India's grievance portal is a genuine achievement — and a live map of where the state hesitates. The next-generation reform is to turn AI on the absent decision, and make decision velocity as consequential as integrity.
O. P. Singh — The writer, a retired IPS officer, was Director General of Police, Haryana. His forthcoming book The Fear Tax: Decision Velocity for Viksit Bharat examines administrative inaction.
Something quietly remarkable happened in Shillong this week. Three hundred officials gathered at the national conference on NextGen Administrative and e-Governance Reforms, and the centrepiece was not a highway or a dam but a complaints portal. CPGRAMS — the government's grievance redressal platform — now receives close to twenty-five lakh grievances a year, up from about two lakh in 2014, and a multilingual AI chatbot talks citizens through the process, with a human interface retained at the final stage.
Give the initiative its due. A state that builds a counter where any citizen can walk up — in her own language, at midnight, without a tout — and lodge a grievance that lands on a named officer's dashboard is a state taking its citizens seriously. For most of our administrative history, the aggrieved Indian had two options: the dak register or despair. Now a bot greets him. That is not a small thing, and the officials who built it have earned the applause.
Why grievances grew twelve-fold
But the number deserves a harder look. Why has the flow of grievances grown twelve-fold in a digital decade? Part of the answer is benign: awareness. A portal that works attracts users; every grievance redressed recruits ten new complainants. Rising numbers partly measure rising trust, the way rising crime registration often measures better policing, not worse streets.
Part of the answer, though, is structural — and this is what I learned in thirty-three years inside the machine. Most of what citizens complain about is not corruption or incompetence. It is the pending decision: the pension not sanctioned, the mutation not recorded, the permission neither granted nor refused. And decisions stall not because officers are timid by temperament but because of the conditions under which they decide. Our accountability architecture scrutinises action with ferocity — every signature can summon an audit para, a vigilance query, a court notice years later — while inaction is invisible to it. No inquiry has ever been opened into a file that sat still. Face those conditions, and the rational course, for the honest officer above all, is not to decide. In my book The Fear Tax, I call the behaviour Rational Abdication, and its cost to the citizen the Fear Tax. Twenty-five lakh grievances a year is, in large measure, that tax being collected.
Change the conditions, not the sermon
The point is worth insisting on: this is a defect of design, not of character. I saw the proof in Haryana. When we were losing crores to cyber fraud, we changed one condition — bank officers sat physically beside the police staff answering the 1930 helpline, with authority to freeze a stolen transfer while the victim was still on the line. Nobody was exhorted; nobody was sent for motivational training. The same people, under new conditions, behaved differently — and recovery of defrauded money rose from seven per cent to thirty-six per cent in a year. Change the decision conditions and behaviour changes overnight. Sermons change nothing.
Let AI see the absent decision
Which is why the AI now being celebrated is a larger opportunity than its builders may realise. Until now, no instrument of the Indian state could see an absent decision. Auditors need a transaction; courts need an order; vigilance needs a signature. A file that never moved escaped them all. But AI reads patterns, not signatures. The same systems that route twenty-five lakh grievances can be turned around to ask the questions no auditor ever asked: which offices generate the most grievances per sanctioned post; where the median file exceeds its own citizen's charter; which docket shows the tell-tale stillness of Rational Abdication. CPGRAMS is already a live map of where the state hesitates. Let AI audit inaction with the same rigour with which we have always audited action.
In my forthcoming book The Fear Tax, I give this instrument a name: Stage-Tracking. Every file passes through a handful of identifiable stages — received, examined, consulted, decided, dispatched — and each stage carries a timestamp. Reviewed weekly, those timestamps become a mirror held up to the office: what is measured weekly, an office begins to manage. It needs no new software and no new posts; AI simply lets the mirror cover the whole government at once.
But the mirror alone will frighten, not cure, unless the state also changes what happens to the officer who does decide. That is the companion protocol: Safe Harbour — a written assurance that a decision taken to the agreed standard, with reasons recorded and a named decider, will not be reopened by vigilance, audit or disciplinary proceedings on the basis of outcome alone. Mala fide, alleged and prima facie established, is the only key that reopens it — and mala fide is what disciplinary law was built to catch. Everything short of it is the cost of running an executive state, and the state must agree, in writing, to bear that cost.
Track the stalled file, shelter the honest decision — and decision velocity becomes as consequential as integrity. Publish, office by office, the median time-to-decision. Weigh an officer's record of deciding — including defensible mistakes — in his favour at empanelment and promotion, as we weigh his integrity record. The officer who decides ten cases and errs once must stand taller than the officer who decides nothing and errs never. Until that inversion happens, every new platform will lighten the citizen's burden of complaining while leaving untouched his reason to complain.
Shillong showed a state willing to listen at scale. The better reform is to make listening unnecessary — a state that decides before the citizen needs to complain. The technology is finally equal to the task. The question is whether the accountability system will let it look.
The above article has been written by O. P. Singh, who is former Director General of Police, Haryana and the author of his forthcoming books The Audacity of Order and The Fear Tax.
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