(a) Low cyber awareness among officials is causing cyber security issues in the administration. Comment. (10 marks) (b) The…

(a) Low cyber awareness among officials is causing cyber security issues in the administration

Human error remains the softest underbelly of administrative cybersecurity. The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In, the national nodal agency under Section 70B of the IT Act) and the National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre (NCIIPC, Section 70A) repeatedly warn that many breaches in government networks begin with basic human lapses rather than sophisticated technical exploits. The ransomware attack that crippled AIIMS New Delhi's servers for about two weeks in November 2022 showed how costly such lapses can be. Officials routinely fall victim to social engineering attacks such as spear-phishing, credential harvesting, the use of weak passwords, and the unauthorized handling of external storage media, which serve as entry points for ransomware attacks that can paralyze critical administrative databases. The administrative apparatus often suffers from a siloed culture where cybersecurity is relegated purely to IT departments rather than treated as a continuous operational protocol. CERT-In's April 2022 directions requiring incidents to be reported within six hours, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, and the National Cyber Security Policy (2013) set the rules, but compliance depends on people. To mitigate these risks, capacity-building frameworks such as the Cyber Surakshit Bharat initiative (2018), Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) deep-dive training programmes and cyber-hygiene modules on iGOT Karmayogi are imperative to transform institutional cyber hygiene into a standard administrative discipline.

(b) The 'guillotine' hastens the budgetary process to meet the timeline: Evaluation

The 'guillotine' is a parliamentary closure device provided in the Rules of Procedure of the Lok Sabha, read with Article 113 of the Constitution, whereby the Speaker puts all outstanding Demands for Grants to vote without further discussion once the allocated time for budgetary debate expires. Evaluated against the standard of administrative efficiency, the guillotine ensures that the Appropriation Bill is passed within the constitutional timeline before the start of the financial year, preventing government business from stalling. However, evaluated against the democratic standard of executive accountability, the procedure severely diminishes legislative scrutiny. A substantial portion of the budget—according to PRS Legislative Research, often more than three-quarters of expenditure, and in March 2023 all demands—is guillotined without detailed debate, turning Parliamentary approval into a procedural formality. A "vote on account" under Article 116 already exists as a safety valve if more time is needed, so the timeline argument is weaker than it appears. Thus, while the guillotine succeeds as a mechanism of procedural expediency, it compromises the core principle of financial accountability, requiring mandatory and robust pre-guillotine scrutiny by Departmentally Related Standing Committees.

(c) New localism and empowering local actors

New localism, rooted in Anthony Giddens' Third Way and Blairite administrative reforms and articulated by Gerry Stoker and Dan Corry (2002), represents a paradigm shift from traditional localism; it was later given statutory form in the UK's Localism Act 2011, while Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak's The New Localism (2017) described American cities solving problems through local networks when national government stalled. While old localism was characterized by rigid bureaucratic decentralisation and top-down municipal delegation, new localism emphasizes network governance, subsidiarity, and the co-production of public services between local state organs, civil society, and citizen groups. In India, the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment Acts echo this approach by moving beyond viewing local bodies merely as implementation arms of higher tiers of government. Instead, new localism empowers local actors by leveraging contextual knowledge, social capital, and multi-stakeholder partnerships to design and manage public services. By prioritizing direct community agency and collaborative governance over bureaucratic command and control, new localism transforms local actors from passive recipients into active co-creators of local development.

(d) Gram Sabha and community participation

Under Article 243A of the Constitution, the Gram Sabha serves as the foundational institution of direct participatory democracy in India. It is structurally distinct from the Gram Panchayat: while the Gram Panchayat is an elected, representative executive body, the Gram Sabha is a deliberative assembly consisting of all registered adult voters in a village. The Gram Sabha ensures direct community participation by institutionalizing social audits, beneficiary selection, and collective oversight over local development works. Its participatory mandate is further strengthened in tribal areas through the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 (PESA) and the Forest Rights Act, 2006 (FRA), where PESA requires the Gram Sabha to be consulted before land acquisition and gives it ownership of minor forest produce, the Land Acquisition Act of 2013 requires Gram Sabha consent in Scheduled Areas, and the FRA gives Gram Sabhas a decisive role in recognising forest rights and consenting to forest diversion - as when the Supreme Court in the Niyamgiri case (2013) left the Vedanta mining decision to the Dongria Kondh Gram Sabhas, which rejected it. Special Gram Sabhas are convened nationally on 26 January, 1 May, 15 August and 2 October, though low attendance, especially of women and marginalised groups, and domination by local elites often weaken them. The transformative potential of the Gram Sabha is best demonstrated by Kerala’s People’s Plan Campaign, which institutionalized bottom-up, community-driven planning across local governance.

(e) Implementation challenges and issues of the Government e-Marketplace (GeM)

The Government e-Marketplace (GeM), launched in August 2016 and made mandatory for common-use goods and services under Rule 149 of the General Financial Rules, 2017, was established to bring transparency, efficiency, and scale to public procurement; its annual gross merchandise value crossed ₹5 lakh crore in 2024-25, but its execution faces several operational and structural challenges. First, small enterprises face MSME exclusion due to technical compliance burdens and high turnover criteria, compounded by a persistent digital divide among rural and semi-urban suppliers. Second, the platform has faced concerns about market distortions such as collusive bidding, vendor cartelisation and restrictive bid conditions that favour particular brands, as well as disputes over transaction charges, which were reduced in 2024. Third, post-delivery quality verification gaps remain prevalent, as procuring departments often lack decentralized testing infrastructure to inspect delivered goods against technical specifications. Finally, backend integration bottlenecks with the Public Financial Management System (PFMS) and the Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN) cause reconciliation delays and protracted payment cycles for vendors. Addressing these bottlenecks requires algorithmic anti-fraud mechanisms, vendor onboarding support, and end-to-end integration across financial platforms.