The Sanchar Saathi Moment: From Telecom Safety to State Surveillance | Alka S. Yadav

The Sanchar Saathi is the latest episode in the saga of Indian digital governance. It showcases a big shift from welfare-oriented digital platforms to more structural forms of state surveillance. Concerns about constitutional accountability and citizen autonomy have been raised. Sanchar Saathi came up at a time when digital governance is slowly changing everyday interactions with the state. Most public services these days employ some form of identification or verification. The centre of power, which earlier rested with the local officer across the counter, now sits inside the design of an app. We cannot say that this makes the system illegitimate, but it does make accountability more difficult to trace. Sanchar Saathi is an example of this change. It promises efficiency and security, but then it also ends up centralising the ability to restrict a person