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Visit githubstatus.com, https://status.stripe.com/ or status.claude.com and you will see something simple: metrics about how the platform functions. This includes: whether the platform is up, how long it has been up over the last 90 days, a log of every incident that occurred, and how long it took to fix each one. 

GitHub, for instance, shows component-level uptime percentages such as Git Operations at 99.83% and Pull Requests at 99.55%. This information is presented alongside an account of what went wrong. A simple description of platform performance allows users to know when things are broken and when they are fixed too. For consumers of these platforms, this creates trust as many businesses now run with the help of these platforms. 

Github has been facing unprecedented load since the boom in AI-assisted software development where the volume of software code being written and pushed to Github has increased exponentially. Consequently, GitHub spent a large part of last month in internet infamy, with every hiccup laid bare for the world to see — all enabled by its own transparency tool. Yet, throughout the turbulence, the status page remained online, holding the company accountable until the dashboards eventually turned green again.

Now open the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) platform, the Pradhan Mantri Gram Awaas Yojana platform, the Jal Jeevan Mission platform, UPI or Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System. What you will find is what these platforms choose to show: scheme targets, funds released, houses built, piped water connections created. What you will not find is how reliably the portals themselves work, how quickly grievances are actually resolved, or what a citizen should do when the system fails them. The performance of the scheme is reported while the performance of the platform is not. 

Without these hard numbers, what you are left behind with are hearsay on the slowness of pages, servers being down etc. But, every time you would try to raise these issues with the engineering teams, they will be set-aside as mere gossip, or one-offs or repudiated by loading the page right in front of you in 100 MBPS leased web lines and saying “see it works”! 

We’ve agreed that we need evidence-based development, but where is evidence-based software development?

Pun aside, technology is playing an increasingly important role in welfare delivery. It is no longer an accessory but the medium through which benefits and services are being delivered. If these platforms don’t work optimally, the downstream services and benefits get impacted adversely.  From registering job demands on NREGASoft, tracking housing instalments on PMAY-G to filing water connection requests on the JJM portal, millions of citizens are now nudged to access entitlements through digital platforms. The reliability of these systems is no longer just a technical concern that can be ignored or surpassed offline. It is a welfare and service delivery concern. A portal that is down during wage week, or a grievance that loops in a closed status for months, has direct consequences for the families depending on it and those delivering it to them.

This is an important gap to fix. To fix it, we need to know it's broken, in a more quantified manner.  While uptime metrics is a great start, in our context we’ll need a little bit more.

What the metrics should look like

Metrics that could be designed to show a platform’s performance does not have to be complex for the team managing the platform as well as the citizen accessing it. Adapted for welfare portals, a public-facing status dashboard could show the following:

1. Uptime — the percentage of time the portal was accessible and functional, shown over the past 30 and 90 days. This could be broken down by key functions such as application, tracking, payment or grievance.
2. Average grievance resolution time — not just whether grievances were closed, but how long it actually took, tracked against the stated 21-day limit that CPGRAMS itself commits to. CPGRAMS has reportedly seen a 74% reduction in pendency since 2021, but citizens have no way to see what that means for their specific complaint category or state. 
3. Payment disbursement lag — the average gap between entitlement approval and actual transfer, visible at different levels of disaggregation such as district, block and village. 
4. Incident log — a simple record of when the system experienced failures, what was affected, and how long resolution took. This includes Aadhar authentication failures where necessary.

Why this matters beyond transparency

As studies have shown,  lack of trust in government platforms is a common challenge in India. A public status page does not solve this problem entirely, but it addresses one specific part of it: it tells citizens whether the system they depend on is actually working.

There are also benefits for the system itself. Frontline workers, namely Data Entry Operators, Rozgar Sahayaks, block and district-level officials, spend significant time navigating portal errors they cannot explain. A live status page gives them a reference point when systems are down. It tells them whether the problem is on their devices or the system’s end. This also helps them redress the large volume of queries that citizens bring to them during outages. 

It isn’t just the citizens and frontline staff, engineering teams that run these systems and Union and state-level bureaucrats overseeing these systems stand to benefit too. This evidence can help them identify recurring bottlenecks, improve coordination, and build more reliable public systems over time.

The 2024 OECD Digital Government Index specifically highlights reliable and resilient digital public infrastructure as a foundational requirement for sustainable digital governance. It is important to note that reliability here is not a feature, but a fundamental baseline.

The government already measures scheme output. It is time to also measure and openly share platform performance. If the portals that deliver welfare can tell us how many houses were built, they can also report whether the portal was up when the beneficiary came to check if the funds to build their house were disbursed or if the OTP came when an engineer was trying to use the inspection mobile app to inspect the road built by the contractor.

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Sidharth Santhosh is Senior Research Associate at ResGov and Harsh Nisar is Founder of Bharat Digital