Law making and policy initiatives in a digital age

As the technological revolution advances, bringing challenges such as Aadhar, privacy, data protection and e-governance, the process of law making and initiating policy has to face its own trials.

In a digital age, the essential question is whether technology decides the direction of sustainability and development and thus also laws and policies, or do sustainability and development priorities decide the direction of technology and innovation through laws and policies? Those who advocate the former, need to answer whether technology has indeed served the ends of sustainability, developmental goals of societies and economies. Has technology enabled people to improve their quality of life or has it resulted in the denial to many of such improvement? Concrete examples of this conundrum are whether technology has, for example, led to – improved food grain distribution systems and inventory management; advanced the accuracy and timeliness of advisories to farmers through satellite mapping of weather patterns; or enabled online and doorstep delivery of public services to the last person in the rule of law and access to justice value chain?

Manoj Kumar is the founder and managing partner at Hammurabi & Solomon.