Context

• In recent years, India has turned to digital technologies to address persistent governance failures.
• From workers photographing themselves at job sites to mandatory biometric authentication for welfare benefits, techno-centric solutions have become the default response to absenteeism, corruption, and inefficiency.
• These interventions are promoted as tools of greater accountability, yet they often shift incentives in counterproductive ways, creating new forms of manipulation, exclusion, and demotivation while leaving underlying structural problems unresolved.

The Persistent Quest for Accountability

• Technological interventions have been introduced to address issues such as absenteeism, delayed service delivery, and petty corruption.
• Biometric attendance systems exemplify this trend. They were intended to curb evasion of duty but instead reshaped work priorities.
• Officials in Jharkhand, for example, became preoccupied with marking timely attendance rather than completing essential tasks that required flexibility.
• Evidence from Rajasthan showed that biometric monitoring failed to improve attendance among nurses, and in fact reduced it over time.
• This pattern extends to welfare programmes. In MGNREGA, where inflated attendance records have long enabled wage theft, the National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS) mandated twice-daily photographic evidence of worker presence.
• Yet corrupt actors quickly adapted by uploading irrelevant images or photos of photos, exploiting the system’s technical loopholes.
• Official documentation later confirmed widespread misuse, demonstrating how easily such accountability systems can be manipulated.

Biometric Dependence and Its Human Costs

• Facial recognition and biometric authentication have been promoted to safeguard welfare entitlements by ensuring that benefits reach the intended recipients.
• The Ministry of Women and Child Development’s decision to make Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) compulsory for Take-Home Rations aimed to prevent diversion.
• Yet these verification procedures often burden beneficiaries, especially women in rural areas, who must grapple with poor connectivity, crowded centres, and app instability.
• More critically, successful authentication does not guarantee access to benefits. Frontline workers retain discretionary power, and beneficiaries may still be denied rations after completing the required digital steps.
• Similar issues arose with Aadhaar-Based Biometric Authentication (ABBA) in the Public Distribution System, where the elderly, disabled, and immobile were disadvantaged by rigid identity checks.
• Meanwhile, corruption persisted through methods such as recording full entitlements while distributing less. These systems frequently imposed exclusion without reducing malpractice.

Perverse Incentives and Worker Demotivation

• The use of digital monitoring to oversee frontline health workers creates further distortions.
• Auxiliary Nurses and Midwives (ANMs) must upload geo-tagged photographs to document tasks such as breastfeeding counselling.
• This produces perverse incentives, where uploading proof becomes more important than providing the service itself.
• Completing a task without digital evidence risks punishment, while superficial compliance satisfies the system.
• Cases where ANMs were reprimanded due to GPS fluctuations or connectivity issues reveal how such systems treat diligent workers with suspicion.
• Instead of encouraging sincere service, they create an environment of surveillance-driven anxiety, eroding intrinsic motivation and diminishing public-spiritedness.

Accountability vs. Responsibility

• The core problem lies in conflating accountability with responsibility.
• Accountability enforces compliance, often in mechanical ways, whereas responsibility arises from intrinsic motivation and a commitment to the public good.
• Digital tools grounded in monitoring and verification cannot cultivate this deeper sense of purpose.
• By focusing narrowly on procedural control, they overlook the need to strengthen work culture, support frontline staff, and build trust-based systems.
• This raises a fundamental question: why do so many nurses, teachers, doctors, and cleaners work diligently even in contexts with weak accountability?
• The answer lies not in surveillance, but in professional ethics, community respect, and supportive environments, factors that technology cannot replicate.

Agnotology and the Politics of Not Knowing

• Despite growing evidence of exclusion, inefficiency, privacy violations, and continued corruption, digital systems continue to expand.
• This persistence reflects a deliberate cultivation of ignorance, or agnotology.
• By disregarding the harms arising from these technologies, policymakers maintain the illusion of effectiveness.
• This ignorance aligns with the interests of technology vendors who benefit from rapidly expanding markets for surveillance infrastructure, devices, authentication services, and data systems.
• Like industries that historically obscured the harms of their products, these actors gain from framing digital tools as inevitable solutions, while structural problems remain unaddressed.

Conclusion

• While digital tools promise transparency and efficiency, they often generate exclusion, new opportunities for corruption, worker demoralisation, and privacy risks.
• They promote a narrow vision of governance where procedural compliance overshadows meaningful service.
• The refusal to confront these failures suggests institutional inertia and vested interests rather than evidence-based policymaking.
• In this context, tech-fixes function as snake oil, seductive but ineffective remedies that distract from the real work of strengthening institutions, improving work culture, and fostering responsibility among those who serve the public.