Billboard Governance: Who Ordered Lakhs of Government Offices to Go Clicking Dirt?

In the recent past, India has seen waves of campaigns that have purported to better simplicity, and improve administration, and they are indeed carried out to stop public projects. One such campaign that was reviewed in a trenchant piece by The Journalists’ Group involves asking government employees to file pictorial evidence of cleanliness efforts undertaken at lakhs of government workplaces. This training, despite the seeming march towards computerized administration and accountability, calls for massive concerns about its feasibility, the true ends that lie behind it, and the possibly adverse outcome of such tactics.

The Roots of the Movement

The campaign under discussion is, after all, an adjunct of the larger **Swachh Bharat Mission**, initiated in 2014 as a pan-India endeavour aimed at cleanliness and decontamination, especially of the countryside. The mission became applauded for focusing on ridding the place of loose poo and working on a cleanliness aspect that was made open for everyone, which formed the grassroots of governmental strategy. With time, the mission scaled up, which included also sterilizing aside from the aspect of cleanness of governmental structures and other public organizations.

This extension coordinated government representatives to follow standards of cleanliness in their workplaces. Part of this accountability came as an application-based framework. In such a framework, authorities were expected to send visual proof of their cleaning efforts on an administration door. This was created as a transparent step, meant to monitor the progress rate while making the workers accountable for their cleanliness roles.

An Algorithmic Incentive Mechanism or an Exposure Scam?

The need for governing bodies to submit pictures of tidy working environments would at first blush appear a commonsensical extension of steps taken towards compliance with standards of neatness. It is far from it in reality, however, according to a report by The Investigating Collective recently published.

Instead of being mere documentation of genuine efforts to continue cleanliness drives, the uploading process itself has now been characterized by an observable surplus of energy. A photograph-uploading schedule was given to the officers of various tiers of administrations to be performed on a routine basis, which then sent in a sudden tide of photographs to the website. What was originally intended to be something of a gadget for monitoring improvement immediately developed into a practice in optics with many workplaces organizing nothing more than neat pictures for their share without inventing a breakthrough in anything that was the core practice at that place.

And it is on this stress of optics at the expense of content, here lies the trouble. Transfer missions have made what some even described as “billboard governance,” where being able to present consistency and appearance is considered more highly than actual changes in hygiene. The mission seems not so much focused on establishing whether actual changes are coming and going, but rather on building a visual record that might be used to demonstrate efforts to the public and perhaps further up the governmental chain of command. That aspect is troubling because it transfers the attention from the efficacy of the strategy to optics into implementation.

Impact on Political Representatives

For the most part, majority government representatives, this need to engage in this photo transfer exercise has been very frustrating. However much as neatness may be a genuine concern, the burden of constantly transferring photos is merely that which has heaped their work with little weight. This training has led to a situation where the authorities are wasting precious time on organizing and taking photos instead of focusing on actual work liabilities.

Furthermore, the pressure to meet photograph transferring shares has led to some dubious practices. Organizations have been transferring the same photographs multiple times or even organising cleanliness drives for the camera without implementing long-term changes in their workstations. The result is a system that emphasizes looks over meaningful improvement, where employees are more concerned with racking up points than ensuring their workstations are clean.

This abuse of time and resources results in greater concerns regarding the demands of administration. If the elected officials are busy snapping and transmitting pictures instead of performing their core functions, it may dent the overall productivity and effectiveness of the public domain.

An Issue of Accountability

At least on paper, the transfers were meant to instil some sense of responsibility, while the study by The Reporters’ Collective implies a sort of education that somehow bypasses real responsibility altogether. Today, there exists an enormous electronic record of cleanliness photographs, and such photography does little to provide much about the real conditions within a government office or whether an initiative is sustainable over the long term.

The framework, which is photograph-based, represents a deeper concern in administration: dependence on a set of superficial measures. Instead of focusing on results over the long term, the framework focuses on measures that are short-term and measurable example, how many photographs are uploaded or downloaded. This does little to correct the root problems of sanitization and cleanliness the Swachh Bharat Mission was tasked to address. Worse, this allows the regime to proclaim victory without having made any concrete strides.

The Greater Fallout

The act of Announcement Administration stretches out beyond this one point. In a variety of ways, it symbolizes a larger pattern in Indian administration: using digital platforms and technology to create the presence of transparency and accountability without necessarily improving the quality of services. From cleanliness photos to digital dashboards and online performance measures, there is a growing reliance on shallow indicators of improvement rather than significant outcomes.

This focus on appearance has deep implications for governance in India. While technology can surely be harnessed to augment transparency and smooth processes, it needn’t come at the cost of significant governance. The challenge for policymakers is to strike a balance between the two- to leverage technology as an instrument for genuine improvement rather than producing great insights that obfuscate further problems.

Beyond the optics

The neatness of photograph photograph-transferring effort is a perfect representation of the entanglements of Board Administration. While probably presented with good intentions, the framework has come to be more about optics than about real progress. It raises very significant questions regarding the concept of responsibility in policy implementation: How do we ensure that strategies lead to real improvements rather than merely creating an illusion of improvement?

For India to reach that point of being truly transparent and having good governance, it needs to be more than just superficial; it must make long-term meaningful changes beneficial to its people. Such steps include the uploading of photographs and importantly, the root causes of poor sanitation, ensuring that taxpayers’ monies are indeed making an actual difference. Ultimately, actual change is measured, not by the number of photographs in a post but by changes in the lives of people.