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This chapter evaluates the partial e-government initiatives in India to focus on the conditions for success and failure. The term e-governance is employed to connote delivery of services in general, not particularly from the state, while e-government indicates such delivery from state units. The chapter provides context for limited statehood and governance in India—the macro outline for understanding the environment within which e-government operates—and an examination of India’s relative success in the last decade with provision of an information infrastructure. The chapter also examines the operations of specific e-government and e-governance initiatives and concludes that the key factors for the partial success of a few e-government initiatives include adequate telecommunication and human resources, societal and business demands, and well-placed champions within governments. E-government initiatives in India are most successful at the basic level, rather than providing for a broader transformation in the relationship between government and the people.

This contribution analyses public administration as core state power with an empirical focus on policy execution of EU-rules on workers qualifications and VAT-collection. It tests standard hypotheses on administrative integration dynamics against the Genschel–Jachtenfuchs model. It is shown that the horizontal coordination of domestic public administrations leads indeed to regulation by stealth. However, not public administration as such but national, decentralized administrative capacities are regulated. This diverges from the outcome suggested by the supply/demand model. The empirical data suggests that in public administration we recently witness a shift from vertical to horizontal integration, promoted by the Commission to overcome long-standing shortcomings in the operational completion of the single market project due to implementation failures. Key to this trend is the development and improvement of new electronic tools that facilitate administrative coordination across different jurisdictions, language barriers, and administrative cultures.

Chapter 2 first defines the main concepts of the book. It uses the well-known framework of explanations for political protest, consisting of individual motives, resource mobilization, and political opportunity. In comparison to conventional communication technologies such as newspapers, television, and phones, the advent of the Internet affects protest mobilization in different ways: it increases the speed and availability of the network, changes the nature of the transmitted information, and possesses a network structure that can be less susceptible to government interference. The chapter reviews the existing literature on the relationship between Internet technology and protest within the framework of motives, mobilization, and political opportunity. Even though this literature has recognized that the Internet is neither exclusively beneficial nor detrimental to protest mobilization, it still has failed to identify the conditions under which digital technology helps protesters or autocratic governments.

This chapter presents an empirical first look at the relationship between Internet technology and protest occurrence at the level of cities. The authors argue that the expansion of Internet coverage should lower the incidence rate of anti-regime protest: governments enjoy a high level of control over Internet technology and content, which they can use to prevent protest. Building on the book’s research design introduced in Chapter 4, the chapter tests this theoretical expectation by presenting descriptive statistics and later by estimating multilevel regression models. In line with the authors’ argument, the analysis reveals a negative effect of Internet penetration on protest incidence. In other words, high Internet penetration in a given city reduces the likelihood of anti-regime protest incidence in autocracies. This effect is robust across a number of different model specifications and time periods.

This chapter begins with an introduction to surveillance as both theory and practice, beginning in the era of the British Empire, followed by Foucauldian theory and the specific nature of digital surveillance in contemporary India. It explores the State’s many investments in the surveillance of its citizens against the reality of insufficient legal support for privacy. It highlights the complexities and compulsions of Aadhaar as well as the geopolitics of surveillance and India’s surveillance partnerships with the USA. It also explores the ambiguities of e-governance, the politics of transactional efficiencies against the creeping power of ‘code’, as well as the persistence of caste and other markers of identity that have made a comeback in the context of a resurgent nationalism in India.