Democracy in the age of Robocracy: Exploring scenarios for future democratic participation in the era of Digital India

The taxonomy of democracy in the present era is somewhat perplexing. The crumple of socialist paradigm and the upsurge of digital age paved way to cement fundamental institutions together with democracy. With the leap in new digital technologies (hereafter NDT’s) like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Social Media Platforms (hereafter SMP’s) will have the potential to effect the kinds of social change that will shape modern digital democracies in the very near future. The Indian democracy is in transitory phase manifesting from representative to participatory democracy. However, these newely emerging complex techno-social participatory relationships unlock new opportunities and challenges. Although fragile and clouded, an attempt has been made to foresee the societal consequences of the interrelationships between forms of future democratic participation (FDP) and (NDT’s) in the era of digital India in 2030. In the light of above intricacies, a qualitative inquiry has been conducted by applying Delphi technique involving experts from transdisplinary domain. The Delphi analysis relied on the problem under investigation draws three plausible scenarios: i) Status quo participation (SQP) ii) Bounding together participation (BTP) and iii) The new techno-public translocal-participatory democracy (TPD) in the age of robocracy.