Surveillance apps in welfare, snake oil for accountability

UPSC Syllabus Topic: GS Paper 3 -e-Governance

Introduction

Digital tools are increasingly used in welfare programmes to monitor attendance, prevent fraud, and enforce discipline. They promise quick fixes to long-standing problems such as absenteeism, corruption, and weak accountability. Yet their growing use has shifted attention from real work to digital compliance. Many tools create new forms of exclusion, burden, and manipulation. This raises serious questions about whether surveillance-based systems truly strengthen welfare delivery or simply offer an illusion of accountability.

Why Did Digital Tools Become Popular for Accountability?

1. Perception of Digital Solutions as a Quick Fix: Digital systems were seen as a simple way to address absenteeism, delays, and corruption among government employees.
2. Shift in Focus From Work Quality to Compliance: Digital tools redirected attention from actual work to meeting the tool’s requirements. Their priority became marking attendance, not completing meaningful tasks. This shows that digital popularity grew because it provided a measurable but misleading sense of control, even though it did not ensure better work.
3. Reasons Governments Linked Technology to Accountability: Tools appeared easy to implement and offered quick numbers and dashboards. These created an illusion of control, even though the real problems—poor work culture and social norms—remained untouched.
4. Absence of Parallel Efforts on Motivation: There was little attempt to build responsible behaviour or intrinsic motivation among workers. The emphasis remained on forcing compliance through devices.

What Has Been the Real Impact?

1. Fraud Continued Through New Digital Tricks: Digital tools did not stop manipulation. Fake attendance did not disappear; it only changed form. People uploaded random or recycled photographs to satisfy app requirements. Fraud shifted from signatures to photos, showing that digital checks could be easily bypassed.
2. Exclusion of People: Biometric and app-based systems excluded many genuine beneficiaries. Elderly people, persons with disabilities, or workers with poor connectivity faced denial of entitlements because they could not authenticate themselves or upload required photos. Those who needed support the most were pushed out of the system.
3. Extra Burden and Stress on Frontline Workers: Workers spent significant time dealing with app errors, low bandwidth, and geo-tagging demands. Their actual work became secondary to uploading proof. Some even received warnings when apps flagged technical mismatches. This discouraged sincere workers and increased frustration.
4. Weak Link Between Monitoring and Real Work Quality: Digital tools forced presence but not performance. Being photographed or marked as “present” did not ensure useful work. In some studies, even attendance fell over time after biometric systems were introduced. Compliance improved on paper, not in practice.
5. Reduction of Professional Autonomy and Trust: Surveillance-focused apps treated workers as potential defaulters. This constant monitoring weakened trust, limited autonomy, and reduced workers’ ability to respond to real field conditions. Accountability rules overshadowed meaningful engagement and public service motivation.
6. Rise of New Inefficiencies and Corruption Pathways: Digital systems created slow service delivery, long queues, and new forms of corruption—such as claiming “biometric failure” to hide under-provision. They also raised privacy concerns, especially when sensitive photographs were uploaded. Technology introduced fresh problems instead of solving old ones.

Way Forward

1. Move from control to responsibility: Accountability tools can force basic compliance, but they cannot create care for the public. Systems should encourage workers’ own sense of duty.
2. Stop treating technology as a magic cure: Digital tools are treated like a quick, neat solution to deep problems. This obsession hides issues of work culture, norms, and support. Technology should be used carefully and in a limited way. It should assist workers, not dominate welfare delivery or define what good work means.
3. Support and learn from sincere workers: Many nurses, teachers, and field staff already work well in difficult conditions. Reforms should ask what helps them, not just how to watch them.
4. Review digital systems honestly: When misuse, exclusion, or errors appear, governments should pause, study the damage, and change design or roll back tools instead of adding more layers.
5. Protect people from harm and vested interests: Surveillance tools have caused denial of benefits, delays, new corruption, and privacy risks. Reforms must reduce these harms and avoid punishing honest workers for technical failures.
6. Check Vested Interests and Manufactured Ignorance: The expansion of surveillance apps creates large markets for devices, servers, data, and authentication services. Tech companies benefit when governments ignore the harms of these systems. Decision-makers must resist such capture, question who gains from these tools, and stop cultivating ignorance about their negative effects.

Conclusion

Surveillance apps promise cleaner welfare systems but often deliver exclusion, new corruption, and demotivation. They record compliance without improving real work or public outcomes. Digital control cannot replace responsibility, trust, or supportive work environments. A better path requires honest review of failures, respect for frontline workers, and caution against vested interests. Without these shifts, technology will remain a superficial fix—snake oil for accountability.

Question for practice:

Discuss how the growing use of surveillance-based digital tools in welfare programmes affects accountability, exclusion, and the motivation of frontline workers.

Source: The Hindu