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Faced with widespread student anger, systemic corruption and repeated paper leaks in national entrance examinations, the government’s instinct has been to redesign the system rather than ask why it has lost public confidence. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced a high-powered task force led by IT architect Nandan Nilekani to overhaul the examination framework. That signals a familiar belief – the crisis is a software problem, and better engineering will solve it. 

That mistakes the nature of the crisis. It regards an abysmal social and political rupture as an administrative problem and ignores the essential questions of equity and trust to questions of logistics. 

The shadow of the Aadhaar playbook

India has seen this style of governance before. 

More than a decade ago, Nilekani was asked to lead the Aadhaar project. The promise was a frictionless digital system that would reduce corruption and improve welfare delivery. 

The reality proved more complicated. Aadhaar created an unprecedented digital infrastructure with very little privacy and safety safeguards, and its implementation largely placed technological efficiency above people’s lived experience. 

Illustration: The Wire.

Development economists Jean Drèze and Reetika Khera have long argued that welfare systems face two kinds of error: inclusion errors, where ineligible people receive benefits, and exclusion errors, where eligible citizens are denied. Technocratic systems are usually designed to minimise the first. They often pay far less attention to the consequences of the second. 

Also read: Nilekani’s Challenge: Technology Can Fix Systems, But Not a Crisis of Credibility

Civil rights groups, including Rethink Aadhaar, have documented cases where........

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