On 1 July, 2015, PM Narendra Modi officially launched Digital India. The government’s flagship programme to transform India into an empowered digital economy was ambitious, audacious even. Only 19% of the population was connected to the internet, and a mere 15% had access to mobiles. But the programme captured a palpable shift in public imagination of India’s place in the world—optimism about the direction the country was headed in was running high following a couple of years of “deepening economic doubts”.
Six years on, India’s digital journey has had its fair share of hiccups, from multiple petitions (ultimately unsuccessful) questioning the constitutionality of Aadhaar—the biometric ID that would gate-keep access to government programmes—to an apparent data security flaw in Aarogya Setu, the contact tracing app intended to be the digital backbone of the government’s COVID response. Its track record is emblematic of the limitations of treating “digital” as a silver bullet, especially when the State— and its own lumbering bureaucracy—is often its own worst enemy.