Vision to Verification: e-Governance Speeches Must Learn to Count
Additional Secretary, MeitY & DG, NIC Abhishek Singh in Mumbai (Image X.com)
The future of governance will not be decided by how beautifully we speak about technology, but by how honestly we count its results.
By P SESH KUMAR
New Delhi, October 9, 2025 — At the 28th National e-Governance Conference in Visakhapatnam, Abhishek Singh, IAS, Director-General of the National Informatics Centre, delivered an inspiring oration, celebrating India’s digital transformation journey.
The speech, rich in rhetoric and vision, resonated with optimism about AI, inclusion, and citizen-centric governance. Yet, beneath its eloquence lay a critical gap—the absence of measurable outcomes, timelines, and accountability structures that distinguish an aspirational manifesto from a genuine policy roadmap.
The Rhetoric of Digital Destiny
Abhishek Singh’s speech had all the trappings of a modern governance epic. Delivered in a city long associated with digital innovation and administrative experimentation, it captured the pulse of India’s tech-driven public sector evolution.
The address framed India’s digital transformation as both moral and managerial-a national calling where AI, machine learning, and digital platforms would democratize service delivery and redefine governance.
The audience—an eclectic mix of administrators, entrepreneurs, and technologists—responded with palpable enthusiasm. Singh’s charisma and command over the subject lent the event a celebratory sheen.
It was, in many ways, a persuasive narrative of what India’s digital state could become: intelligent, inclusive, efficient, and transparent.
Yet, the speech glided elegantly over the one thing that differentiates a dream from a deliverable- measurable accountability. It was stirring in spirit but spare in specifics.
Where the Applause Meets the Accountability Gap
When stripped of its rhetorical finery, the address left critical listeners searching for numbers, baselines, and metrics. It spoke of transformation, but not quantification.
Nowhere were we told how many services would go fully online by 2026, how much citizen-interface time would be reduced, or how soon inter-departmental data silos would vanish.
The absence of such quantifiable targets weakens the power of an otherwise compelling message. Without metrics, inspiration becomes self-referential—it excites but cannot be evaluated. Governance speeches today are not judged by applause but by dashboards.
The Estonian e-governance model, for instance, is built upon the X-Road platform, which allows the government to track every digital interaction between citizens and the state, ensuring real-time measurability of outcomes.
Singapore’s Smart Nation Dashboard similarly updates citizens on live service metrics—from the number of e-payments processed to average response times in municipal services. The UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) even publishes weekly performance statistics for every department.
India, too, has the potential to adopt such models—but the speech stopped short of signalling when, how, or by whom. It called for vision but not verification.
The Problem of Rhetorical Governance
To be fair, Singh’s address was not devoid of substance. It echoed the vocabulary of inclusion, digital empowerment, and participatory governance. Yet, like many official speeches, it succumbed to what may be called the “rhetorical governance trap”—an over-reliance on abstract nouns (“transformation,” “innovation,” “ecosystem”) and an under-investment in verbs that measure (“achieve,” “deliver,” “reduce,” “scale”).
Without timelines or responsible entities, accountability dissolves into aspiration. Which ministries or state departments will operationalize these reforms? What share of the NIC’s annual outlay will be directed toward AI-enabled projects? How many civil servants will be retrained under IndiaAI initiatives? None of these questions found their way into the speech.
Moreover, every large-scale digital agenda has fault lines- connectivity gaps, uneven literacy, privacy vulnerabilities, and bureaucratic inertia. Ignoring them makes the future appear frictionless but not feasible.
A realistic roadmap, as demonstrated by Estonia’s or Singapore’s models, pairs optimism with candour: identifying constraints and defining institutional remedies before they snowball into bottlenecks.
Lessons from Global Peers: Counting, Not Just Dreaming
Governance leaders across the world have learned that success in digital transformation depends less on grand vision statements and more on what is countable, auditable, and publicly reviewable. Estonia tracks every digital service through a real-time performance log.
Singapore’s GovTech authority releases transparent quarterly progress reviews. The UK’s National Audit Office (NAO) audits digital infrastructure projects for efficiency, accessibility, and value-for-money.
India’s e-governance establishment- led by the NIC, MeitY, and IndiaAI -could emulate this culture of transparency by publishing open dashboards displaying measurable progress indicators: service-uptake rates, grievance-resolution times, and citizen satisfaction indices.
Without such tracking, speeches risk becoming rituals of reassurance rather than instruments of reform.
What the Next Speech Must Do
If India’s next national e-governance address seeks to transcend rhetorical grandeur, it must adopt a SMART framework—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time—bound. Each vision statement should carry a numerical pledge: percentage of services paperless by year-end, number of citizens digitally trained, reduction in approval times, or fiscal savings achieved through automation.
It should also institutionalize independent verification. Third-party audits -akin to the UK’s NAO or Singapore’s Smart Nation and Digital Government Office evaluations – can lend credibility. India’s own Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) already has the mandate to audit digital service performance, thereby closing the loop between aspiration and accountability.
Finally, such speeches must engage in self-diagnosis—acknowledging digital inequality, privacy concerns, and the slow adoption curve in rural governance. Only when ambition is balanced with realism can e-governance evolve from theory to transformation.
From Poetry to Proof
Abhishek Singh’s Visakhapatnam address was, without doubt, a lyrical celebration of India’s digital imagination. It inspired confidence and pride- but inspiration alone cannot transform governance. To move from poetry to proof, India’s digital leadership must embrace the discipline of data, the humility of measurable goals, and the courage of public accountability.
The NIC and MeitY could take a decisive step by unveiling a National e-Governance Scorecard- a transparent, quarterly report benchmarking progress across states and departments, similar to the PEFA model for fiscal accountability. That single move would turn future conferences from talk-fests into review meetings of national progress.
The future of governance will not be decided by how beautifully we speak about technology, but by how honestly we count its results. The Visakhapatnam speech was a fine beginning. What India now needs is a matching finish-one that replaces applause with audited outcomes.
(This is an opinion piece, and views expressed are those of the author only)
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