About two weeks ago in Shillong, the central government opened the next chapter of its administrative story — “Next Generation Administrative and e-Governance Reforms,” built on artificial intelligence, digital public infrastructure, and chatbots that answer a citizen in her own language. It is a real advance, and I have no wish to be the man who sneers at progress.
The numbers behind it are not spin. Fifty-six crore Jan Dhan accounts; a payments rail that clears 18 billion transactions a month; nearly 2,000 obsolete rules struck off; and a grievance system, CPGRAMS, that has grown from about two lakh complaints in 2014 to nearly 25 lakh today. India has laid administrative plumbing most states can only envy.
But that last figure needs a harder look. Most complaints on CPGRAMS are not about a bribe demanded; they are about a decision not taken, whether it’s an unsanctioned pension, a pending mutation, or an approval that simply sits. This is the thing the reforms keep missing. They optimise the speed of the process. But the binding constraint is not the process; it is a human being who has simply concluded that the wise move is to not press the button—and no interface, however fast, reaches him.
I call the cost of that conclusion the Fear Tax. Its engine is an asymmetry. The downside of a wrong decision is close to unbounded — an inquiry ten years on, a suspension, a decade in departmental proceedings, a pension held. The downside of no decision is, very nearly, zero. In 33 years in the police and in government, I watched inquiries open over a hasty sanction, a tender awarded, or an FIR that should not have been registered. I do not remember an inquiryopened because a file did not move. While a wrong move could end a career, delay ended nothing.
When the ledger is that lopsided, silence is not a character flaw in the officer. It is the correct answer to the question the state is actually asking him.
When the condition is changed
I have also seen what happens when you change the condition instead of preaching courage. When we built the cybercrime response in Haryana, stolen money was vanishing from bank accounts in minutes while our reply took days. We did not ask officers to try harder. We put a real-time link to the banks behind the 1930 helpline, so an account could be frozen while the money was still in it. Recovery of blocked funds rose from roughly 7 per cent to about 36 per cent.
The reformer will answer: this is precisely what technology fixes. Put the file online, stamp it with a deadline, and delay goes away. I wish it were so. CPGRAMS already disposes of most grievances inside a few weeks. But disposal is not resolution. You can close a ticket by marking it “forwarded” or “under examination” or “returned for clarification” without making the decision that was requried. A faster interface laid over the same fear does not end delay. It produces quicker excuses.
The state is not blind to any of this. In 2018, it amended the Prevention of Corruption Act by adding Section 17A, which requires prior government approval before an official can be investigated for decisions taken in the course of duty. The idea was to reassure officers that honest decisions would not automatically lead to investigations. But the provision does little to change behaviour. It may help an officer defend a decision years later if an inquiry is launched. It does not remove the hesitation he feels at the moment he has to decide whether to move the file. The fear exists now; the legal protection comes, if at all, much later.
The cure is not another portal. It is to make inaction as visible and as costly as we have made action. Audit the decision that never came, not only the one that did. Track how long a file waits, not merely how fast it is “closed.” Protect officers who make decisions in good faith, even when they turn out to be wrong. Judge them on what they knew at the time, not on what became obvious in hindsight. And measure the state by whether the citizen’s problem was solved, not by whether the process was observed. Call it decision velocity. It is the metric the whole apparatus is missing.
Here is the sting in the AI story. It will draft the note, translate the complaint, flag the anomaly — it drives the cost of every step towards zero, except the one step that carries personal liability. The signature. And when everything around it is instant, the stalled file stops looking like a system creaking and starts looking like what it is: a choice. The officer becomes more exposed, not less. So he will guard himself the only way the system leaves open — by finding one more clarification to seek. We will have automated the whole journey up to the exact point where the tax is levied, and left the tax in place.
The file moves at the speed of the fear behind it. Lower the fear, and the state quickens. Leave it, and all that our reform will buy us is the most modern queue on earth.
OP Singh is a retired IPS officer and former Director General of Police, Haryana. He tweets @opsinghips. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant Dixit)