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Technocracy Won't Debug India's Education Crisis

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Taxing Tech in Age of AI Could Fund Human Rights

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Children’s Digital Rights Need More Than a False Promise of Safety

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AI Meets the US Midterm Elections

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Here Come the Synthetic Voters

Amber Sinha is a contributing editor at Tech Policy Press.

In his annual Independence Day address on August 15, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi 

 that over ten million young people will receive AI training through a dedicated national drive over the coming year, while India’s digital public infrastructure will be harnessed to deliver free online test preparation for competitive exam candidates. This follows the government’s announcement in late July about the 

constitution of a high-powered task force

 to recommend comprehensive steps to make India’s examination system “leak-proof and technology-driven.”

These steps come on the heels of the unprecedented Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) protests that recently swept the country, driven by a massive 

 that exposed the severe vulnerabilities of India's centralized examination infrastructure. As millions of young people took to the streets and demanded accountability for compromised futures, the political fallout culminated in the 

Faced with a structural and political crisis of this magnitude, this response is revealing. The framing of the task force 

 the issues with the examination system as 

, a problem of insecure databases and inefficient data pipelines. 

This represents a limited and extremely technocratic view that has informed education policymaking in India over the last decade. It is an approach that consistently treats pedagogical, structural, and socio-economic failures as mere data management and fraud detection problems, applying digital band-aids to a system that is fundamentally misaligned with the needs it seeks to address.

A decade of digital interventions and the employability crisis

To understand the current moment, one must look at the trajectory of education and examination reforms undertaken by the Modi government over the past decade. The state’s vision has been to leverage Digital Public Goods (DPGs) to achieve scale and efficiency. The last ten years have seen an aggressive push toward the digitization of the classroom and the examination hall.

DIKSHA (Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing)

, envisioned as a national platform for school education. This was followed by the Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE) implementation of the 

, designed to digitize answer scripts and streamline evaluation to prevent manual tampering and reduce logistical bottlenecks. The government also introduced the 

APAAR (Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry) ID

, marketed under the slogan “One Nation, One Student ID.” Concurrently, there has been a significant push to integrate AI into educational delivery and assessment, promising personalized learning and automated grading.

This digital architecture often operates divorced from the material realities of the Indian education system. The technological reforms have done little to address the most glaring failure of this system: the employability crisis. India’s much-touted demographic dividend is rapidly transforming into a demographic burden. Successive iterations of the 

data from the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE)

 have repeatedly demonstrated that nearly half of all Indian graduates remain unemployable in the modern economy, lacking fundamental critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication skills.

The structural issues are glaring — a massive shortage of qualified faculty, chronically underfunded state universities, rote-learning-based curricula, and a severe lack of physical infrastructure. In this context, the government’s flagship 

, launched to bridge the gap between education and industry needs, has largely failed to meet its ambitious targets. 

The focus has consistently remained on certification and enrollment numbers rather than pedagogical quality or actual skill acquisition. Instead of addressing these root causes — which require sustained financial investment and complex institutional reform — the state has prioritized digital legibility. By focusing on metrics, dashboards, and technological interventions, the government has created an illusion of progress, while the fundamental unemployment problem and the quality of education remain disastrously stagnant.

The current approach to education reform represents a specific, highly technocratic ideology. It is a governance model that operates on a fundamental premise of trust deficit. In this worldview, students, teachers, and regional administrators are inherently prone to inefficiency or corruption, and centralized technology is the only objective, incorruptible arbiter. Consequently, the primary problem statement that educational technology seeks to solve is not how to improve learning outcomes, but how to optimize fraud detection and standardize assessments.

This ideology is most evident in the design and deployment of the APAAR ID. The state frames APAAR as a revolutionary ‘single source of truth." The 

 is to replace fragmented, physical academic files with a unified, lifetime digital history, ostensibly to stop the proliferation of fake certificates and eliminate duplicate records via frictionless digital verification. However, this top-down architecture replicates the exact ideological and structural flaws of the Aadhaar project. By demanding absolute centralization and standardization, the system becomes inherently brittle and exclusionary.

This uncritical embrace of technology is equally evident in the state's recent push toward Artificial Intelligence in schools. As a recent investigation highlighted, Indian schools and state portals are embracing AI without adequate guardrails, precipitating a 

" Ed-tech platforms integrated into state systems and automated AI tutors are generating factually incorrect information, while automated grading systems penalize students whose subjective answers do not align with the algorithmic vector space. 

AI is being deployed not to augment teacher capacity, but to substitute it, driven by a desire for cost-cutting and scale. The risks of algorithmic bias — where AI systems trained on skewed datasets systematically 

 students from specific socio-linguistic backgrounds — are entirely ignored in the 

state’s rush to present a technology-driven educational facade

It is within this context that the appointment of Nandan Nilekani, among the chief proponents of India’s modern technocratic state, to run the task force must be seen. His trajectory—from building Aadhaar at UIDAI to his influential role at the software product think tank iSPIRT, and his championing of India Stack and Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) — represents a very particular philosophy of governance.

This governance approach has so far reduced complex, deeply human civic and social interactions to APIs, databases, and authentication protocols. It operates on the belief that societal problems are essentially engineering problems at scale. If welfare delivery is inefficient, build a biometric database (

). If retail commerce is skewed, build an open network (

). Now, if the examination system is plagued by leaks and protests, will the response focus on building a new layer of cryptographic or biometric verification?

This model of building digital public infrastructure fundamentally alters the relationship between the citizen and the state. In this framework, citizens are reduced to data points, and systemic issues of equity, access, and democratic accountability are bypassed in favor of technological efficiency. The architecture of 

 and similar Indian state-endorsed DPI is inherently centralizing. While it is presented globally as a benign, open-source public good, it allows the state to consolidate vast amounts of behavioral, financial, and now academic data, creating monopolies of information under the guise of public utility.

governance of Digital Public Infrastructure

 has noted, this infrastructure is routinely built and deployed outside of robust legislative frameworks. The architecture precedes the law. Systems are deployed via executive mandate or public-private partnerships driven by entities like 

, leaving citizens with little democratic recourse when systems fail or data is compromised.

The experience with ID and DPI systems built and championed by Nilekani has historically prioritized state fiscal savings over basic survival rights, narrowing down to a specific and limited problem statement (identification, KYC, data exchange layers) and often proposing datafication of human interactions and behavior as a key to solving complex problems.

The constitution of the high-powered task force under Nilekani is a signal that the Indian government intends to double down on its techno-solutionist approach. What is more unlikely is a recommendation for the massive expansion of the education budget, the widespread hiring and rigorous training of teachers, or a fundamental overhaul of a pedagogical model that prioritizes rote memorization over critical inquiry.

The state will undoubtedly build a more sophisticated dashboard, and the examination system may even become more “leak-proof.” But a secure database and digitalization of student data do not lead to better education. Until the government recognizes that the crisis in Indian education is structural and economic rather than merely technological, millions of graduates will continue to emerge from this seamlessly integrated digital pipeline fundamentally unprepared for the world.

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2027 Tech Policy Press fellowship applications are due on September 24, 2026.

Tech Policy Press is now accepting applications for its 2027 fellowship cohort.

 in 2023, the fellowship program has supported 25 fellows from 11 countries across three cohorts, who have written on pressing topics such as the governance of artificial intelligence, tech regulation, digital rights, and the entanglement of state and corporate power. You can learn more about past fellowship cohorts and read their work 

For 2027, we intend to support a new cohort of fellows to pursue independent reporting and analysis that explore urgent questions at the intersection of technology and democracy. The year-long, part-time fellowship is designed to support mid-career journalists, researchers, and public policy professionals. We welcome a wide range of contributions, from original reporting to policy analysis.

Applicants should come prepared with a clear area of focus and a sense of how their work will contribute to informing both the public and decision-makers. We are particularly interested in projects that center communities and regions often excluded from global tech policy conversations.

Each fellow will receive a $10,000 stipend to support their work. In addition, fellows will join an international cohort for regular feedback and exchange of ideas, receive ongoing editorial guidance, and participate in monthly sessions designed to support and strengthen their work.

Applicants should have a strong background or expertise in a specific tech policy area or issue, a particular geography, or, more generally, technology and its impact on democracy or society. All fellows will work remotely as independent contractors.

Contribute (on at least a monthly basis) analysis or reporting on issues related to technology and democracy. (While topics can change after the fellowship commences, each fellow should clearly articulate a topic and why they are a good fit to cover it)

Attend a mandatory hour-long monthly cohort meeting

Attend a monthly check-in meeting with Tech Policy Press’s editorial team to evaluate progress and discuss next steps

Collaborate with other fellows and the Tech Policy Press masthead as appropriate

Meet all agreed-upon deadlines for outputs

Disclose any potential conflicts of interest

If you would like to apply for the fellowship, complete 

 by 11:59 p.m. EDT on September 24th, 2026

Cover letter (no more than two pages) that conveys what you hope to accomplish

We will host two information sessions for potential applicants via ZOOM. Registration is required. Choose from one of two dates:

The fellowship is open to journalists, researchers, lawyers, and public policy professionals who are interested in exploring the intersection of technology and democracy. We encourage applicants from the Global Majority and underrepresented communities in media. Candidates should have a demonstrated interest or background in tech policy, media, or related fields, and be committed to producing high-quality, public-interest work during the fellowship.

What are the benefits of being a Tech Policy Press fellow?

The opportunity and support to work on a pressing, underreported issue for a year

Develop a significant body of work by the end of the fellowship

Access to an international cohort of past and current fellows

Engage in learning opportunities provided by Tech Policy Press

Develop and maintain a network of sources in your focus area

Can you provide a timeline for the application review process and when selected fellows will be notified of their acceptance?

We aim to notify applicants of their status by early December 2026.

When does the fellowship start and how long does it last?

The fellowship will commence in January 2027 and last for 12 months.

Are you accepting international applicants?

Can I share additional information that is not part of the application questions?

We will only assess applications based on the information required in the application form.

A published link should direct to work that is publicly accessible online and clearly attributed to you. This can include reported pieces, policy or issue analyses, opinion articles, essays, podcasts, newsletters, or data projects. Please note that social media posts and unpublished material, such as class assignments or dissertations, will 

Will there be an interview round for the fellowship?

A select pool of candidates may be invited for an online interview.

How does Tech Policy Press plan to promote and showcase the work of fellows to a wider audience?

We publish fellows’ work on the Tech Policy Press website and feature it prominently in our newsletter to reach a broad and engaged audience. Additionally, we highlight fellowship projects through our podcast and at special events throughout the year.

Is the 2027 cohort open to those whose main contributions are technical?

Yes. We welcome applications from a variety of disciplines, as long as you can show how your work aligns with Tech Policy Press’s editorial purview.

Can we upload pre-print papers or research papers that are not formally published yet?

What kinds of projects have past fellows worked on, particularly for candidates from policy, governance, or development backgrounds?

You can learn more about our fellows and their work via the 

Are there any preferred geographic or thematic focuses for applicants from the Global South?

What are some of the criteria to reject an application?

Applications may be rejected if they do not meet eligibility criteria as listed on our 2027 Fellowship announcement.

Yes, but we recommend submitting at least one solo publication.

You can share translated work, but we also require at least one submission to be written in English.

Should the monthly submissions be exclusive to Tech Policy Press?

Is this fellowship open to candidates outside the USA who are not authorized to work in the USA?

Yes. This fellowship is open to candidates from around the world.

Is it disadvantageous to be open to working in multiple formats?

Do you have to stick to one theme, or can you write on a variety of topics?

We encourage fellows to respond to news events as they pertain to their area of expertise.

How broadly or specifically should applicants define the tech policy area or issue they want to work on?

The place where I work automatically translates our articles into English using AI. Is that a problem?

We require evidence of your own command of English.

What should we do to share a published piece behind a paywall

You must ensure that the pieces you submit are open access.

If you have other questions about this opportunity, please contact us at 

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Call for Applications: 2027 Tech Policy Press Fellowship Program

If you pay attention to financial news and markets, you’ve likely seen headlines about weakness in the United States bond market. This includes the fact that the first round of policy interventions attempted by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent 

. Accompanying headlines include the fact that the US national debt has surpassed 

 and that similar interventions into Japanese currency 

The story is actually much bigger than bonds for US policy. Bonds, as a safe haven asset, are financial instruments that you purchase when you want to invest in the long term and are worried about the stability of literally everything else. This means that if you’re buying a 10 or 30 year bond, you’re confident in the fiscal soundness of the US in that timeline (as well as the country’s commitment to pay when the bill comes due). So when the bond market weakens, that signals increased concern about the US fiscal situation. Bessent has suggested that 

. That’s where tech policy experts need to pay attention.

None of this is much of a surprise. In 2016, I recall speaking to former White House science advisors about large scale science projects scheduled to come online in the early 2030s. One of them commented that projects with major expenditures in that period would be placed under extreme budget pressure due to our worsening fiscal situation. Thanks to the massive fiscal interventions required during COVID-19, successive waves of tax cuts, and eye-popping increases in defense and immigration enforcement spending, it’s safe to say the timeline has advanced substantially.

 of the federal budget. Under President Donald Trump, defense spending is now the single largest expenditure at $1.6 trillion. The next two largest expenditures are medicare ($1.4 trillion), Social Security ($1.3 trillion), followed by interest servicing the federal debt ($1.1 trillion). That last number is key–interest servicing the debt now exceeds that of all other non-defense discretionary spending, which only accounts for about 14 percent of the total budget. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the total expenditure of the US in non-defense discretionary expenditures 

, at least as far back as data are available.

Non-defense discretionary spending is where most of tech policy lives (except for matters related to the military). Military research and development (R&D), which is overwhelmingly spent on new platform development, stands at about $100 billion, which is roughly the same amount that’s spent on science and technology everywhere else. R&D spending covers everything from grants issued to universities by the National Science Foundation (less than $10 billion) to all of the infrastructure supporting weather forecasts (about $1.5 billion).

All of this spending is investment in the non-military activities of the country, from the stuff that supports commercial agriculture to healthcare research and the things that make food safe to eat. It includes the development of new energy technology, safety standards, and measurements that support international trade. It also includes spending for things like education, which is a country’s ultimate investment in its own future.

Why this matters now, and what it means for the future

Even without the current bond situation, a future administration could be expected to face considerable pressure to engage in fiscal consolidation. Consolidation comes in two forms: increasing revenues and reducing spending. Even if the US wipes out all of the investments that it makes into the architecture that supports science and tech policy in this country (as well as the IRS, which is needed to collect the revenues needed to pay our bills), it would still not be enough to balance the budget. This doesn’t mean that pain is not coming, but it helps to know all of this before having a serious conversation about what the US must do to get its fiscal house in order.

This administration has already committed itself to 

 budget cuts while arguing for significant increases in spending for defense programs. Expect most of the administration’s position to be focused on locking in its proposed non-defense budget cuts for 2027 and beyond, and then for a future administration to be faced with proposals for things like 

If you’re someone who supports the US government’s role in science and technology, that means thinking now about the justifications for future investments in science, technology, and education. An honest conversation is going to have to admit that taxes have to go up, especially if you want to maintain investments in science and technology and embark on a massive rebuilding exercise that’s focused on reestablishing the science and technology ecosystem.

The bond situation is a leading indicator in other people’s confidence in the stability of the US government. When the country is engaged in highly disruptive wars, like the one in Iran, or making trade enemies with its neighbors, people start treating the US as a less dependable force for global good. While US dependability has always been a bit of a myth (

), the fact that it was considered a generally stabilizing force meant that people in the rest of the world were willing to continue making bets on it.

What the bond crisis reflects is ultimately a loss of influence and trust in the position of the US. It’s an indicator of the fact that the toolbox that US policymakers had to affect global affairs based on trust and reliability are weakening. The US is becoming a normal country, and that’s going to have major impacts on the amount of rope that countries are willing to grant American negotiators when negotiating everything from standards treaties to tech regulations. People pulling out of the US bond market should be treated as equivalent to actions taken by foreign governments to 

 to US technology and a re-alignment toward 

And then there’s US competition with China

The impacts of the current moment are particularly acute when thinking about US-China technology competition. The ability of the US to successfully engage in a competition depends on two factors—overwhelming technological supremacy and the ability to serve as a credible deterrent to PRC expansion, especially with respect to Taiwan. Previous administrations have recognized the global economic risk extending from the concentration of the semiconductor industry in Taiwan and Korea–something we got to preview with 

 in a remarkably short period of time, despite a $1.6 trillion dollar defense budget—makes this all much more precarious. Reinvestment in infrastructure, technology, and even defense support are all imperiled if the US cannot finance the competition effectively, and certainly not without having significant deleterious effects on the rest of the economy. When paired with the fact that the US 

 with respect to its national laboratories and 

 to run and maintain, the prospects of the country being able to effectuate a technology competition look about as bad as its ability to control the 

. The geopolitical situation forces US policymakers to reckon with the fact that the US has limited resources, authorities, and weakening alliances. Overconfident assertions of Pax Americana are unlikely to work.

Multiple groups are working on pulling together plans to rebuild the country in the aftermath of the current presidency. As I 

, those efforts can only succeed if there is a nuts and bolts approach to decision-making and the core functions of government. All of this is imperiled by the current situation. If the administration uses this moment to cut 

Future support for technology programs is far from guaranteed. Recall that billions of dollars in CHIPS and Science funding 

 in the wake of 2023 budget caps deals after Republicans took the House. Without a theory of political influence that balances the multitude of competing factors in technology—from the 

, a future administration will also fall short. This will require honest assessments of what can be done, the tools necessary to do it, and what it will cost. The old adage “show me your budget and I’ll show you your strategy” certainly applies.

The US has come out of dire fiscal situations before, though not without sacrifice. At the start of World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the case to the nation for higher taxes and resource rationing in his “

” speech. President John F. Kennedy, Jr. made 

 when he asked Americans to pay for the Apollo space program, as did Ronald Reagan in an Easter and Passover address when he asked Congress to increase funding for fundamental research. American citizens need to know what is being asked of them, what it will cost, and the consequences of inaction. The blowback against data centers should serve as a warning of what will happen if policymakers impose financial and physical costs on society without earning the public’s trust.

Yet the benefits of rebuilding far outweigh the costs of the long-term struggle. Science and technology offer the world more than new knowledge and flashier devices. From cancer to the climate crisis, they are the source of solutions for some of our most vexing problems. We need to give ourselves, our children, and successive generations the best shot at a better future that we can muster. “After all, the tradition of hope 

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

 titled “How ideas of a vast censorship network moved from the online fringe to Trump policy.” It considers the emergence and impact of the narrative that revolves around the idea of the “censorship industrial complex,” and how a network of aligned right wing actors collaborate to build that narrative. It also details the impact on civil society groups and independent technology researchers who have been targeted with lawsuits, investigations, visa restrictions, and various forms of harassment for their work.

This week, I spoke to two of the authors of the piece about what they learned reporting it, and where the story might go next: 

, MIT Technology Review senior reporter for features and investigations, and open source investigative reporter 

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Eileen Guo, MIT Technology Review, where I am a senior reporter for features and investigations.

I'm Gisela Pérez de Acha. I'm an OSINT investigative reporter.

I want to thank the two of you for joining me today to talk through 

 that you produced on the censorship-industrial complex. We're going to talk through some of the details of the piece and some questions that I have, after both reading it and following this issue for a few years.

But let me just ask to start… nine months of reporting, more than 100,000 social posts scraped, hundreds of thousands of pages of records. Give listeners just a shape of the scope of the undertaking.

What were you looking at? What made you decide that it warranted this effort in this moment?

Maybe I'll just start with how this story came to be. It really came about, actually, even before those nine months that we've been investigating this.

Last April, I got a tip that this small office at the State Department that focused on monitoring and countering foreign disinformation was going to be 

. And that that office had long been accused of working at the center of this so-called censorship-industrial complex.

And I'm not a disinformation beat reporter, so I was really coming at it from my limited perspective. Important office is being shut down in the midst of all of these other DoD shutdowns. What's going on?

And the mention of this idea of the censorship-industrial complex, and the fact that it was being announced in an interview with a person that most people haven't heard of, including me at the time, named Mike Benz, really made me want to understand what's actually behind this.

How did it come to this moment that we're at? And just again, in the midst of everything else that's been happening since January 2025, where could this be going?

I want to get a little more into the implications, the effect that state and other parts of the government, for instance, but I want to stick a little bit just with the genesis.

I mean, I think one thing that's special here, you try to go back to the ideological origins as well as the events that led to what we can now think of as this meme around the censorship-industrial complex.

Walk me through that genesis. You trace language like ‘censorship industry’ on Twitter back to more than 15 years ago, and then you bring us up to date, the 2022, 2023 timeframe. What's the through line from 2011 to 2023 to today?

I'll let Eileen walk us through the through line, but I think it's really important to say that a lot of these conspiracy theories have been enacted as policy in the Trump administration, and it was important for us to figure out where this came from.

It was a massive effort. And one of the biggest challenges that we faced was actually that after Elon Musk bought Twitter, he ended all the free access to Twitter's API and making it prohibitively expensive for many researchers, us included, to really gain a full picture of what's happening in the platform.

A few years ago, I would just go to the platform and scrape and just get all of the censorship tweets. And now we just had to go around it and find creative ways and work with what we had, given all the roadblocks that Elon Musk had put for us.

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