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Paper-based bureaucratic procedures to access government services such as welfare measures can be user unfriendly and riddled with red tape In India, despite extensive work over the past decade in the digitization of such processes, government welfare services remain hard to access by low-income populations, causing significant distress among people during the Covid-19 pandemic These problems are systemic in nature, rooted in the design of e-governance technologies Here, Seth and Vaani focus on several design flaws that manifested themselves during the pandemic To curtail the rapid transmission of the virus, the Indian government imposed a stringent lockdown of approximately 75 days, during which millions of people lost their jobs and valuable sources of income The government announced several emergency relief measures with both cash and in-kind transfers, yet many people remained excluded because of technology-related issues They describe these issues and also briefly discuss why design errors continue to emerge with technologies deployed by the state
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