Humans are still core to Digital India

Context: While the ‘Digital India’ has increased the inclusiveness, human intermediaries are still significant in brokering trust bet­ ween governments and citizens.

Human aspect of e-governance programs

• Builds trust: between government and citizens
• Helps citizens: in overcoming barriers to citizens -
  • Awareness: the availability of digital services and rights from the state.
  • Ability: to navigate through provided solutions with trust; focusing on marginalized sections of citizens like women, elderly and minorities.
  • Hearing grievances: Supports individuals by placing complaints, directing them to the right authorities, and following up.
• Enables the state to do its work better: Offline architecture can be both political and apolitical, individuals or collectives with varying motivations to do this work.
  • Apolitical social workers and community leaders do their work as service.
  • Partisan political individuals see their work as constituency service to secure vote bases.
  • Community-­based organizations and NGOs see their work as allied to their core work.
• Providing last-mile governance: For e.g., Andhra Pradesh rolled out a ward secretariat programme for delivering government services at citizens’ doorstep.

Issues in present e-governance model

• Non-inclusion in the design of programmes: Only a few States have built a cadre of individuals
  • Intermediaries struggled with indicating that they were placing a complaint about someone else, and with communicating the impact.
  • These intermediaries often worked without any formal backing and role.

Way forward:

• Leveraging Types and forms of intermediation: in relation to regional, social, cultural and economic contexts instead of one size fits all approach.
• Incentivize intermediaries and not romanticize the benefits; See intermediaries as crucial to the realization of governance outcomes as delivery agents and drivers are to Swiggy and Uber.
• Learning from India’s formalized intermediation in traditional markets (such as mutual funds):
  • In these areas, formal governance mechanisms, structured capacity building, widespread awareness campaigns, and process re-engineering enabled growth and usage.

Conclusion:

• Digitization of governance with intermediaries to raise citizens’ awareness, build intermediaries’ skills and capabilities, and establish governance frameworks with suitable feedback loops.
• It will support the process of responsible, responsive and data-driven governance across domains.