Rebalancing the relationship between the State and the citizen

India has long grappled with asymmetry, and what is heartening today is that we are beginning to address it in earnest.

In every democracy, the gap between those who govern and those who are governed is not merely administrative. It is moral. When the State holds more information, more power, and more discretion than the citizen it is meant to serve, democracy becomes, over time, a spectacle rather than a lived reality. India has long grappled with this asymmetry, and what is heartening today is that we are beginning to address it in earnest.

The Indian administrative system was not designed for participation. It was designed for compliance. Inherited from a colonial architecture whose purpose was extraction and control, it placed the official at the centre and the citizen at the periphery. Decades of democratic governance softened its edges but did not alter its DNA. The bureaucratic instinct remained one of gatekeeping, and citizens continued to approach the State as petitioners, often unsure of their entitlements and even less sure of their rights.

What is changing today is not merely the infrastructure of governance but its philosophy. The principle of Jan Bhagidari, people’s participation in their own governance, marks a quiet but consequential shift. It signals a movement from the State doing things for people to the State doing things with people. This is not a cosmetic change. It is a civilisational one. It draws from a long tradition of Indian thought that recognises the individual not as a subject of power but as the very source of it.

Swami Vivekananda’s insistence that the divine resides in every human being finds a contemporary echo in Nagrik Devo Bhava, which is treating the citizen as one would a revered guest.

The broader vision of Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, Sabka Vishwas, Sabka Prayas, articulated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, captures this philosophy with clarity. Each dimension speaks directly to the asymmetry problem.

Shared partnership challenges the monopoly of power. The democratisation of opportunity challenges the monopoly of benefit. Trust demands that the State earn legitimacy through transparency rather than command it through authority. Collective effort refuses to let governance remain the exclusive preserve of officialdom. Together, these principles constitute not just a political slogan but the architecture of a participatory State.

At the heart of this reorientation lies antyodaya, the ancient commitment to reaching the last person first. Power and information asymmetries are most acute at the margins. The Jenukurubas and Bettakurubas, the tribes of Heggadadevanakote, among whom I worked for over four decades, understood intuitively that the State was something that happened to them rather than something that served them. Their experience was representative of millions who live at the edge of access and visibility.

Antyodaya insists that governance is measured not by how it treats those at the centre but by how reliably it reaches those at the periphery.

India’s digital public infrastructure has done more to erode informational asymmetry in the last decade than any previous reform. Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker, and direct benefit transfers have reduced the intermediaries who once thrived on opacity. Citizens can now verify entitlements, track transactions, and access services without depending on an official’s goodwill. Yet digital efficiency is not the same as digital democracy.

The next frontier must be participatory dashboards, open data ecosystems, and feedback loops that allow citizens to audit governance themselves. Information symmetry is necessary but not sufficient. What must accompany it is trust symmetry.

This is where Mission Karmayogi and the Capacity Building Commission (CBC) become important. The CBC is attempting something that administrative reform has rarely managed: changing not just what civil servants do but how they think. The competency frameworks, digital learning pathways, and behavioural modules under the National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building are designed to produce a civil servant who sees the citizen not as a petitioner to be managed but as a stakeholder to be engaged. The shift from a compliance-driven to a citizen-centred mindset is subtle but profound. Culture is harder to reform than structure, and the CBC is working on culture.

None of this transformation will be swift or seamless. Institutional inertia is real. The habits of a century and a half do not yield easily to even the most well-intentioned reform. But the direction is right. The vocabulary of governance is visibly evolving from authority to empathy, from secrecy to openness, and from doing for to doing with.

What India is slowly building is not an erosion of State capacity but its moral renewal. A State that shares power does not become weaker. It becomes more legitimate. A State that shares information does not lose authority. It gains trust. And a State that treats its citizens as partners rather than subjects does not diminish itself. It fulfils the promise on which it was founded.

In this quiet, unfinished, but unmistakable shift lies the possibility of a more equal republic. One where governance is not a transaction between rulers and the ruled but a partnership between citizens and the State that exists, ultimately, to serve them.

(The writer is the founder of SVYM and a former member of the CBC)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.