The right to live with dignity is a constitutional imperative. However, it rarely manifests in discussions surrounding digital initiatives in governance. Centralised data dashboards — valuable as they are — have become the go-to mode for assessing policies, relegating principles such as human dignity and hardships in accessing rights to its blind spots. Often when technological glitches prevent one from accessing rights, there is a tendency to make the rights-holder feel responsible for it. For instance, I recall being in Rajasthan with Natho Ba, an old MGNREGA worker with severe speech impediment. Despite repeated attempts at a bank to get his e-KYC, he wasn’t able to access his own MGNREGA wages because his biometrics wouldn’t work. The bank manager said in Hindi, “His fingers are defective”. Natho Ba felt humiliated, but was physically unable to voice his humiliation. The bank official was not intentionally insensitive, but had internalised spouting dehumanised technocratic vocabulary. Dehumanisation is the likely outcome when trust and humane aspects of governance get outsourced to opaque technologies.
Two technocratic initiatives
Two recent technocratic initiatives by the Union government underscore these issues again. The Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), launched in 1975, is one of the world’s largest early childhood care and development programmes. An important component of ICDS is supplementary nutrition for children in the 0 to 6 years age group, pregnant women and lactating mothers. This became a legal entitlement when it became part of the National Food Security Act in 2013. As per this, the rights-holders get hot cooked meals or take-home rations at the local Anganwadis. In 2021, the Union government launched the Poshan Tracker, a centralised platform, to monitor all nutrition initiatives, including ICDS. A recent article by Tapasya of The Reporters’ Collective highlights some alarming technocratic proposals for ICDS. As per Union government circulars, the updating of Aadhaar of ICDS rights-holders, including children, on the Poshan Tracker is mandatory, and subsequent Central funds for supplementary nutrition to States is being made contingent on this. Nearly three-fourths of children between the ages of 0 to 5 years do not have Aadhaar cards, and Supreme Court orders specify that children cannot be denied their rights for lack of Aadhaar. The government has responded saying that only the Aadhaar of mothers need to be authenticated at Anganwadis. However, it does not provide any data or evidence to show how many “fake” or “ghost” children there are. In our study of Common Service Centres (CSC), even CSC owners reported that biometrics of 42% of the users don’t work on the first attempt. This is borne out in other studies too.
