UPSC Mains 2025 GS2 Q7: model answer

E-governance is meant to make services easier for citizens. Many projects, however, are planned from the department's side: databases, integration and dashboards first, the user later.

Where the bias shows

• Aadhaar-based biometric authentication in ration shops excluded people whose fingerprints failed, with no simple offline fallback.
• English-first portals and complex forms in a country where NFHS-5 found only 33% of women had ever used the internet.
• Success measured by transactions and seeding numbers, not by whether grievances were solved.
• Assisted access points are thin; citizens still pay middlemen at cyber cafés.

Counter-evidence

• UPI succeeded because it was simple for users.
• DigiLocker, UMANG and CoWIN had multilingual, mobile-first designs.
• Common Service Centres provide human help.

Way forward: design with users, offline options, local languages, usability testing and grievance redress built in, in line with the 'citizen first' spirit of the e-Kranti principles.

Technology is the means; ease for the last citizen is the measure.