Yesterday, I took a friend, Pradyumna, to donate blood for a relative of mine. At the blood collection centre, he was asked whether he had donated blood in the previous three or six months (I don’t remember clearly). It was a routine question, presumably necessary to determine whether he was medically eligible to donate again. But my friend turned to me and asked: “Why isn’t this already recorded somewhere? Why isn’t it in my Aadhaar or some other government system?” I did not have a good answer. His question was not really about Aadhaar, or even about blood donation. It was about the strange relationship we have built with the state: the extraordinary number of times an ordinary citizen is required to establish who he is, where he lives, what he owns, what he earns and what he is entitled to.
There is something almost comical about the number of times an ordinary citizen has to prove that she is, in fact, herself. Imagine, purely for argument’s sake, that an average Indian lives for 60 to 75 years. Over those years, she could easily accumulate 20, 30 or even more cards, certificates, registrations and identifiers. She is born and receives a birth certificate. She grows up and acquires an Aadhaar. Then comes a PAN card, a voter ID, perhaps a passport, a driving licence, a vehicle registration certificate, a ration card, bank KYC records, employment records, a UAN, health-related cards, academic identifiers, property documents, income or residence certificates and, depending on her circumstances, caste, disability, pension, labour, professional or business registrations. Some are cards; some are certificates; some are numbers hidden inside databases. But to the citizen, they are all essentially the same thing: another piece of evidence that the state wants her to produce, remember, update, protect or retrieve. My God, that is an extraordinary amount of compliance for simply being a citizen.
Of course, none of this means that every document is unnecessary. A driving licence exists for a reason. A passport establishes a person’s identity and nationality (or does it?) when travelling internationally. A property record establishes ownership. A birth certificate establishes the fact of birth. The state needs records to administer taxation, elections, welfare, law enforcement, public health, education and countless other functions. The problem is not that these systems exist. The problem is that the citizen is often required to navigate each of them separately, even when the government already possesses much of the information being requested. The state has become extraordinarily good at collecting information about us, but not necessarily at using that information to make our lives easier. We remain responsible for carrying information from one arm of government to another, as though government departments were independent islands and the citizen were the boat connecting them.
Consider the absurdity of it. The government knows who I am through Aadhaar. It may know my tax identity through PAN, my voting identity through the electoral system, my vehicle through its registration database, my employment history through other systems, my academic credentials through educational databases and my entitlement to various schemes through yet more databases. Yet when I need a government service, I may still be asked to prove again who I am, where I live, what I own or what I am entitled to. Sometimes I have to upload the same document that another government department issued to me in the first place. Sometimes I have to visit an office to submit something that already exists somewhere else in the government’s own records. Sometimes I have to find an intermediary simply because navigating the official process has become too complicated for an ordinary person. The citizen is, in effect, being made to connect the government to itself.
This is where the discussion about bureaucracy becomes more uncomfortable. Every mandatory requirement creates a relationship between the person who needs something and the person or institution that has the authority to provide it. When the state says that a particular document is compulsory, compliance is no longer optional. The citizen needs the certificate; the system controls its issuance. That imbalance may be perfectly legitimate when exercised through transparent rules, but it can also create opportunities for delay, discretion, dependence and, sometimes, rent-seeking. The more complicated the process, the greater the advantage enjoyed by the person who understands the process. A citizen who knows which office to approach, which form to fill, which document to attach and whom to speak to has an advantage over someone who does not. And where the process is sufficiently difficult, an entire ecosystem of agents and intermediaries inevitably develops around it. The official fee may be small. The real cost, however, can include transport, lost working hours, repeated visits, photocopies, digital assistance and the price of simply figuring out what the government wants.
Digital India should have changed this relationship fundamentally. But putting a complicated bureaucracy online does not necessarily make it citizen-friendly. A hundred government portals are still a hundred government portals. A citizen should not have to know which ministry, department, authority, municipality or office is responsible for a particular service. Why should someone looking for a marriage certificate have to understand the administrative structure of the government before getting married? Why should someone applying for a driving licence have to understand the architecture of the transport department? Why should a citizen moving from one city to another have to repeatedly inform different departments of something that the government already knows?
The answer could be surprisingly simple. Let the systems remain. Let the Transport Department maintain its database, the tax authorities maintain theirs, the election authorities maintain theirs, the municipalities maintain theirs and the courts, police, education, health and welfare departments maintain their specialised systems. There is no need to create one giant government database containing everything about everyone. What we need is one citizen-facing door into the government. One secure application. One login. One verified citizen profile. Inside it could be tabs for driving licences, vehicles, birth and death registration, marriage, taxation, voting, land, education, health, welfare, employment, business, passports and whatever other services the state provides. Tap the service you need and you should arrive directly at the relevant application. The complexity should remain behind the screen, where the government can manage it. It should not remain in front of the citizen.
The principle should be equally simple: if the government already has the information, the government should retrieve it. If my date of birth is already recorded, I should not have to upload my birth certificate again. If my address can be verified through an existing government record, I should not have to prove it repeatedly to different departments. If my identity has already been authenticated, I should not have to establish it afresh every time I cross an administrative boundary. The citizen should be asked only for information that the state genuinely does not possess. And if a decision requires human judgement, there should still be a human being available—but as an exception, an appeal mechanism or assistance, not as the gateway through which every citizen must pass.
There is an important distinction here. This is not an argument for eliminating government departments or reducing the number of records that government legitimately needs. It is an argument for reducing the number of times the citizen has to interact with those records. The state can have a thousand databases if it needs them. The citizen should not need a thousand doors to enter the state.
Perhaps that should be the measure of a modern government. Not how many forms it has digitised, how many portals it has created or how many cards it has issued, but how little of its administrative complexity the citizen has to experience. The state may need to know many things about us. It may need to maintain many records. But surely, after decades of technological progress, it should not still be the citizen’s job to carry the pieces of the state from one department to another.
A citizen has one life. The government has many departments. It is time the government made those departments talk to each other (convergence is the word, my friend)—and stopped making the citizens do the talking.
I still don’t know why my friend’s blood-donation history couldn’t simply have been available to the person asking him that question. Perhaps there are perfectly good reasons why it should not be. But his question exposed something larger: how accustomed we have become to proving ourselves to the state. We are born, registered, identified, taxed, licensed, employed, insured, married, housed, educated and eventually retired, accumulating a trail of numbers and documents along the way. Each one may have a legitimate purpose. Taken together, however, they make one wonder whether technology has really made citizenship simpler—or merely made compliance digital. I know who I am. I am not sure how many more times I should have to prove it.