It is increasingly common to see cleaning staff photographing or filming themselves at work. This is meant to ensure that they do their job. How effective it is, is anybody’s guess.
The lack of accountability of government employees manifests itself in many ways in India — they may be absent from work, may come late or leave early, may not work in a time-bound manner, and may expect bribes.
The biometric era
Somewhere along the line, digital tools emerged as the magic wand for this vexatious problem. For instance, years ago, some governments in India introduced biometric attendance to ensure punctuality. In some cases, if biometric attendance was not marked on time, employees were threatened with punitive action. At that time, in Khunti Block (Jharkhand), some conscientious officials worked after office hours to complete online tasks that required connectivity (“digital paperwork”) because Internet bandwidth improved in the evenings. With the system of clocking in and out, their emphasis shifted from getting the work done to marking biometric attendance in a timely manner. In Rajasthan, a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) that studied the impact of biometric attendance on absenteeism among government nurses found that, in the long run, it resulted in lower attendance.
Take another example. In the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), official worker attendance is widely inflated to siphon off wages. Wage expenditure is booked on the basis of fudged attendance and either shared with participating “workers” (job cards holders who do not actually work) or pocketed entirely by the masterminds.
In response, the government introduced the National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS) app in 2022. The NMMS app requires a photograph of workers at the worksite to be uploaded twice a day. It was meant to put an end to fudged attendance records. The app might succeed in forcing worker presence at the NREGA worksite, but it cannot guarantee that they do any useful work once they are there. In the most egregious cases workers were not even showing up twice a day to mark attendance: the masterminds were uploading random photographs. They worked out that the NMMS app only needs a jpeg file: irrelevant photographs and photographs of photographs can do the trick.
A July 2025 circular of the Union Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) lists seven such malpractices. Fudged photographs replaced fudged signatures to inflate attendance and the racket continued, more or less as before.
Around the same time, the Ministry of Women and Child Development (MoWCD) made “Facial Recognition Technology” (FRT) compulsory for Take Home Rations (THR). The reasoning is familiar: THR packets for children and pregnant and lactating mothers do not reach them. Making it mandatory to upload the mother’s photograph (with blinking) on the Poshan Tracker is supposed to ensure that she does not get cheated. The Poshan Tracker ostensibly does a real-time match of the live photograph with an on-record photograph.
An Anganwadi worker in Nuh (Haryana) who was struggling with connectivity, a crowd and the clunky app, said matter-of-factly, “those who want to cheat will continue”, i.e., nothing prevents an Anganwadi worker from refusing THR packets to mothers after they have jumped through the hoops of Poshan Tracker’s FRT.
This loophole was documented in 2017 when the Aadhaar-Based Biometric Authentication (ABBA) was made mandatory for Public Distribution System (PDS) rations. It was the same logic again: ABBA would ensure that only person A could receive their benefits. This meant that the elderly and persons with disabilities who would request neighbours or relatives to pick up their rations, could no longer do so. Person A (sick, old, or immobile) would have to show up in person. Many began to be excluded as a result.
Subsequently, some States put an ‘override’ mechanism in place, at least on paper. Meanwhile, PDS ration dealers would make people authenticate — biometrically — for their full quota of rations, while giving them a bit less (in 2017, in Jharkhand, an accepted norm was 4.5 kilograms instead of 5 kg). ABBA resulted in “pain without gain”.
Limited effect
In many States across India, a number of tasks done by Auxiliary Nurses and Midwives (ANMs) require geo-tagging or photographic evidence. For instance, uploading photos of a breastfeeding mother as proof that the ANM had done breastfeeding counselling. This results in a perverse situation: uploading a photo without counselling would not get her into trouble, but counselling without the photo upload would. In a tribal area of Andhra Pradesh, another ANM said that she was compelled to move around for connectivity in order to log a home visit on the app. She looked visibly hurt as she showed us a “show cause notice” she got soon after: as she had moved more than 300 metres to log the home visit and the app red-flagged her visit as fraudulent. Such surveillance apps, in accountability clothing, demotivate sincere workers.
At best, such apps can have a limited impact on accountability. But accountability itself is a limited achievement.
Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen (2025) urge us to go beyond accountability (which “can induce people to do what someone else wants them to do”) towards responsibility (as it “includes what people themselves want to do in the public interest”).
The tech-fixes described above cannot foster responsible behaviour, and cannot help self-motivate workers to act in public interest. The current obsessive fixation with tech-fixes diverts attention from the larger goal of improving work culture and changing social norms. It blinds us to other pathways to get there. For instance, few ask how is it that even in areas with poor accountability, so many nurses, teachers, doctors and cleaners work diligently?
A case of agnotology
Returning to accountability in welfare programmes, the government is consciously ignoring the failures of tech-fixes. For instance, even though the MoRD officially acknowledged that the NMMS was being “misused and manipulated”, in July, the MoWCD made FRT compulsory for THRs in July. Moreover, having admitted to the failure of NMMS, the MoRD responded by ordering “100% verification of all uploaded photographs” each day in all gram panchayats.
There is a carefully cultivated ignorance towards new problems created by apps: exclusion (in the PDS, of the elderly, and the immobile for whom ABBA fails; in NREGA, of workers whose photographs could not be uploaded on NMMS), inefficiency (distribution of PDS rations and THR packets takes much longer), new forms of corruption (claiming ABBA failures even when it is successful), privacy invasions (uploading photographs of breastfeeding mothers), identity fraud, and worker demotivation.
The stubborn refusal to learn is baffling. It raises questions about the possible capture of decision-making by vested interests to create assured markets for their products. The infrastructure for surveillance apps (devices including smartphones for all frontline workers, electronic point of sale machines, hard drives, servers, Internet data, authentication services) is not cheap. Tech companies are doing today what the tobacco and refined white sugar industry did in the past — cultivate ignorance about the harms from their products to stall corrective action. The government is playing along.
Science historian Robert Proctor uses the term agnotology, how and why various forms of knowledge have “not come to be”, for this phenomenon. Put simply, tech-fixes are snake oil for accountability in welfare.
Reetika Khera is Professor of Economics at IIT Delhi
Published – December 08, 2025 12:16 am IST
