Technology without accountability is just power without a leash. The Chief Minister's Office of Uttar Pradesh shared a pointed statement by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Saturday, 24 October 2026, framing the central challenge of the digital age in stark, practical terms: building powerful technology is only half the job — making it secure, reliable, and genuinely useful for ordinary people is the harder half.

In the statement, CM Yogi said: 'Today's challenges are not only about developing technology, but also about making that power secure, trustworthy, and in the public interest. There is a need to reflect on how we can all work together in this direction.' The remarks — delivered as part of a speech — land at a moment when India's state governments are simultaneously racing to digitise services and grappling with the vulnerabilities that digitisation introduces.

The three-part test CM Yogi set for technology

CM Yogi's formulation is deliberate: surakshit (secure), vishwasneey (trustworthy), and lokhitkari (in the public interest). These three words are not interchangeable — they represent three distinct failure modes that have haunted technology deployment in Indian governance. Security breaches erode citizen data; unreliable platforms erode citizen trust; and systems built without public-interest design erode citizen access. Naming all three together signals an awareness that each dimension requires its own policy response.

Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state with over 240 million people, has a direct stake in getting this balance right. The state has been an active participant in the Digital India programme launched in 2015, rolling out e-governance platforms, citizen service portals, and digital infrastructure across its 75 districts. The scale of that infrastructure also means the scale of risk — from data governance gaps to cybersecurity vulnerabilities — is proportionally large.

A call for collective deliberation, not a lone directive

What stands out in the Chief Minister's framing is the phrase 'how we can all work together.' Rather than issuing a top-down directive, the statement is an invitation — to state officials, technology developers, civil society, and citizens — to co-create solutions. That consultative register is notable in a context where technology policy in India has often been made at the centre and cascaded downward.

Indian state leaders have periodically raised similar concerns, but few have distilled them into a single, deployable formula as crisply as this. The statement could presage formal state-level consultations on cybersecurity frameworks, data governance rules, or responsible AI deployment standards specific to Uttar Pradesh — areas where states have growing room to act alongside central policy.

The question CM Yogi has placed on the table is simple and urgent: if the technology is powerful but neither safe nor honest nor fair, who exactly does it serve? The answer, his statement implies, had better be everyone — or the work is not finished.