OPINION | When Digital India stops working

This Independence Day, as the tricolour is raised for the eightieth time from the ramparts of the Red Fort, the nation is held together by a different kind of infrastructure from the one its founders could have imagined. Roads and railways once stitched a subcontinent into a country. Today, it is the digital network that quietly and continuously performs that function for a billion-plus citizens who may never meet each other, but who now depend on the same databases, the same applications, and the same signal towers to get through an ordinary day. If unity in diversity was the promise of 1947, connectivity has become its everyday necessity and aspiration.

Which is why a fortnight of ordinary digital failures is worth pausing on, even amid the celebrations. A pollution certificate that could not be issued because the VAHAN/PUCC system did not respond. A railway reservation that kept dropping mid-transaction. An academic certificate from a university portal that stayed unreachable for days. A flight status update at an airport where the app searched endlessly and found nothing. A payment that could not go through because a bank's server was down. None of these were emergencies. That is precisely the point. They were the routine transactions any citizen relies on, and each one failed.

This is not a complaint about a bad week. It points to something more basic. There was a time when the digital route was one option among several, a faster lane alongside the counter, the ticket window, and the paper file. For most citizens now, it is the only lane left. Dependence on the digital ecosystem has stopped being a choice people make and has become a condition they live under and, most of the time, perhaps the only option.

The country no longer merely uses digital systems. It depends on them. A railway reservation is no longer necessarily a counter and a paper ticket. A university certificate is no longer a document in a file. A pollution certificate is no longer something carried in a glove compartment. At an airport, information about a flight, a boarding pass, or a payment increasingly lives only on a phone. The physical service may still exist, but the route to it has become digital. When that route fails, the service itself becomes inaccessible.

India's digital public infrastructure is, by any global measure, a remarkable achievement and perhaps as significant a nation-building project as any undertaken since 1947. In little over a decade, identity, payments, health records, transport, and government services have moved online at a scale and speed few nations have managed. Yet an infrastructure of this reach carries an obligation that grows with its adoption. Every citizen who stops keeping a paper backup, every hospital that retires its manual register, and every institution that closes its counter in favour of an app is placing a small, cumulative bet on the network's word that it will be there. Multiply that bet by a billion people and the sum is not convenience. It is trust—the kind that took years to build and can be spent down in an afternoon of outages.

That is the real infrastructure at stake. Not bandwidth. Trust.

The failures that should worry policymakers most are not the ones in remote areas with known coverage gaps. Those are honest problems with honest explanations. What is harder to explain is patchy connectivity inside the intensive care corridors of two of Kochi's most reputed private hospitals, or dead zones in the departure lounges of one of the country's busier international airports. These are not fringe locations. They are places where a citizen is, almost by definition, least equipped to absorb a digital failure mid-emergency, mid-journey, or mid-transaction. If connectivity cannot be guaranteed there, the conversation about Digital India needs to move from adoption metrics to something more basic, and that is its presence at the moments when it is needed most.

The armed forces offer a useful discipline here. Before first light each day, including holidays, every network, every application, and every data link is checked in what is called a technical stand-to, not because a fault has been reported, but because a fault might exist and no one has found it yet. It rests on the assumption that silence is not the same as health. An operation does not wait to begin before discovering that a radio or a server does not work.

Civilian digital infrastructure runs on the opposite assumption. Networks are checked when users complain, or hurriedly, just ahead of an anticipated peak, a festival, an exam result, a VIP visit, or a sporting event. Verification arrives after the failure has already been felt by someone, somewhere. There is no reason the stand-to logic cannot translate to civilian life. A routine, unannounced check of availability across critical services could be carried out by operators themselves as a matter of routine rather than as a reaction to embarrassment. It would cost little. It would catch a great deal before a citizen ever notices.

A related habit needs to change. Too much of India's grievance handling for digital services has been quietly handed over to AI-driven response systems that are excellent at closing tickets and poor at actually listening. A citizen whose certificate has not arrived for the third day running does not need a chatbot's apology loop. What is needed is a mechanism in which a real complaint, escalated enough times, reaches a human being with the authority to act, and where the resolution is visible, not just logged. Automation has its place in routing and triage. It has no place as the final word on whether a citizen's problem was taken seriously.

Alongside this, there is real value in cultivating a smaller circle of informed users—people with the technical literacy to describe a failure precisely rather than generally, who could be incentivised to test and report on services more rigorously than the average user is equipped to, and to do so on an ongoing basis rather than as a one-time exercise. Every mature engineering discipline uses expert testers ahead of general release. There is no reason public digital services should be an exception.

None of this should rest on the goodwill of operators alone. Periodic, independent assessments by regulators or credible third parties, published rather than filed away, would do for digital availability what audits already do for financial integrity. The test that matters is not whether a dashboard in a control room looks green. It is whether an ordinary user, at a given location, at a given time of day, on a given network, can actually access the service.

The conversations that decide these standards also need to stop happening only in Delhi's conference rooms. The gaps described here were experienced in Kochi, a well-connected metro, not a remote outpost with an acknowledged coverage problem. If a city this connected can feel the strain, the design conversation needs voices from every region—be it Guwahati, Jaipur, Srinagar, Ranchi, or the small towns of the Northeast—and not only the capitals. A nation celebrating eighty years of independence should not still be designing its most essential infrastructure from one city's vantage point.

One institution deserves particular mention. BSNL, as the country's public sector telecom operator, carries a mandate that goes beyond commercial viability. It is meant to be the network of last resort in places private operators find unprofitable to serve. That mandate is only meaningful if the service behind it is dependable. Strengthening BSNL is not nostalgia for a public sector past. It is a hedge against a future where reliability is available only to those who can pay a premium for it.

None of this is exotic or unachievable. It calls for checking ahead of failure rather than after it, complaints that reach a person rather than close a ticket, a wider and better-informed circle of testers, independent audits with real teeth, a national conversation that draws on the whole country and not only its capital, and a public operator that finally lives up to its public purpose.

What is at stake is not whether an app is occasionally slow. It is whether the quiet promise embedded in every digital service India has built—that it will be there when needed—continues to hold. That promise, once broken often enough, is far harder to rebuild than any network.

Eighty years ago, India's first task was to convince a newly free people that a distant capital could govern a vast and varied land. Today's task is not so different in spirit: to convince a billion citizens that a digital ecosystem they cannot see can be relied upon as completely as the nation they belong to. Digital India has earned the country's trust. On this Independence Day, and every ordinary day after it, it has to earn that trust again.

Lt Gen M U Nair (retired) is the former National Cyber Security Coordinator, Government of India, and a former Signal Officer in Chief, Indian Army.

 

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.