Abstract

Democratic governments are meant to guarantee individual civil liberties and must have adequate checks and balances to prevent State excesses. They must also provide an actionable legal framework to prevent exploitation by private organisations. The Constitution of India guarantees individual freedoms through its fundamental rights and the Constittuion’s directive principles point to the need for policies to be undertaken by elected governments to ensure these rights are honoured. Development policies in spirit and implementation must ideally advance these principles. However, there have been concerns that historically, the implementation of welfare measures to uplift the capacities of the poor have been riddled with corruption by field level bureaucrats. This gets exacerbated by a graded gap in levels of literacy and information asymmetry between the bureaucrats and the rights-holders. Led by social movements, the Right to Information Act promulgated in 2005, meant that for the first time citizens could have access to the same information that a parliamentarian would have. This was a vital law in an attempt to alter the power equations between citizens and the State and it paved the way for several landmark rights based legislations such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the National Food Security Act, among others. For governments, some key preoccupations with regard to the implementation of such welfare schemes include achieving policy objectives efficiently at scale and reducing corruption. The proliferation of digital technologies appeared to be promising in this regard. Many Indian states and ministries at the central level have created various digital platforms to identify rights and entitlement holders, disburse cash, and monitor the efficacy of various programmes. While this is understandable, it comes at a cost. A ‘one size fits all’ approach does not account for unique social and geographic constraints and can consequently result in technology mediated exclusions which are hard to resolve. All welfare policies in India are digitally mediated today. However, there have been no official protocols or standards to perform a transparency and accountability audit of such technologies. In this paper, we primarily focus on the following themes. First, we discuss the nature and typology of exclusions arising from the digital State in welfare programmes. Most of those excluded are the poorest and over-represented by historically marginalised castes and tribes. Second, we argue how the scaffolding of digitisation has impeded democratic participation. Seen from the lens of Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, we interrogate how this has impacted a broader understanding of citizenship. And third, as a corollary, we discuss how the notion of ‘authentic’ has been transferred to ‘authenticating’ as the burden of proof has been shifted to the poor from accessing rights to establishing their citizenship.