Context

• India’s approach to welfare governance is undergoing a profound transformation, moving from traditional rights-based models towards a technocratically-driven, data-centric system.
• As illustrated by massive Aadhaar enrolments, the integration of over 1,200 schemes into the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) mechanism, and the proliferation of digital grievance platforms, the Indian state is redefining how social welfare is conceived, delivered, and experienced.

The Promise and Perils of Technocratic Governance

• On the surface, the digitisation of welfare promises greater efficiency and reach.
• By tracking beneficiaries through databases and bypassing traditional leakages, such as ghost beneficiaries, the state claims more effective targeting and coverage.
• However, this transition brings into focus critical questions about the very nature and purpose of welfare, and whether democratic ideals are being subordinated to the demands of algorithmic rationality.
• Recent developments in political theory and game-theoretic research underscore that technocratic governance often flourishes where political polarisation is high.
• In such contexts, elected leaders, regardless of party, tend to offload difficult policy choices onto data-driven systems.
• The discourse shifts noticeably from the moral and philosophical question, ‘Who deserves support and why? to a managerial concern: How do we minimise leakage and maximise coverage?
• This shift, while rationalised as progress, often avoids grappling with constitutional complexities and lived realities.

Theoretical Lenses: Habermas, Foucault, and Agamben

• This transformation can be illuminated through critical perspectives.
• Habermas’s notion of ‘technocratic consciousness’ and Foucault’s ‘governmentality’ both describe how state rationality becomes increasingly measurable, auditable, and resistant to political challenge.
• Welfare schemes like E-SHRAM and PM-KISAN exemplify a push for unidirectional, innovation-driven interventions that value measurability and error-intolerance above democratic dialogue or ambiguity.
• Conversely, participatory planning and community feedback, bedrocks of democratic deliberation, are receding.
• Agamben’s concept of homo sacer is particularly resonant: the citizen is reduced to a mere auditable beneficiary, stripped of agency and rights, visible to the state only as data.

Democratic Deficits and Declining Social Investment

• The data-driven approach risks reducing citizenship to computable metrics, with substantial implications.
• India’s social sector spending has fallen to 17% in 2024-25, down from an average of 21% over the previous decade.
• This drop is not merely statistical: minorities, labour, nutrition, and social security programs have suffered a dramatic decline from 11% of spending pre-COVID-19 to just 3% post-pandemic.
• Behind the numbers are real consequences for the most vulnerable.
• Further accentuating the democratic deficit is the mounting crisis within the Right to Information (RTI) framework.
• With over 400,000 cases pending across information commissions and key leadership vacancies, the RTI, once a powerful transparency tool, is struggling to fulfil its role.

The Centralisation Trap: Accountability and Algorithmic Insulation

• The Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System is emblematic of both progress and peril.
• While it expedites the routing and tracking of complaints, it also risks centralising visibility of grievances without ensuring true responsibility or accountability.
• This algorithmic insulation makes it increasingly difficult to hold power to account, undermining democratic checks and balances.

The Way Forward

• Towards Democratic and Anti-Fragile Welfare Systems
  • Acknowledging these challenges is not to dismiss the value of digital innovation, but to urge a reimagining of welfare that foregrounds democratic antifragility.
  • The state must empower local knowledge, participatory institutions like gram sabhas, and frontline officials with discretion and reflexivity.
  • Community-driven audits, institutional support for platform cooperatives, and robust offline fallback mechanisms have all been cited as crucial reforms.
  • Embedding the right to explanation and appeal in digital governance is essential to countering the opacity and rigidity of automated systems.
  • Drawing on international best practices and domestic successes like Kerala’s Kudumbashree, a plural, responsive welfare regime is possible.
• Re-centring the Citizen
  • Ultimately, a welfare machine that operates efficiently but ignores democratic deliberation will serve everyone except those most in need.
  • For India to achieve the vision of a Viksit Bharat, digitisation must be reoriented around democratic and antifragile principles, transforming citizens from ledger entries into full partners in governance.

Conclusion

• India stands at a crossroads where the pursuit of efficiency must not come at the expense of justice, agency, and democratic accountability.
• The challenge is not to slow technological progress, but to harness it in ways that deepen democracy, expand participatory governance, and safeguard the rights and dignity of every citizen.