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The government’s recurring policy response is to deal with institutional failures as software problems. The assumption is that securing the platform, digitising the database and centralising management under technocrats will solve social problems. Therefore, let us bring in the master engineer to re-code the system.

Similarly, the government has now constituted a “high-powered task force” headed by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani to recommend examination reforms. It follows nearly two months of protests by students and youngsters against the leak of the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test for admission to undergraduate medical courses.

This approach conflates logistical efficiency with social equity.

It is a manifestation of a deep, chronic flaw in the ruling establishment’s imagination that socio-political crises can be engineered away through top-down, technocratic management.

India’s Aadhaar experiment supplies ample empirical evidence of why a purely technocratic approach to education and examinations is dangerous. In 2009, when Nilekani was brought in to build Aadhaar, the promise was similar: a frictionless, fraud-proof, digital architecture that would eliminate corruption and streamline the welfare state.

Instead, it was a classic case of technocratic hubris. Aadhaar’s real-world implementation subordinated human rights to digital server uptime while storing vast amounts of personal data in leaky systems.

Economists Reetika Khera and Jean Drèze havepointed out that welfare systems are vulnerable to...

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