by Transparency International, not the World Bank. Scale 0-100, where 100 means very clean. India: 38, rank 96 (2024).
• GGI 2021: 10 sectors, 58 indicators, released on Good Governance Day (25 December, Atal Bihari Vajpayee's birth anniversary). Top three: Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa.
• The first District Good Governance Index was for Jammu & Kashmir (2022).
• NeSDA rates e-service delivery and is run by DARPG.

Mains Points

• Inclusion against efficiency: biometric authentication cuts down on leakage, but it also wrongly excludes eligible people. Examples are the Jharkhand starvation deaths (2017) and the job-card deletions after the wage-payment mandate (2024). A rights-based design would keep offline options as a legal right, require human override, and allow no deletion without notice and a social audit.
• Surveillance and the rule of law: interception under Section 69 of the IT Act and the Telecommunications Act 2023 is ordered by the executive, and CMS and NATGRID have no dedicated law of their own. The Pegasus case showed the limits of judicial oversight when the government does not cooperate. Reform ideas:
• a judicial or parliamentary check on interception orders;
• the proportionality test from Puttaswamy (2017);

• an independent oversight body.

• Security as a governance duty: the AIIMS attack (2022) showed that putting citizen data in one place raises the risk of a breach. The CERT-In six-hour rule needs to be backed by cyber-hygiene in government bodies and by the duties under the DPDP Act 2023.

• Measuring governance: indices such as WGI, CPI, GGI and NeSDA make comparison possible and drive competition among states. Their weaknesses are perception bias, poor data and states chasing rankings. They should be combined with outcome data, citizen-report cards and social audits, in the spirit of the MKSS idea of public verification.