THR Web Features / December 3, 2025

India’s digital systems are built not to profit from users but to govern them.

Sahasranshu Dash

(** solarseven/Shutterstock.)

India today sits at a curious intersection of technological optimism and political anxiety. At a time when liberal democracies are scrambling to regulate Big Tech and authoritarian regimes are deepening algorithmic control, India’s digital state-building project occupies a category of its own. In the world’s largest democracy, where 1.4 billion people navigate deep social inequalities, infrastructural deficits, and postcolonial legacies, the project of digital governance has become nothing less than a redefinition of what it means to be a citizen, a subject, and a state.

This transformation is built not on platforms like Facebook or WeChat but on public infrastructure—codebases, digital IDs, interoperable databases, real-time payment rails, and biometric registries. Aadhaar, India’s biometric ID system, is already the largest in the world, covering more than 1.3 billion individuals. Its architecture enables access to a constellation of other systems: UPI (a real-time payment protocol), DigiLocker (for credential storage), CoWIN (for vaccination management), and Jan Dhan (for financial inclusion).

The model emerging from this vision is not Silicon Valley’s surveillance capitalism or Beijing’s algorithmic authoritarianism. It is something distinct—a mode of governance that might best be described as surveillance developmentalism. Unlike commercial data extraction, India’s model is driven by the logic of the developmental state. Its digital systems are built not to profit from user but to govern them. More precisely, to govern by rendering citizens legible to the system and governable through it.

The moral framing of these platforms is seductive. They promise transparency, efficiency, and inclusion. They claim to end duplication, curb corruption, and deliver benefits directly to the “last mile.” And in many ways, they succeed. But legibility comes at a cost. As political theorist James C. Scott observed in Seeing Like a State, when states strive for perfect visibility, they often suppress the complexity that makes life liveable. Uniform categories displace vernacular ones; biometric identity substitutes for social embeddedness.

In India’s case, this cost becomes existential. Failure to authenticate—due to a fingerprint mismatch or faulty connectivity—is not just an inconvenience. It is erasure. A person unable to verify their identity through Aadhaar may be denied food rations, healthcare, or mobility. Rights, in this architecture, are no longer moral claims or political entitlements but contingent outputs of technical systems. In surveillance developmentalism, the body itself becomes infrastructure.

This is why surveillance developmentalism differs structurally from other digital regimes. In Silicon Valley, the user is commodified. In China, disciplined. In India, the citizen is rendered procedural. One must be seen to be served; to fall outside the database is to fall outside the polity. The procedural citizen’s existence is validated not by history, law, or struggle but by successful interaction with a digital interface.

Unlike traditional state legibility—birth certificates, voter rolls—biometric systems encode political belonging directly into flesh. The fingerprint is not evidence of identity; it is identity. This represents a fundamental shift: from reading documents about bodies to reading bodies as documents. When manual laborers lose fingerprints to construction work, when elderly citizens’ irises cloud with cataracts, when disabled individuals cannot position themselves for scans—these aren’t technical glitches but political exclusions. The system renders them unrecognizable to the state itself.

This differs qualitatively from documentary citizenship. A lost ration card could be replaced, a misspelled name corrected. But when the body fails to authenticate, there is no alternative text.

Colonial states measured bodies to classify and control them. The techno-procedural state inverts this purpose: bodies are read not to exclude but to include, not to divide but to serve. Yet the assumption remains: The body holds the truth of identity, and the state has the right to read it.

What emerges is a new form of biopower, one that Michel Foucault could not have anticipated. The state no longer merely disciplines bodies or optimizes populations; it metabolizes bodies as data, transforming biological uniqueness into administrative infrastructure. Citizens become unwitting co-producers of their own surveillance, carrying their identification in their very cells. The biometric body politic thus represents the ultimate fusion of person and database—a citizenship that is quite literally embodied.

India’s constitutional vision—rooted in universal rights, legal guarantees, democratic accountability—is being reinterpreted through code. A ration card becomes a QR code; a welfare claim becomes a dashboard transaction; a grievance becomes an error message. Of late, this is also leading to charges of voter lists being gamed in favor of the incumbent party in state elections, leveraging administrative control and centralised digital infrastructure.

To be sure, many of these platforms have improved service delivery and financial inclusion. But the logic beneath them is quietly transformative: the substitution of legal and political inclusion with infrastructural participation. This reorientation is reinforced by India’s approach to data protection.

In 2023, the Indian Parliament passed the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, the country’s long-awaited privacy legislation. On paper, it affirms familiar liberal principles: informed consent, purpose limitation, data minimization. In practice, however, it provides the state with expansive exemptions on grounds of national interest, sovereignty, and public order.

Yet a more charitable reading is possible. For many developing countries, India’s model represents a genuine infrastructural leap. Drawing on the capabilities approach articulated by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, one might argue that digital systems like Aadhaar, UPI, and CoWIN expand access to essential goods—banking, healthcare, identity—enabling millions to exercise capabilities previously out of reach. The JAM trinity—Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, and Mobile—has facilitated the opening of more than 500 million bank accounts. UPI now processes more than 12 billion transactions monthly, totalling some $216 billion. CoWIN coordinated the distribution of more than 2.2 billion vaccine doses across India and in parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean. Collectively, these platforms are credited with saving the Indian state approximately $33 billion by reducing fraud and leakage.

In this complementary light, Mariana Mazzucato’s conception of the entrepreneurial state becomes especially salient. She argues that the state is not merely a regulator or service provider but a creator of public value and a shaper of markets. From this perspective, Aadhaar, UPI, and CoWIN are not just administrative tools—they are mission-oriented public innovations. But as Mazzucato warns, public value can be easily captured—by the state itself or by private actors—unless democratic governance mechanisms keep pace with infrastructural ambition.

This reveals a philosophical orientation: Rights are not inalienable limits on power but variables balanced against inclusion, efficiency, and scale. The postcolonial developmental state treats discretion as feature, not flaw. Constitutional protections become symbolic while real governance architecture is built through APIs and back-end protocols.

Code increasingly functions as constitution. Protocols determining eligibility, access, and exceptions are embedded not in legal texts but in software systems. The database, not the court, is often the final arbiter of recognition. Sovereignty takes new shape—no longer anchored only in borders, but in infrastructure.

India’s digital project reorganizes the relationship between citizen and state. The ambition is infrastructural sovereignty—owning the tools of governance and encoding the rules through which society is seen, classified, and acted upon. This logic is deeply postcolonial: asserting control over informational terrain as a way of overcoming Empire’s asymmetries, its legacy of underdevelopment, and colonial patterns of technological dependence.

But infrastructural sovereignty often becomes indistinguishable from infrastructural discretion. The biometric system doesn’t merely verify identity—it gatekeeps recognition itself. If the system says no, there’s little recourse. Rights are embedded in platform logic, not deliberative institutions. When infrastructure becomes the locus of citizenship, failure is not just technical—it’s political.

The Friction Deficit: What Democracy Loses

Digitization eliminates more than inefficiency—it eliminates democratic spaces that inefficiency created. Traditional state-citizen interaction was chaotic: long queues, multiple visits, unclear requirements, bureaucratic discretion that could work for or against you. This messiness was the texture of political life. Within gaps and delays, citizens learned to advocate, negotiate, make claims.

Partha Chatterjee’s distinction between civil society and political society becomes crucial. While middle-class Indians engage the state through legal rights and formal procedures, the majority navigate “political society”—a domain of improvisation, exception, negotiated entitlement. In the friction between rule and reality, most Indians historically made claims on the state. A widow might convince a clerk to overlook missing documents; a migrant worker might find an advocate; a community might collectively petition for exception.

Digital governance compresses this space to zero, because the interface doesn’t negotiate. The algorithm doesn’t bend. The dashboard presents binary outcomes: approved or denied, verified or failed, included or excluded. A relational encounter becomes a transactional event. Citizens lose not only immediate remedy but also the knowledge from engaging the state as political actor rather than service consumer.

This represents profound loss of democratic capacity. Democracy depends not only on formal rights but on practical ability to make claims, contest decisions, navigate power. James C. Scott’s metis—practical wisdom from local experience—develops precisely in friction between citizens and bureaucrats. This knowledge is political. It teaches that the state is not natural force but human construction, subject to pressure, persuasion, change.

Surveillance developmentalism eliminates this pedagogical dimension. Citizens interact with systems, not states. They receive services, not recognition. They become users, not political subjects. Indeed, the seamless user experience—celebrated as democratic progress—represents democratic regression, reducing citizenship to consumption and political engagement to technical troubleshooting.

The result is a friction deficit—systematic reduction in opportunities for democratic learning and contestation. This is not accidental but architectural. Systems optimized for flow cannot accommodate democracy’s stops, starts, and detours. They cannot pause for argument, adapt to exception, learn from resistance. In eliminating old inefficiencies, they eliminate democracy’s inefficiencies.

When citizens can no longer engage the state as political entity—when every interaction is mediated through friction-minimizing interfaces—they lose practical experience of democratic agency. The state becomes naturalized, its decisions algorithmic rather than political. The possibility of democratic transformation begins to atrophy.

The DPDP Act mirrors surveillance developmentalism’s assumptions. While echoing global privacy regimes’ vocabulary, it privileges state prerogative. Sovereignty, national interest, public order are grounds for broad exemptions. The promise of rights is affirmed but always provisional—protection with a backdoor, privacy by design but surveillance by exception.

The Schmittian concept of sovereignty—the power to decide the exception—moves from courtrooms to codebases. Exceptions aren’t declared in emergencies; they’re embedded in technical architectures. Who gets seen, served, or disappears—these decisions are made not by judges or legislators but by system designers, software vendors, backend configurations.

Code as Border, Cloud as Territory

Sovereignty in India’s digital regime is no longer just territorial—it’s infrastructural. The state governs through code and cloud. Data localization mandates, restrictions on cross-border data flows, digital taxation mechanisms signal an attempt to treat information as sovereign resource.

This isn’t mere techno-nationalism but an attempt to redraw sovereignty’s contours: moving beyond postcolonial dependency by asserting control over informational flows and infrastructures. CoWIN, Aadhaar, UPI aren’t just services—they’re instruments of rule.

Yet paradox persists. The same state claiming infrastructural sovereignty often builds systems through partnerships with private tech firms like Infosys. Public purpose is enacted through private expertise. Platforms may serve people but aren’t always answerable to them. Infrastructure replaces institution: state legitimacy flows from functionality, not deliberation.

India’s infrastructural model is no longer confined domestically. Through MOSIP (Modular Open-Source Identity Platform), India exports an Aadhaar version to the Global South—including Togo, Morocco, and the Philippines. These are pitched as open-source, adaptable, affordable digital public goods. MOSIP’s appeal—modularity, scalability, affordability—means quick, wide adoption. But it carries India’s assumptions around governance architecture: that identity is procedural, rights are platform-mediated, and that inclusion is validated by legibility.

This export is philosophical, not just technological. Unlike China’s Digital Silk Road (associated with surveillance tech and strategic debt), India’s offering presents itself as civic, open, and sovereign. But that civic promise isn’t necessarily accompanied by strong institutional safeguards. Legal frameworks often lag behind platforms and the politics of techno-proceduralism is folded into its backend logic.

Unlike in India, where civil society has at least partially pushed back (the 2017 Puttaswamy judgment of the Supreme Court declared privacy a fundamental right), many recipient countries lack institutional or discursive infrastructure to negotiate these risks. What is meant as inclusion may result in deeper marginalization.

But even in India, the systems that now structure state–citizen interaction increasingly treat that right as optional, even dispensable. There is no formal suspension of rights—only a procedural postponement. Privacy becomes a checkbox. Consent becomes a formality. And recognition becomes conditional on whether the system says yes.

This is not the overt authoritarianism of control, nor the market-driven surveillance of the West. It is something more insidious: the normalization of the exception, embedded in code, enforced through dashboards, and rationalized in the language of efficiency and inclusion.

This regime produces not only administrative exclusion but what Miranda Fricker calls epistemic injustice. People are denied not merely goods or services but the ability to be understood as knowers, as subjects with claims. A migrant worker who cannot articulate a system error, a rural woman facing a dashboard in unfamiliar language, a tribal family flagged for duplicate Aadhaar entries—these aren’t technical failures but political ones.

This is surveillance developmentalism’s quiet violence: the quiet erosion of democratic capacity. Not through authoritarian laws, but because contestation conditions are designed out. When decisions once made openly—by ministers, courts, civil servants—are now embedded in software, Carl Schmitt’s formulation that sovereignty lies in deciding the exception is reborn digitally. Exceptions are no longer declared. They’re silently enforced by backend systems.

This isn’t just technocratic—it’s constitutional. The question isn’t whether rights exist on paper but whether architecture remains to enforce them. The more seamless the experience, the more complete the erasure of dissent.

Surveillance developmentalism is not inevitable. It’s a choice—shaped by postcolonial anxieties, neoliberal pressures, and genuine desire to serve a massive population efficiently. But its costs are cumulative and creeping. It flattens citizenship into data points. It narrows accountability to uptime. It transforms democratic voice into system legibility.

Last but not least, India’s infrastructural turn is no longer just a national story—it’s a global prototype. But whether it becomes a foundation for new democratic possibilities or a template for silent exclusion will depend on whether friction, subjectivity, and dissent can find their way back into the digital imaginary.

Infrastructure is not neutral. It is political terrain, or at least should be. The code governing access, inclusion, and recognition must itself be contested. What is needed is not wholesale rejection of digital governance but its politicization.