Who guards India’s digital gatekeepers?

From the era of submitting application forms in triplicate to today, India has managed something truly remarkable: we have built digital systems that can move money in seconds, verify identities across an enormous population and attempt to bridge our many languages that surprised even the babus.

But getting a government officer to answer a telephone remains a challenge. Both realities can co-exist. Our digital achievements deserve recognition. They also deserve scrutiny. The argument begins when we decide what kind of scrutiny is needed.

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Pundits are out there arguing extensively for using competition law to regulate the digital platforms. When the government builds the digital highway, the sensible response is to demand accountability. Indeed India’s digital gates need opening, but not every lock needs competition law.

A government platform is not automatically another Google or Amazon simply because millions of people depend on it. Aadhaar, UPI, DigiYatra and BHASHINI perform different functions, under different obligations, from those of commercial platforms. Some of these systems have made services cheaper and more accessible than a conventional private business might find worthwhile. The State can afford to take a longer-term view as it need not live by QSQT—Quarter Se Quarter Tak. That is a genuine advantage and it’s not a licence to escape accountability.

A government system can fail in several ways. An authentication failure that prevents someone from accessing a benefit is an administrative and reliability problem. A platform that unfairly disadvantages private competitors may raise a competition issue. Misuse of personal information belongs in the privacy and data-protection conversation and under the DPDP purview.

Refusal to explain a decision raises questions of transparency. These problems overlap, of course. But treating all of them as competition-law violations would be rather like taking every hospital complaint to the Income Tax department because the hospital happens to charge money.

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There is another uniquely Indian complication. We are very good at producing rules, notifications, circulars and clarifications. Finding out which one applies to a particular problem is another matter. Adding more disclosure requirements may produce impressive document repositories without making life easier for the aam aadmi. The consultants and lawyers will benefited; the citizen may still be standing in a line at the counter.

What we need is useful information: how often systems fail, who gets excluded, how complaints are resolved, whether independent audits identify recurring problems and what happens when an institution fails to correct them. No one should be asked to publish everything. That is not what transparency means. Security-sensitive details should not be released simply to demonstrate a commitment to transparency. Nobody sensible would demand that a public infrastructure system publish instructions for hackers to breach. But there is a difference between protecting a vulnerability and protecting an institution from embarrassment. The latter has a habit of borrowing the language of national security.

And who checks the people doing the checking? An audit that outsiders cannot meaningfully evaluate risks becoming an institution hiding itself from prying eyes. Exemptions that cannot be challenged can turn temporary secrecy into permanent shelter. Like what we witness now with the Election Commission and SIR.

This is where the debate about government digital gatekeepers becomes louder. If private platforms can be scrutinised for favouring their own services or discriminating against competitors, a government-backed platform should not receive a free pass merely because its owner is the State. Recent history has shown us that the State too has its favourites.

Since identical institutions don’t exist, equal scrutiny does not make sense. A commercial app store, a public identity database and a payments infrastructure do not necessarily exercise the same powers or carry the same responsibilities. Where a government entity conducts economic activity, competition law may have a legitimate role but when it performs a sovereign function, other accountability mechanisms may be more appropriate. The difficulty is deciding where the boundary lies—and ensuring that the boundary does not become an escape route.

Just because an entity carries a government label, the Competition Commission of India should not be denied jurisdiction. Equally, competition law should not be turned into a universal accountability mechanism because other institutions are not doing their jobs. If the existing framework leaves a gap, Parliament and the courts should step in to clarify it.

The aam aadmi, meanwhile, is usually missing from these sophisticated arguments on market access, competitive neutrality, regulatory jurisdiction and institutional mandates. The person most affected may simply be trying to complete a transaction or access a service. When the system rejects an application, the distinction between a sovereign function and an economic activity makes no difference to him/her.

India needs accessible performance data, independent audits, effective grievance redress and consequences for persistent failure. Security exemptions must be proportionate, and citizens must have a meaningful way to challenge decisions that affect them. Our digital infrastructure is too important to be left unquestioned. It is also too valuable to be weakened by applying the wrong regulatory instrument to every problem.

The State should open its digital gates to scrutiny. But the real test of accountability is actually very simple: when something goes wrong, can an aam aadmi get an answer without needing a lawyer, a lobbyist or divine intervention?