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The unprecedented digitalisation in public life in India is founded on a collection of massively successful “digital public goods” like Aadhar, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) or the Ayushman Bharat Digital Health Mission. These have been celebrated for the fact that they are developed and promoted by the state, and made freely available to all residents of the country. But these have critical gaps in social appropriateness, arising from social, legal and political ambiguities and incompatibilities.
While the costs of digitalisation are beginning to receive some attention, the positive side of the equation—the supposed benefits of digitalisation to people, organisations, the government and society as a whole—have not yet received rigorous attention. Developing standards that would allow entities to clearly articulate the benefits and intended use-cases of a large digital application is of crucial importance to public affairs.
Democratic practices and public administration in India have also had a socio-politically complex relationship with digitalisation. Consider digital elections: while protocols for secure, End-to-End Verifiable Voting (E2V) have been around for quite some time, their implementation has been hampered because they are technically complex and any viable electoral procedure should be easily appreciable by the public.
Privacy is often mistaken for secrecy. Multiple interventions, including the Supreme Court’s Puttaswamy judgement on the Right to Privacy in India, have recognized that the concept has several other crucial dimensions. For example, understanding privacy using the concept of “informational self-determination” would require us to also account for asymmetry of information and power between individuals and processing entities about the nature, extent and value of processed data, and how this processed data is used or shared. Expanding our understanding of privacy in these ways is crucial to an appropriate exercises of the “proportionality” analysis.
The prominence of big data analytics, and more recently, the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence, present raise problems at many levels. On the one hand there is the possibility of bias and social exclusion, especially given India’s demographic complexity and unique social structures. On the other hand, the advertised predictive power of these approaches encourages collection of the kind of data that tend to compromise privacy.
The explosion in popularity of social media and instant messaging platforms has revolutionised personal expression and communication, with India leading this charge. But this has also facilitated the proliferation of disinformation, illegal profiling, and hate speech, with implications for both the personal mental health and well-being of users, and the security of the nation as a whole.
