Digital Democracy

Infosys row: The unanswered questions on the tax portal  by Prabal Basu Roy   SEP 14, 2021  https://www.hindustantimes.com/opinion/infosys-row-the-unanswered-questions-on-the-tax-portal-101631619815649.html 
Equating perceived incompetence with extremist motives such as an anti-national agenda to destabilise the economy is unpardonable..

delays in execution reflect poorly on its programme management competencies.

In its keenness to win the order in 2019, it most likely compromised even on basics such as adopting the “waterfall” design method (breakdown of project activities into linear sequential phases, where each phase depends on the deliverables of the previous one as opposed to DevOps which works on the projects in discrete batches. snd test them out in practice, and then integrate these batch processes)   to align itself with the government’s norms of a fixed-price contract on an L1 basis. 

The government, on its part, must clarify whether the specifications were fully scoped out and not arbitrarily imposed later. The guiding principle of this dispensation has been a lack of attention to detail in decision-making, based primarily on populism.

One, is there a defined programme manager in the government who is accountable for the success of the project? Any technology project — and transformational projects, in particular — depends on continuous two-way communication and frequent interactions between the client and the tech partner.

Digital Democracy: Vision and Reality  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231382330_What_Is_Digital_Democracy 

The effects of digital democracy were often framed in the perspective of a total revolution, which means a democratic revolution in politics and public governance, or of a technological fix for basic problems of political activity and the trust of citizens in government...technology may not be value free but does not in itself predetermine directions, structures and modes for governance. 

THE MAKINGS OF A DIGITAL PANOPTICON https://tatsatchronicle.com/the-makings-of-a-digital-panopticon/ Srinivas Kodali

The Government of India, over the past decade, has been building information, digital, platform, and surveillance infrastructures such as Aadhaar, UPI, Digital Locker, GST Network, and various other digital platforms or stacks to power a data economy. The core idea behind this centralised digital infrastructure is to collect all the data of citizens and share it with the private sector to turn us into consumers...

A data protection law is on the way and is supposed to offer some comfort to citizens in this data economy. It is supposed to safeguard our interests and put in some checks and balances in the data economy. But I do not share this optimism due to a range of factors, as the data protection law is more about the economy and not about citizen rights anymore. It protects the data that has already been forcefully collected from us, whether it is Aadhaar or our financial or health data to be stored in databases protected behind 13-foot walls. There is no choice but to share your data with the government, which retains the discretion to do whatever it wants. This is one reason for the lack of a precise definition of ownership over personal data by the government.

The government and the Indian IT sector are promising to empower citizens through data, by forcefully taking it away from them. In reality, it’s disempowering them in the process.

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https://sflc.in/legal-challenge-cpil-and-sflcin-surveillance-projects-cms-natgrid-and-netra  three surveillance projects namely CMS, NETRA and NATGRID, which collectively and separately seek to spy on the communication of citizens in India.  

The Writ Petition challenges the operation and execution of the surveillance projects on the following grounds:

The surveillance projects violate the right to privacy of citizens under Article 21 of the Constitution of India.
Aggregation of metadata of an individual's transactions such as financial information and travel information can lead to profiling of the population. Such methods of data collection have a chilling effect on right to free speech, restricting the fundamental right to speech and expression under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India.
Surveillance projects are in violation of India's obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (“ICCPR”) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (“UDHR”).
The projects lack an oversight mechanism and stand in violation of the principles laid down in the Puttaswamy judgment.
Lack of a parliamentary or judicial oversight mechanism over interception and monitoring of communications.