Digital India, analog procurement: Reforming how govt buys tech

India's digital ambitions are soaring, from building digital public infrastructure to digitizing several government processes and administrative functions.

- MITUL JHAVERI & AATMAN SHAH

Across some of our high-profile e-governance projects, such as the GST Network and the MCA21 company filing system, which involve specific technology platforms, the result is the same: delays & cost overruns, duplicate systems, multiple vendors, and piling technical debt. The problem is not a lack of ambition or talent. The real obstacle is our outdated procurement rules that treat technology the same way as cement and steel.

The first and most fundamental issue is policy fragmentation. At the horizontal level, India's procurement framework remains scattered across the General Financial Rules (GFR) 2017 and a patchwork of manuals designed for physical goods rather than dynamic digital systems. Technology procurement cuts across goods, works, and consultancy rules. Departments rely on myriad guidelines from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), CERT-In, Cloud advisory, Make-in-India order, and STQC (Standardization Testing and Quality Certification). Most are advisory, outdated, or unenforced. Without a unified framework, duplication and irregularity are inevitable outcomes rather than exceptions.

Vertical fragmentation exacerbates this problem.

Multiple institutions, often working in silos, simultaneously build and procure IT systems. MeitY's agencies, such as NIC, NeGD, C-DAC, and BISAG-N, operate alongside sectorspecific units like CRIS for Railways or the Centre for Health Informatics in Health. Each has a valid remit and a record of successes. However, without a mandatory "reuse first" policy, these agencies often procure or develop parallel platforms instead of shared modules, leading to wasted resources and disjointed citizen services.