Since long, India tried the old-school fixes to bring about transparency and curb corruption: vigilance committees, laws, audits, RTI filings. All useful, nonetheless slow. All still plagued with loopholes which let clerks sit on files and middle-persons siphon-off subsidies. Paper trails vanish, and human systems leak despite the best intentions.One innovative concept, GeM (Government e-Marketplace), has revolutionised the huge government procurement machinery, historically riddled with malpractices. It has digitised the entire lifecycle — vendor registration, bidding, contract award, payments, performance tracking — and made every step auditable. The by-product is MSMEs, start-ups and women-led businesses, who never had the wherewithal to play the dirty game, benefitting hugely. And it turns out that transparency is a market-access tool also, and not just an anti-corruption one.The tax system has also been revolutionised. A fragmented, inspector-driven, paper-heavy regime has been replaced by GSTN with digital invoicing and data-driven compliances. Add to that PM Gati Shakti’s GIS-based master plan, where roads, railways, ports and transmission lines finally show up on one map instead of in twelve ministries’ separate spreadsheets transparency between departments that used to barely talk to each other.A decade back, when the Prime Minister announced from the Red Fort that one’s mobile would be one’s bank, very few might have believed it that time. And witness the mighty UPI now. People are actually using mobiles as their banks. The volume has crossed 23 billion transactions and ₹29 trillion per month. It has quietly become one of the most transparent instruments simply by making transactions traceable; pulling cash out of the shadows. And this is the by-product of convenience.The JAM trinity has almost solved a teething problem — the ghost beneficiary. Duplicate pension claims, fake ration cards, and subsidies siphoned off before they even reached the intended beneficiary. Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) now puts money straight into a beneficiary’s account; no middle-person required. It has helped create cumulative savings worth crores in the last decade, by weeding out duplicate and fake beneficiaries. This is the hard cash that used to vanish earlier into thin air.Data as a public goodNo democracy apart from India has attempted to build digital public infrastructure (DPI) at such a scale, so rapidly and for so huge a population. Maturity, however, does not come with scale. A peep outward would be in order.South Korea, a perennial UN-ranker in digital government, has pushed AI and predictive analytics deep into service delivery, coupled with regular investment in cyber resilience and citizen engagement.With the platform like X-Road, Estonia, a small East European nation, has been able to bridge the trust gap between government and citizens. Citizens can see when and which agency accessed their data on X-Road in addition to the platform digitising services, generating a two-way transparency; government knows the citizens, citizens monitor the government. Estonians retain trust in the system, thanks to this reciprocity, and not due to the tech itself.For Singapore, digital governance is a full-blown infrastructure, not an IT upgrade only. It is foundational, with huge investment in cybersecurity from day one and institutional coordination tied together.The interoperability between systems, real algorithmic accountability, independent audits and grievance redressal that does not end in a call centre queue, are the challenges to be countered head-on; the count of digital rails alone is not enough. A silver lining is that the government is prioritising putting data in public domain, be it on agriculture, health, education, finance, or demographics. No more waiting endlessly to find out what is actually going on after filing the request; the dataset is already here. Yet, enhancing trust in the system is not a cakewalk; so much remains to be done.Every one of these systems runs on personal data — loads of it. And this is a double-edged sword. Personal data in irresponsible hands turns into a surveillance system.Services delivered at speed is what people crave for, but they also want corruption eliminated speedily, alongside freedom and real privacy from the state’s prying eyes. Ensured by independent regulatory supervision, the DPDP (Digital Personal Data Protection) framework is not a cosmetic initiative. It is the line between a state that is merely better at watching and the one that is accountable. Get this wrong, and transparency starts being something citizens fear instead of something they trust.The age of omnipotent AIThe Prime Minister has called AI ‘All Inclusive’, which now seems to be the one-stop solution for all ills, capable of detecting fraudulent welfare claims in real time, flagging anomalies in procurement before they become scandals and forecasting where corruption is likely to surface next. In a country where land disputes choke the judicial ecosystem, blockchain can make land records genuinely tamper-proof. Satellite imagery now verifies whether a public project is still stuck in file or has seen the light of the day.The very crux of digital governance is to ensure, humans no longer override the system quietly. Nothing works, however, if the algorithms making these calls are black boxes — becoming the new opaque discretion; unaccountable and unexplainable. The recent incident of Claude getting unauthorised access to systems of three organisations during internal cybersecurity testing, unfolds a more capable AI posing serious threat dimensions.The 20th century’s most transformative governance innovation was the Right to Information. The defining governance idea of the 21st century is DPI, a framework designed so intelligently that citizens need not ask for information because transparency is woven into the system itself.Technology got India this far. But only institutional discipline will ensure the dream of Viksit Bharat becomes a reality.Ranjan is Registrar, Indian Institute of Public Administration, New Delhi, and Chatrath is Management Lead at the Canberra Business School. Views are personalPublished on August 15, 2026