Sanjay K Mohindroo
Closing the Accountability Gap in Digital India
Discover how Digital India can evolve from online portals to true outcome-driven governance by closing the digital accountability gap through automated escalation.
Digital India has transformed something fundamental: the way citizens reach government.
Applications can be submitted online. Payments can be made digitally. Documents can be uploaded remotely. Services and grievances can be tracked without starting with a visit to a government office.
That is real progress.
But after three decades of watching technology transformations unfold across large organizations, I have learned to ask a second question once the technology works:
Did we digitize the interface, or did we improve the underlying outcome?
That question now matters for Digital India.
The programme's stated vision has always gone beyond connectivity and portals. “Governance and Services on Demand” is one of Digital India's three core vision areas.
Yet as India's digital-government infrastructure matures, an important gap becomes increasingly visible.
A citizen can complete almost every part of an interaction digitally and still find that, when something goes wrong, accountability becomes manual again.
That is the gap the next phase of digital governance should address.
Digital Access Is a Major Achievement
It is important to begin with what has worked.
India has built digital public infrastructure and government-service platforms at a scale that would have been difficult to imagine two decades ago.
The citizen experience has changed materially.
A process that once began with finding the right office can increasingly begin with opening a website or an app.
That matters.
It saves time, increases traceability, reduces physical paperwork and creates data that administrators can use to understand how services are performing.
It would therefore be wrong to dismiss digitization simply because administrative problems have not disappeared.
In fact, the opposite is true.
Successful digitization is precisely what now makes the next gap easier to see.
The Accountability Gap in Digital Government
Consider a routine citizen interaction.
Someone applies online for a license, certificate, registration, approval, pension or benefit.
The portal accepts the application.
Payment is made.
Documents are uploaded.
Verification takes place.
A reference number is generated.
The dashboard says:
Under process.
Then the prescribed or expected deadline passes.
At this point, something interesting happens.
The digital system may already know when the application was submitted. It may know when documents were received. It may know which department or administrative stage is handling the case. And it can know that the service timeline has expired.
But the burden of responding to that failure can shift back to the citizen.
Call the helpline.
Send an email.
Find the appropriate official.
Visit the office.
Register a grievance.
Follow up on the grievance.
The front end is digital, while the exception-management process can revert to manual citizen intervention.
That is the accountability gap.
We Should Distinguish Digitization from Transformation
This distinction is not unique to government.
I have seen it repeatedly in enterprise technology programmes.
A company replaces paper forms with an application but leaves the underlying approval structure untouched.
It moves infrastructure to the cloud but preserves the same operating model.
It installs a new workflow platform while keeping the same unclear decision rights.
Technically, something has changed.
Operationally, surprisingly little has.
Government digitisation faces the same risk.
Putting an existing administrative process online can improve access enormously, but it does not automatically reform the process itself.
The conventional wisdom often equates more digital services with greater digital maturity.
I would challenge that.
A better measure of maturity is whether digitisation changes the outcome, not merely the channel.
Are We Measuring Transactions or Citizen Outcomes?
Digital programmes naturally produce measurable numbers.
Applications submitted.
Transactions completed.
Services online.
Users registered.
Grievances disposed.
Turnaround times.
These are important management measures.
But the citizen experiences something else.
Was the licence issued?
Was the pension received?
Was the certificate corrected?
Was the problem actually resolved?
Did the citizen have to visit an office despite completing everything online?
Was the service delivered within the promised time?
This distinction can be seen even within India's increasingly sophisticated grievance-redressal system.
CPGRAMS has undergone significant reforms. The prescribed grievance resolution timeline has been reduced to 21 days, and the average disposal time for Central ministries and departments had fallen to 13 days in 2026 as of July 15.
That is meaningful progress.
But another government data point illustrates why outcome measurement matters. Between January 2025 and February 2026, feedback was available for approximately six lakh resolved grievances, of which 69.8% were rated satisfactory by complainants.
The two measures tell us different things.
One measures administrative processing.
The other gets closer to the citizen's experience of resolution.
A mature digital-government system should increasingly understand both.
So, What Should Come Next?
This is where I believe there is an opportunity.
Not because accountability must automatically be declared the “next phase” of Digital India.
But because the infrastructure already created makes a stronger form of accountability increasingly possible.
If a digital system knows that a service commitment has not been met, why should its role end at displaying that fact?
Perhaps the next logical step is to design accountability into the workflow itself.
I would describe that principle as:
Accountability by Default.
It could be built around five ideas.
1. Make Service Timelines Explicit
For notified, time-bound services, both the citizen and the administration should be able to see when the service clock began and when the commitment is due.
“Under process” should not obscure whether a deadline has already expired.
2. Establish Clear Digital Ownership
The system should know which administrative authority or workflow stage currently owns the next action.
This does not require turning every public portal into an employee directory.
It requires institutional ownership to be traceable.
A pending case should not disappear into an organizational abstraction.
3. Let the System Detect and Escalate Delays
This is potentially the most meaningful change.
Where rules provide a defined service timeline, a breach could trigger the next appropriate step automatically rather than requiring the citizen to initiate another process.
The workflow becomes:
Application → Deadline → Delay Detected → Escalation
instead of:
Application → Delay → Citizen Follows Up → Citizen Complains → Citizen Follows Up Again
4. Require Meaningful Reasons for Delay
Once a prescribed timeline has expired, a generic status such as “under process” provides little value.
If additional citizen action is required, say so.
If verification is incomplete, show it.
If another authority is involved, identify the stage.
If additional time is legitimately required, record the reason.
Transparency does not mean every delay is unjustified.
It means unexplained delay should become harder.
5. Measure Outcomes, Not Disposal Alone
Management dashboards could increasingly distinguish between services delivered on time, services completed after escalation, cases pending beyond timelines, appeals, justified rejections, and citizen satisfaction.
A statement such as:
98% of applications disposed
tells us something.
A dashboard showing how many were delivered on time, how many required escalations, and whether the citizen considered the matter resolved tells us much more.
India Already Has Evidence That This Approach Is Possible
This idea is not purely theoretical.
Haryana's Auto Appeal System provides an instructive example.
DARPG documentation describes a system integrated with the Antyodaya SARAL platform in which failure by a designated officer to provide a notified service within the stipulated timeframe can generate an automatic appeal and escalate it to higher authorities. The stated objective is either satisfactory delivery of the service or fixing responsibility for the failure.
That changes a fundamental piece of the process.
The traditional model is:
Deadline missed → citizen must act.
The alternative is:
Deadline missed → system recognizes the exception and acts.
That does not mean one state's model can simply be copied across every service, department and jurisdiction.
But it demonstrates that accountability can be incorporated into digital workflow design.
Automatic Accountability Does Not Mean Automatic Approval
There is an important counter-argument.
Government decisions are often complex.
A license may require verification.
A case may involve another department.
A statutory process may require consultation.
Legal proceedings may intervene.
The applicant may not have supplied necessary information.
Even CPGRAMS recognizes that some grievances exceed normal timelines because of complexity, interdepartmental consultation, legal proceedings or detailed verification.
So automatic escalation should not mean automatic approval.
Nor should every missed deadline automatically be treated as official misconduct.
The better principle is:
Make exceptions visible, explainable and accountable.
If the citizen must act, notify them.
If an external dependency exists, record it.
If the timeline can legitimately be extended, explain why.
If no valid reason exists, trigger the appropriate escalation.
Technology is particularly well suited to managing these kinds of workflow rules precisely.
The Next Question for Digital India
Digital India has already demonstrated that government services can be made dramatically more accessible through technology.
That achievement creates the foundation for a more ambitious question.
Can the same digital architecture that records the citizen's obligations also strengthen the government's obligation to deliver?
Can it detect where applications become stuck?
Can it make service timelines meaningful?
Can it reduce unnecessary visits and follow-ups?
Can it distinguish administrative disposal from actual resolution?
Can it make institutional ownership clearer?
And, where appropriate, can it trigger accountability without waiting for a citizen to demand it?
This is why I see Accountability by Default not as criticism of Digital India, but as a possible next step made feasible by Digital India's success.
The next decade need not be judged only by how many more government processes become digital.
A more meaningful benchmark may be:
How reliably does digital government deliver the outcome the citizen came for?
Because ultimately, citizens do not experience Digital India as infrastructure.
They experience it when they need something from government.
And if digital systems can make that interaction not only easier to initiate but also more predictable, transparent, and accountable to complete, digitization moves much closer to genuine governance transformation.
If a government system already knows that its own service deadline has been missed, should the citizen still have to tell it?
If this question resonates, subscribe to TechnologyTrends or share where you believe digital access ends and digital accountability should begin.