In techno-state utopia, efficiency is at odds with democracy

Back in July 2022, I started this monthly column with the primary goal of riffing on the challenges of building state capacity in India. The rank incompetence of the Indian state, particularly in addressing routine matters – education and healthcare, sanitation and clean water, pollution, and basic law and order – is felt daily by every Indian. Our politics is animated by promises of change, remember “maximum governance, minimum government”, but real change remains elusive. As citizens and indeed the state itself (I am always amazed at how many senior bureaucrats believe that investing in the public system for basic services will only lead to increased inefficiency and waste) got disenchanted, technology emerged as the magic bullet. GPS mapping, mobile apps, data dashboards, and direct benefit transfers to bypass the layers of administration are the shiny new tools to perfect the Panopticon, and resolve the state capacity challenge. Tighter monitoring, disciplining the frontline via greater surveillance, and high-powered incentives would solve the problem.

I was uncomfortable with this. Not because I am a Luddite; I believe in and indeed use technology as much as anyone living in the 21st century. So much so, like many readers, I have lost all moral authority in trying to reduce screen time for my children, who have started a screen tracker for me! My discomfort came from the assumptions about the roots of the problem. In the years I spent in the field talking and working with frontline State functionaries – those corrupt, apathetic bureaucrats whom we vilify – I learnt that their apathy and indiscipline were not merely a product of weak surveillance and monitoring. Rather it was a consequence of a rule-bound, deeply hierarchical administrative culture that stripped them of autonomy and alienated them from their purpose. As I wrote in my first column here, global scholarship on public administration and governance has long pointed to worker discretion and autonomy glued together by a strong sense of mission and purpose as the key ingredient of high-performing public sector organisations. When we deploy technology tools without addressing these critical elements of bureaucratic work culture, we risk reinforcing the grammar of rules and hierarchy which created the problem in the first place. Building state capacity in India, I argued, requires us to build a culture of accountability steeped in worker discretion, autonomy, and a shared collective mission.

Today, I am tempted to revisit this opening salvo, but from a different perspective. In the United States, the public and X-sphere are overrun by Musk and his Department of Government “Efficiency”. Claims of government “wastage”, “corruption”, and “inefficiency” are routinely trotted out to legitimise a project of complete destruction. The DOGE takeover of federal infrastructure traces its roots to a silicon valley, cult-like movement called “Dark Enlightenment” that sees freedom and democracy inherently at odds. This, it argues, is because true freedom allows individuals to rise – the tech bros are an example – while democracy, with its talk of equality and rights, is its antithesis. This imagination seeks to tear down the State’s democratic edifice, replacing it with a “techno-state”. Emphasising bureaucratic inefficiency is the ruse to challenge democracy with the authoritarian techno-state project. The US is walking down a dystopic path.

In India, the debate is less bizarre but equally dangerous. Efficiency and democracy are often pitted at odds with one another. India has “too much democracy”, the argument goes. Its imperatives of dialogue, consensus-building, negotiation, and compromise make our polity inefficient. It creates resistance to good reform ideas. After all, good economics isn’t always good politics. This is served up to legitimise strongman leadership (remember the 2014 arguments against coalition governments), curtail public debate, and perfect the Panopticon via technology-based surveillance to discipline the bureaucrat and “build” state capacity. India too is heading towards a techno-state legitimised by efficiency.

We must interrogate “efficiency” and its deployment to legitimise fundamentally anti-democratic acts. States should deliver and do so efficiently but we must remember that the State is not a private firm. Its scale, form, and roles are different. As citizens, we relate to the State in affective terms, as clients, we relate to the firm in transactional, market-based terms. The State has to balance equity, justice, and social stability as it seeks “efficiency”. Its tasks are an outcome of a political bargain and may necessitate “inefficiency” as it makes trade-offs: between redistribution and growth, environmental protection and business, tax cuts for the middle class and expenditures on welfare. These are outcomes of democratic bargaining necessary to preserve freedoms and a stable society.

Democracy may not always be efficient but it is a value that must be preserved. We must not allow our disenchantment with the State to make us compromise democracy for a techno-state utopia.