Stronger Democracy, Digital Legislatures: NeVA

A major milestone in the development of open, efficient and fully digital legal system in India has been achieved with the end of the 3 rd National Conference on the National e-Vidhan Application (NeVA) in New Delhi. The New Delhi Resolution on NeVA 2025 commitment to collaborate with various states restates a national obligation to make digital innovation, collaboration, and inclusivity transform the very nature of legislative operation.

NeVA essentially is a democratic facilitator and a technology. The project designed by the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs is meant to create a unified digital hub of all state legislatures so as to achieve the intention of having One Nation, One Application. This integration makes it easier to simplify legislation procedures, reduce the use of paper and encourage real-time coordination between state assemblies and Parliament.

More than 100 delegates, such as, Secretaries of State Legislatures and Nodal Departments attended the conference that was inaugurated by Union Minister Kiren Rijiju. In his speech, the Minister rightly called NeVA the very soul of our democracy because it plays the important role of strengthening the parliament through digital transformation. His comments were based on one fundamental fact: the twenty-first Century democracy must evolve with technology to remain open, accountable, and adaptable.

Minister of State, Dr. L. Murugan, Parliamentary Affairs and Information & Broadcasting in his farewell speech again reaffirmed that NeVA is now being used by all state legislatures as a common legislative platform. This standard framework achieves this by eliminating redundancy, simplifying operations, and enhancing accountability and involvement in governance. The measure of the progress can be seen through the achievements listed during the conference. Having 20 Houses already running on the platform and 28 Legislative Houses signing Memorandum of Understanding to be implemented, NeVA has made over 90,000 questions and 600 bill processing. These numbers do not just reflect digital achievements, but a change of thoughts, paperwork is replaced by paperless governance.

The New Delhi Resolution on NeVA 2025 has a plan on how this change can be furthered. It gives a high priority to the establishment of a Committee of Secretaries, faster implementation, capacity building, old records digitization, and AI and other new technology adoption. The National Legislative Digital Index, particularly, is quite an interesting suggestion because it may serve as a central database of legislative information, ensuring its availability, comparability, and the fact that the institutional memory is preserved in the long term.

Human factor in this digital transformation is also very important. Dr. Satya Prakash, the Mission Leader of NeVA, says that the legislators should be the bedroks of Viksit Bharat whereas NeVA is the digital engine that will drive the vision. Making the software available is not the only part of the issue, and other difficulties are the establishment of the institutional capacity, training the personnel and promoting ownership. It is not a matter of technology alone that can help to digitalize legislatures; parliamentary institutions must be transparent, flexible and trusting.

Another activity in the conference was to acknowledge cooperative federalism in action by awarding states that have gone live on NeVA and best practices. The digital journey of every state legislature which is determined by local priorities and challenges improves the efforts of the group in creating a more responsive and connected democracy. India is approaching Viksit Bharat 2047 and legislators need to go digital, paperless, and data-driven. NeVA symbolizes this shift, a convergence of tradition and technologies that strengthens the basis of the discussion, consideration, and judgment.

Continued investment in digital infrastructure, frequent training, cybersecurity protections, and the involvement of smaller legislative bodies must be the main focuses of the future. NeVA could reshape legislative governance and serve as a global model for how democracy can flourish in the digital era if it is executed consistently and cooperatively.