India, Aug. 9 -- An intelligence inside the state cannot be allowed to roam like a mythological animal merely because it is efficient. Oversight must be proportional to consequence.

In a district court in Uttar Pradesh, somewhere in the old dust of files and adjournments and stamped certainties, a translation engine, fed on three decades of judgments, is silently eating into a backlog which human clerks, with all their fatigue and tea and memory, could not really touch. Elsewhere, in a gram panchayat in rural India, a transcription tool sits through the meeting like an invisible munshi, and the moment voices fall silent, minutes exist; a record which earlier took days, or never took form at all, now congeals almost immediately into gover...