Organisers: Nutgraph Social Data Lab

Digital technologies increasingly mediate access to welfare, rights, and citizenship in India. From biometric authentication and automated eligibility scoring to database-driven exclusions, algorithmic systems now shape access to food rations, pensions, healthcare, and social protection. While presented as tools for efficiency and leakage reduction, these systems often operate with limited transparency, weak grievance redress, and minimal democratic oversight, raising urgent questions of accountability, due process, and constitutional governance.

Evidence from welfare and identity systems across states demonstrates how algorithmic decision-making can systematically exclude vulnerable populations: elderly persons, migrant workers, persons with disabilities, rural households, and those living in areas with poor connectivity or data errors. Automated deletions, opaque scoring logics, and rigid authentication protocols frequently translate into denial of entitlements, with affected citizens required to repeatedly “prove eligibility” rather than systems being held accountable for failure.

As the state increasingly governs through databases, platforms, and code, traditional accountability tools such as social audits, disclosures, and grievance mechanisms, remain poorly equipped to interrogate algorithmic power. This session places algorithmic governance firmly within the social accountability tradition, asking how democratic oversight must adapt when decisions are automated and responsibility is diffused across state agencies and private technology vendors.

Existing accountability mechanisms focus largely on financial flows, coverage numbers, and procedural compliance. Social audits rarely examine algorithmic rules, data architectures, exclusion thresholds, or system error rates. Disclosure norms do not require transparency around how welfare technologies make decisions or classify beneficiaries.

Grievance redress systems remain fragmented and individualised, often shifting the burden of correction onto beneficiaries rather than addressing systemic design flaws. Responsibility is further obscured when technology vendors operate core systems without public accountability.

Emerging jurisprudence on digital rights, privacy, and constitutional protections provides important entry points, but operational accountability frameworks remain underdeveloped.

The round table will bring together practitioners, researchers, technologists, lawyers, and grassroots organisations to:
*Map how algorithmic systems function across welfare and ID programmes
*Identify recurring failure points leading to exclusion and harm
*Examine gaps in audit, disclosure, and grievance frameworks
*Share grounded experiences of documenting and contesting algorithmic exclusions. The discussion will surface both structural challenges and emerging accountability practices.

Organiser: Alternative Law Forum (ALF)

In the context of eroding independence and integrity of constitutional bodies set up to protect the right to vote, it is crucial that we revisit the existing legal framework that ensures universal adult franchise. In order to protect the constitutional values that uphold this fundamental right, we must hold authorities like the Election Commission of India accountable to the core tenets of the Representation of People Act and the Rules thereby notified.

No eligible voter must be excluded from the electoral rolls of India. We therefore propose to examine how social audits of electoral rolls empowers people to demand for transparency in the preparation of electoral rolls as well as hold the authorities accountable. We hope that the conference can help in conceptualising pilot social audits, with the active participation of civil society organisations and voters in a limited number of booths.
As an alternative to the SIR, we propose to examine how social audits of electoral rolls empowers people to demand for transparency in the preparation of electoral rolls as well as hold the authorities accountable. We hope that the conference can help in conceptualising pilot social audits, with the active participation of civil society organisations and voters in a limited number of booths.

Organiser: Sham Kashyap

Social accountability mechanisms like Right to Information, grievance redressal protocols and Social Audits need several local actors to work together to be implemented effectively. The local is not only the site of information seeking and scrutiny of service provision by citizens but also involves several technocratic and social processes of community mobilisation, documentation and compilation of implementation related information, presentation of evidence, interpretation and final action based on these processes. Together with local officials and rights holders, several stakeholders like social audit personnel, local politicians, development practitioners and other bureaucrats are involved in engendering these processes and making them effective. Thus, everyday practices of social accountability need consistent effort and resources. The public nature of these practices and the local and immediate stakes involved mean that social accountability can lead to significant political and social impact at the local level.

This round table brings together front-line functionaries, social auditors, elected representatives and citizens in conversation about these everyday practices of social accountability policies. The questions for the participants range from how Right to Information applications are written, processed and used at the local level, the practices related to transparency in local planning and implementation and the bureaucratic, social and political processes of grievance redressal. Key questions related to conducting social audits like disclosure of information, the mechanisms of evidence compilation, the role of frontline functionaries and elected representatives in social audits and processes of follow up action on social audit findings shall also be asked to the participants. Further, there would be questions related to time, resources and capacity and the direct and indirect effects of social accountability practices on local governance.

While sharing their perspectives and personal experiences, the practitioners in this round table also shed light on local factors that make social accountability practices translate into empowerment of rights holders and improved service delivery: the nature of development issues, the supply capacity and demand for service delivery, community participation in planning of development activities, the availability of accurate information in local government offices, the timing and language of information provision and the conviction of local communities in demanding their rights and entitlements. Based on their collective experiences and perspectives, the round table provides an opportunity to explore the pathways and incentive configurations at the local level that make social accountability policies effective for collective welfare schemes as well as for the new forms of individualised entitlements delivered through direct benefit transfers.

Organiser: Foundation for Ecological Security

Ecological systems, from forests, rivers, and wetlands to urban ecologies, form the basis of how societies live their present and produce their futures. Yet decision-making processes may not always reflect the complexity of these lived, pluriversal social-ecological relationships. This is evident, for instance, when urban planning treats floodplains as vacant, ‘idle’ land, when grasslands are approached through afforestation strategies, or simply when ‘wasteland’ exists and persists as an official land classification.

Public policy is often required to balance economic, environmental, and social priorities under conditions of uncertainty/constraint. This has led to the adoption of approaches like market-based conservation or state-led protection which, in many contexts, have had uneven outcomes and, at times, marginalised both human and non-human entities. For non-human life, the marginalisation is further complicated by the fact that their interests cannot be easily articulated and are, inadvertently, represented by proxies who themselves are shaped by power. The gap deepens when looked at temporally, as decisions taken in the present produce uneven, often irreversible, consequences for future generations.

In parallel, scholarship and practice often place the responsibility of care and protection on local communities. Yet, actors who are not engaged in the everyday labour of care and protection often define what counts as “good conservation”, how ecologies should be valued and valuated, or how coexistence must be ensured. “Community” itself is a contested and uneven space in this context, shaped by hierarchies and skewed socio-economic and political conditions, like gender and caste, under which everyday care is actually carried out.
In these realities, ecological accountability offers a powerful lens/framework to understand how responsibility and power are distributed and legitimised for the socio-ecological systems. Cutting across dimensions such as restoration, conversion, and stewardship, and bringing together practitioners and scholars, these sessions will explore: Who gets to decide how ecosystems are used, shaped, or conserved? Who benefits? How are burdens and responsibilities distributed across social groups, institutions, and generations? Where and why do they fall short? Finally, how might forms of ecological accountability be reimagined to enable inter-species, inter-generational, and intra-generational justice?

Organiser: CFA (Centre for Financial Accountability)

The socially embedded banking framework has been steadily dismantled over the recent decades. Priority sector norms have been diluted, share of agricultural credit has fallen, rural branches have shrunk, depositors’ interest rates have dwindled, staffing levels in public sector banks have stagnated, and large-scale mergers have weakened the banks’ local presence and accountability. Instead of regulatory mechanisms that could hold banks accountable towards the margins, norms have been eased only to favour the market. The focus of lending has shifted decisively away from small loans towards large corporate borrowers, while mechanisms like the IBC and NCLT have often resulted in significant haircuts that socialise losses while privatising gains. At the same time, banks have been encouraged to lend to NBFCs, effectively outsourcing retail and small-ticket credit to more expensive intermediaries that charge exorbitant rates and practice inhuman recovery practices that function under nearly no accountability or regulatory oversight.

While we see accountability towards depositors and small creditors eroding on one end, alongside we also see the erosion of the notion of accountability when it comes to investments by the same banks. Big ticket investments by banks on large scale projects and activities remains shrouded in opaqueness and devoid of responsibility towards their adverse impacts on people and ecology. Is profitability the sole purpose of banks or should there be a moral ethical compass that ought to determine where it puts its money? Given that it is public money that runs these banks, should there not be a sense of accountability on where it is invested? There ought to be a public watch upon whether banks are investing in projects that destroy livelihoods, ecology and sustainability. In an age of climate crisis it is also imperative that climate sensitivity also governs banks’ investment plans. While the jargon of “green” in recent years is found dotted across the RBI’s documents, the social and ecological accountability mechanisms and safeguards are not yet adequately institutionalised.

The round table would foreground the notion of accountability on both ends of the spectrum – credit/deposit as well as investment/financing. It would speak of concrete mechanisms and policy prescriptions that can hold financial institutions to account from a people-centric lens.

Organiser: Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reforms (CJAR)

The judiciary possesses neither the power of the purse or the sword but still wields enormous power in India’s constitutional system. It is the protector of fundamental rights and holds the government accountable to the law and Constitution. However, there are very few mechanisms to hold the judiciary and Supreme Court and High Court judges accountable to the public. The constitutional mechanism to insulate judges from the executive and legislature can sometimes stand in the way of citizens holding judges accountable for failing to do their duties properly in accordance with the law and constitution.

However, accountability of judges is not only ensured by the threat of removal or criminal sanction. The law and the Constitution provide multiple avenues for citizens to demand accountability from both individual judges and from the judiciary as a whole. This session is intended to provide a primer to civil society members and the general public on how to hold judges and the judiciary accountable.

The session on judicial accountability will look to:
*Identify the existing legal framework on judicial accountability (defined as accountability of HC and SC judges and accountability of HCs and SCs)
*Hear from civil society organisations on the challenges the lack of judicial accountability is posing to their work
*Come up with actionable ideas on better enforcing accountability through the law and legal mechanisms
*Prepare a primer for civil society organisations on legal mechanisms and strategies to hold judges and the judiciary accountable

Organiser: International Social Accountability Hub, VOCAL Africa

This round table explores international practices of social accountability, with a focus on mutual learning and action-research among civil society, governments, and international organizations. While social audits are often associated with India, comparable approaches have emerged globally. Experiences from Kenya, Sri Lanka and Nepal demonstrate the use of social audits to monitor public funds and service delivery. Participants leading these efforts in their countries will aim to highlight common principles, methods, and enabling practices that underpin effective social audits, while also examining the challenges that constrain their implementation and sustainability. These challenges include legal and policy frameworks, sector-specific requirements, civil society capacity, and state capacity at organizational, sectoral, and national levels. Insights generated through global practitioner interactions will inform the development of a shared framework and an international resource hub on social audits. The discussion also seeks to strengthen mutual support networks within India and internationally, contributing to knowledge sharing, advocacy, and the broader dissemination of participatory social accountability practices.

Organisers: SAFAR and MKSS

This session examines the implications of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA) on people’s access to information and democratic rights. The roundtable will include discussions on significant provisions of the Act to understand its implications on the wider field of social accountability. While the Act claims to safeguard individual privacy, its design raises serious concerns for the future of proactive disclosure, investigative journalism, and the Right to Information.

The roundtable will critically examine how existing practices, such as accessing public records through existing statutes, conducting public and social audits, grievance registration drives, and investigative journalism, will be impacted. The session will also discuss how the DPDPA will (or will not) protect the right to privacy, which the Supreme Court of India has guaranteed as a fundamental right.

Beyond the legal hurdles of the DPDPA, this dialogue addresses a growing crisis regarding the quality and integrity of public data. There is a deep concern that data currently released in the public domain—from census figures to welfare statistics—is often fragmented, politically managed, or designed to obscure the lived realities of marginalized groups. We will interrogate the politics of proactive disclosure: Is the data being put out actually helpful for democratic oversight, or does it facilitate a form of “transparency without accountability”?

The dialogue aims to identify strategic ways forward to respond to the DPDPA’s restrictions while demanding not just more data, but reliable and meaningful data that can withstand technical and political scrutiny. Ultimately, the session seeks to build a people’s framework that balances the right to privacy with a robust assertion of the right to transparency.

Organisers: Ameya Bokil and Devyani Srivastava

Concerns regarding police conduct in India, particularly the use of force, procedural irregularities, and accountability, have been documented through recent empirical research. Studies analysing encounter deaths, conviction rates, First Information Reports, arrest practices, and the experiences of undertrial prisoners highlight persistent gaps between legal safeguards and everyday policing practices. Judicial interventions over the past three decades, including guidelines on arrests, custodial safeguards, oversight mechanisms, and the installation of CCTV cameras, have sought to strengthen accountability frameworks. These reforms have often been advanced through litigation supported by civil society organisations and affected communities.

Despite these developments, enforcement remains uneven at the level of police stations and trial courts, where individuals frequently encounter the police in situations marked by power asymmetry. At the same time, new forms of public access to information such as online FIRs, arrest records, crime data, court databases, and records generated by oversight bodies, have created opportunities for systematic monitoring of police practices.

This roundtable focuses on accountability at the police station level, where oversight is most immediate and consequential. It aims to examine what is currently known about police practices, identify priority areas for intervention, and explore collective strategies for monitoring and accountability. The discussion will bring together community representatives, legal practitioners, researchers, and academics to reflect on the use of data, institutional pathways to accountability, and the practical and safety considerations involved in such efforts.

Organisers: Land Conflict Watch

Nearly two decades after the enactment of the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006, the law remains one of India’s most transformative yet contested governance frameworks. FRA reimagines forests not as centrally administered resources, but as democratically governed landscapes rooted in community rights, Gram Sabhas, and collective decision-making. However, implementation has largely reduced the law to a welfare or titling exercise, sidelining its deeper vision of self-governance.

As India expands infrastructure, conservation initiatives, and climate mitigation efforts in forested regions, conflicts around forest diversion, evictions, and consent continue to intensify. These are not isolated failures but reflect persistent resistance to transferring authority from forest bureaucracies to rights-holding communities.
This session/theme revisits FRA as a governance law and asks: once rights are recognised, how should forests be governed, and what accountability mechanisms are required to uphold community authority?

FRA implementation remains uneven across states, with low recognition of Community Forest Resource (CFR) rights, limited institutional support to Gram Sabhas, and weak transparency in decisions related to forest diversion, conservation, and compensatory afforestation.

Audit mechanisms focus narrowly on claim processing and approvals, rarely examining post-recognition governance such as decision-making by Gram Sabhas, the quality of consent, or conflicts with forest departments. Grievance redress processes are slow, inaccessible, and often ineffective, while rejected claims and evictions frequently proceed without due process. Recent amendments to forest and conservation laws further risk undermining FRA safeguards, making robust accountability frameworks increasingly urgent.

The round table will focus on re-centering Governance under FRA:
*Reframing FRA as a governance framework, not merely a rights-distribution law
*Identifying institutional and political barriers to community-led forest governance
*Examining how audits and disclosures can capture violations beyond titles
*Learning from regions where CFR governance has meaningfully taken root

Organiser: Libtech

Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric digital identity system, was conceived as an instrument to streamline access to welfare entitlements, eliminate duplication, and provide legal identity to individuals lacking formal documentation. Established in 2009 by executive order under the Planning Commission, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) was entrusted with enrolling residents and maintaining the Central Identities Data Repository (CIDR). The Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016, subsequently provided statutory backing to the system and formally integrated Aadhaar into the delivery architecture of welfare schemes, primarily through biometric authentication and Direct Benefit Transfers (DBT).

This roundtable aims to critically examine Aadhaar as a mode of governance, with a particular focus on its design, implementation practices, and the legal implications for rights and welfare delivery. While the State has justified Aadhaar as a tool for efficiency, inclusion, and accountability, its expanding use has revealed systemic vulnerabilities. These include biometric authentication failures, exclusion errors, wrongful deletions from beneficiary databases, payment rejections, and procedural complexities– failures that disproportionately affect marginalised populations, including rural, tribal, elderly, disabled, and migrant communities. The legitimacy of Aadhaar as a centralised repository of identity has been contested since its inception. Early constitutional challenges, notably the petitions filed by Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.), Aruna Roy, and others, raised concerns regarding privacy and data security. Subsequent jurisprudence has recognised privacy as a fundamental right while simultaneously permitting Aadhaar-based welfare delivery.

Drawing on field-level experiences and interventions by civil society organisations, this roundtable foregrounds the gap between Aadhaar’s normative claims and its lived realities. It situates Aadhaar within broader debates, wherein complex social identities and entitlements are flattened into legible, governable data. The discussion will interrogate how procedural design, technological architecture, and institutional incentives interact to produce exclusion, and how responsibility for such failures is diffused across administrative and technical layers. While the primary focus remains Aadhaar-linked welfare delivery, the roundtable will also reflect on the implications of Aadhaar’s integration into other domains of governance, including education, healthcare, financial services, and law enforcement. In doing so, it aims to contribute to ongoing conversations on digital accountability, and the future of rights-based welfare in an increasingly data-driven State.

THEMES FOR DISCUSSION:

The roundtable will address, but not be limited to, the following themes:

* Aadhaar and the State’s Rationality of Governance: Critically examining the lens of administrative rationality and state legibility underpinning Aadhaar, including the logic behind biometric identification.

*Technology Design and Procedural Failures: Analysis of authentication mechanisms, enrolment and update procedures, grievance redressal systems, and the legal invisibility of technological error.

*Welfare Delivery and Socio-Economic Contexts: Differential impacts of Aadhaar-linked welfare across regions and populations, with emphasis on exclusion and barriers to access.

*Legal and Institutional Accountability: Questions of liability, accountability, and remedies in cases of Aadhaar-related denial of Entitlements.

*Civil Society Interventions and Pathways Forward Field-based insights, advocacy strategies, and policy recommendations aimed at reducing exclusion and strengthening rights-based welfare delivery.

Organiser: Olakhaan

Despite their significant contributions to pastoral-based livelihoods, traditional services, arts, trade activities, the freedom movement, and socio-cultural life, nomadic, semi-nomadic, and denotified communities continue to face widespread social and institutional exclusion. Lack of secure housing, weak legal identity, social stigma, caste discrimination, administrative invisibility, and the loss of traditional livelihoods deprive these communities of basic rights such as identity documents, housing leases, education, health, livelihoods, and social security.

This roundtable is being organised with the aim of reviewing the accountability gaps in the implementation of constitutional, welfare and rights-based provisions relating to nomadic, semi-nomadic and denotified communities. The roundtable will focus specifically on the cultural contributions of nomadic, semi-nomadic and denotified communities, social stigma, current socio-economic status, deprivation of constitutional rights and the role of government institutions. It will discuss important issues such as identification of nomadic, semi-nomadic and freed families, ensuring access to government schemes, prevention of discrimination and inclusion in local planning processes.

The roundtable will invite participants to share practices and experiences related to documentation, housing, livelihoods and advocacy. Furthermore, the potential for social audits and participatory accountability mechanisms to improve transparency and service delivery will be discussed.

Organiser: Rhythu Swaraj Vedika and Kisan Mitra

Across India, agricultural governance continues to recognise landowners as the primary farmers, even though cultivation is increasingly carried out by tenant farmers, women cultivators, sharecroppers, and landless producers. This foundational mismatch underlies large-scale exclusion from public support, misdirected subsidies and entitlements, and deepening agrarian distress.

A lack of transparent data on benefit delivery- who receives what and why- compounds exclusion and incentivises accumulation of subsidies by a few actors who may not actively cultivate land but are recognised in official systems. Experience from handling grievances reveals how public support often flows to landowners, not actual cultivators, despite significant agriculture budgets at both Union and State levels. The Union agriculture budget in recent years has run into lakhs of crores, yet coverage and targeting remain opaque and misaligned with ground realities. Agrarian distress and suicide are national phenomena: official data show over 10,000 farmers and agricultural labourers died by suicide in 2023 alone, with distress concentrated in several states but reflective of systemic risk across the country. NCRB data also indicate that agricultural suicides(heavily undercounted) often account for a significant share of all suicides nationally.

At a time when States are adopting land title guarantee laws and digital farmer identification systems, agricultural governance is increasingly linking benefits to formal land records. This roundtable focuses on accountability for farmers by examining how such frameworks risk excluding actual cultivators, particularly tenants and sharecroppers. It reframes farmer identification as a governance challenge: how to recognise real cultivators, assign institutional responsibility, and design digital systems that deliver benefits equitably. The discussion will assess historical and legal approaches to cultivator recognition, the implications of landowner-centric digitisation for subsidies and compensation, and the role of transparent public data in enabling cultivators to claim entitlements and collective voice.

Organiser: SAFAR
This roundtable will map and compare ongoing innovations in grievance redress and accountability systems across states and sectors. The discussion will reflect on practical interventions that strengthen accountability, democratic oversight, and access to justice by focusing on the right to be heard and the right to timebound redress. Participants will share insights from the ongoing research studies and state-level platforms and procedures such as Telangana’s decentralised CM Prajavani, Rajasthan’s Sampark, Karnataka’s IPGRS, Bihar PGRA and Saral Haryana. Sectoral experiences will include NFSA grievance redress and learnings from a helpline to address farmer distress and grievances. The discussion will also bring in engagement with independent oversight institutions (e.g., Human Rights Commissions, Ombudspersons, BoCW Boards, Legal Services Authorities) to draw lessons on institutional design, responsiveness, and citizen oversight. By comparing diverse models, the round table will identify conditions for success, barriers, and collective priorities for strengthening and scaling up these systems.