At airports across India, the DigiYatra now whisks passengers past queues with a quick face scan. This shift from counters and files to tap-and-go platforms is more than a matter of convenience. Such a transformation from long queues and an endless trail of paperwork to instant digital services represents not just technological progress but a fundamental shift in the way the Indian state interacts with its citizens.
The evolution of digital governance in India represents one of the most ambitious technological transformations undertaken by any developing nation. India laid the foundation of e-governance long before the term came into common parlance in many other countries of the Global South.
The calibrated intersection of technology and governance has transformed the isolated computerisation efforts undertaken in the 1970s into a comprehensive digital ecosystem that now serves more than 1.4 billion citizens.
The advancement of technology in Indian governance is best understood through four distinct phases from the 1980s to the present, with each phase reflecting how the Indian state has reoriented its relationship with citizens through digital infrastructures.
Technology making bureaucratic process swift
The initial phase, between 1980 and 2000, saw the technology emerging as a supporting interface for the existing governance system of the time. The establishment of the National Informatics Centre (NIC) in 1976 laid the foundation of India’s digitisation trajectory, with the modest goal of acquainting the government departments and institutions with computers, which then were a novelty for a large number of Indians.
In its attempt to spearhead “technology-driven solutions” by enhancing communications across various government departments at national, state, and district levels, NIC even established a nationwide satellite-based network called NICNET in 1987. There was a systematic effort to introduce technology as a back-end tool in government offices to enhance administrative efficiency.
The result was first visible in the introduction of the computerised reservation system of Indian Railways, which streamlined a long and unwieldy manual process into a forthright, systematic practice. This success encouraged the Income Tax department to digitize tax records and the Election Commission to move to computerised electoral rolls.
However, these initiatives brought under the aegis of NIC, though revolutionary, were largely invisible to citizens. Just as a supporting actor behind the curtains, technology made the bureaucratic process swift and prompt, but it did not yet change anything about how citizens interacted with the government.
Notable e-governance initiatives
The observable shift began in the 1990s with the wave of economic liberalisation that swept across the country, bringing an increased focus on efficiency and transparency in governance. The e-governance initiatives launched by various state governments became watershed moments and marked the movement of technology from back-office computerisation to front-end service delivery.
Notably, it was the individual state leadership of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, and Kerala that first embraced the potential of technology to directly serve citizens. Projects like e-Seva in Andhra Pradesh, brought in 1999, facilitated the provision of multiple government services through a single window.
Similarly, Gyandoot, launched in Madhya Pradesh in 2000, created rural cyber kiosks for bringing government services to tribal areas. The Bhoomi project, initiated in Karnataka in 2001, digitised land records of farmers, thereby revolutionising property documentation and making governance visible at the local level, even in rural areas with limited infrastructure.
The FRIENDS project in Kerala and Lokvaani in Uttar Pradesh further demonstrated that e-governance would work across India’s diverse socio-economic landscape, optimising the ability of digital tools to bridge gaps in service delivery, even if in fragmented ways.
However, these pioneering initiatives also revealed systemic limitations. For instance, many kiosks in the Gyandoot project became non-functional due to poor connectivity and unsustainable revenue models, exemplifying the “pilot project syndrome”, where successful demonstrations failed to scale.
Technology as backbone of modern governance
The second phase of India’s e-governance journey from 2005-2014 was built on the earlier state-level initiatives, during which technology had evolved from being a mere back-end supporting tool to an active interface between government and citizens, though within the traditional governance framework. With the launch of the National e-governance Plan (NeGP) in 2006, the second phase systemically integrated technology as the core infrastructure for governance.
The establishment of State Wide Area Networks (SWANs) for connectivity, Common Service Centres (CSCs) as rural access points, and State Data Centers (SDCs) for hosting applications created the physical and digital infrastructure necessary to scale e-governance across central, state and integrated services.
A real pivotal moment in India’s digital push came with the launch of Aadhaar in 2010, which redefined governance around a verifiable digital identity. By collecting the biometric details of over a billion citizens, it established a unified identity framework capable of authenticating individuals across a wide range of services.
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) not only assigned numbers but also developed an authentication architecture that ensured welfare transfers, banking access, and broader financial inclusion, instituting the backbone for subsequent digital initiatives.
However, Aadhaar’s mandatory linkages also raised concerns about privacy, exclusion errors from biometric failures, and the creation of a surveillance architecture. Nevertheless, during this period, technology had become the infrastructure on which modern governance operated.
From public service to platform governance
The third phase from 2015-2019 embedded technology as an ecosystem, characterised by the creation of platforms that didn’t just digitise existing services but also created entirely new possibilities for governance and citizen empowerment. The launch of Digital India in 2015 symbolised a philosophical shift: technology was no longer just infrastructure but an interconnected environment where different platforms could seamlessly interact.
Platforms like JAM trinity (Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, Mobile), DigiLocker, and BHIM positioned digital infrastructures as interoperable ecosystems that could deliver welfare, financial inclusion, and documentation seamlessly. The essence of ‘platformisation’ lay in creating interoperable digital infrastructures that transcended individual services. The India Stack exemplified this approach, where a set of open APIs (Aadhaar authentication, e-KYC, e-Sign, and UPI) transformed into digital rails on which both public and private entities could build.
Seen in this light, UPI’s explosive growth – from 0.01 million transactions in 2016 to 18 billion monthly by 2025 – was not just about convenience of payment from the user side. It demonstrated how platform architecture could spawn an entire ecosystem of innovation, from merchant payments to credit delivery.
This platform logic extended across governance domains such as UMANG, which aggregated 1,745 government services not merely for convenience but to create network effects where user data and authentication could flow seamlessly across departments.
Similarly, the Government e-Market’s public procurement platform didn’t just digitise tenders but created a marketplace dynamic where transparency and competition became embedded in the platform architecture itself. Hence, in this phase, the government was no longer just providing digital services but creating programmable infrastructure that enabled third parties to innovate atop it, making technology the very ecosystem within which modern governance operated.
Dilemma of platform governance
However, ‘platformisation’ also concentrated unprecedented data power. For instance, Aadhaar’s authentication logs had the potential to create detailed citizen profiles, raising various concerns. Moreover, Aadhar’s underlying technological sophistication couldn’t fix the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) exclusions due to authentication failures that left genuine beneficiaries without their much needed welfare access.
The shift from a public service to platform logic, thus, carried a deeper tension: citizens risked being treated less as rights-bearing individuals in governance and more as data-generating users. But how has e-governance evolved further, and what major challenges hinder its effective implementation in enhancing governance efficiency? This will be explored in the second part of this article.
