Digital Government Index for India.

India's public sector operates at the crossroads of scale, speed and rising citizen expectations. Flagship initiatives under Digital India, India Stack and Gati Shakti have fast-tracked digital adoption across transport, mobility, tourism, cooperation and citizen services. Simultaneously, rapid advances in AI and data platforms are influencing how people discover, access and experience government services. The challenge has moved on from digitisation. It's now focussed on how to make digital service delivery more integrated, efficient and citizen-focussed, while maintaining trustworthiness at the national level.

Adobe's DGI provides a clear view of how well ministries deliver online services. It not only benchmarks the digital maturity of ministries but also serves as a practical guide, helping identify opportunities to streamline and enhance citizen interactions.

Higher DGI scores translate into better civic outcomes. As more people easily engage with digital services, ministries gain efficiency, reduce delivery costs and reinvest in further enhancements.

With AI-driven tools reshaping how people access information, a ministry's AI readiness has become a critical factor in service delivery. By providing a single, reliable digital presence that works seamlessly, governments can ensure services remain efficient, effective and equipped for the future.

The DGI assesses effectiveness across three interconnected foundational digital maturity dimensions: Customer Experience, Site Performance and Digital Self-Service. It assigns a score out of 100 to each, then averages the results to produce a single index.

To capture what makes services accessible, usable and convenient for citizens, the report also evaluates two key digital enablers — personalisation capability, which measures how well ministries deliver relevant, user-centred experiences, and AI readiness, which reveals how easily websites can be found, trusted and accessed by both people and AI-assisted search tools.

India's overall DGI score remained largely steady in 2025, despite significant national investments in digital transformation. The only minimal movement in scores over recent years suggests that while foundational efforts continue, improvements are not yet being reflected evenly at an aggregate level. A closer look reveals considerable variations between ministries, with public-facing departments making stronger progress, while others lag. The current initiatives are heavily focussed on expanding digital infrastructure and mobile-first services, with user-facing elements, such as readability and accessibility, improving more unevenly across ministries.

After rising in 2024, the national score, which aggregates all assessed ministries, has returned to the 2023 level and now stands at 58.2. Of the three measured categories, only Digital Self-Service showed improvement, continuing a growth trend and reflecting a national push to modernise government service delivery through digital channels, with accessibility a clear long-term priority across ministries.

Index scores around the world.

In 2025, the DGI assessed the websites of 115 government departments and ministries worldwide. The United Kingdom (UK) once again took the top spot, supported by strong oversight from the UK Government Digital Service, which helps maintain performance. UK government websites must meet specific accessibility standards and publish accessibility statements, as well as ensure ongoing monitoring and regular updates to make sure these commitments are upheld. This consistency reinforces the region's ongoing leadership and is key to maintaining the high quality of digital services over time.

Across markets, DGI top performers share common traits: they serve as a central front door for citizens to provide a seamless experience across services, they maintain high accessibility standards and they offer more personalised, user-focussed experiences. These qualities explain why they consistently top the index.

Examining the DGI metrics provides insights into each dimension of service delivery, revealing trends, strengths and gaps and highlighting where targeted improvement can have the greatest impact in creating a seamless government experience.

Customer Experience.

Customer Experience assesses how effectively a government delivers simple, seamless online interactions that enable users to complete tasks efficiently. It is tested on mobile and desktop devices, considering digital diversity and examining how an individual's unique circumstances, including any visual, cognitive, motor, or hearing differences, influence their experience.

The 2025 DGI for India Customer Experience score was 58.2, a 3.7% decline overall. Mobile experience saw a modest improvement (1.1%). This reflects India's mobile-first approach and the increasing adoption of apps such as UMANG and DigiLocker. These apps streamline access to services for the 74%⁴ of users who access the internet via mobile devices. In contrast, desktop scores fell by 7.9%, likely reflecting legacy systems and infrastructure that have not been prioritised for modernisation. While mobile adoption is helping lift experiences, the proliferation of apps can also fragment navigation, limiting higher overall scores on this dimension.

Site Performance.

Site Performance is assessed across three metrics: site speed — how quickly a website loads on mobile and desktop devices, site authority — a measure of credibility and ranking potential, primarily driven by backlinks, and site health — a broader metric encompassing speed and other technical factors such as security, content and site structure. Together, these elements support both user experience and search visibility.

The 2025 national Site Performance score declined by 4.4% to 50. All three sub-measures fell, with average site speed experiencing the largest drop of 23.7%, including a 32.8% decrease in desktop speed and a 12.1% reduction in mobile speed. Site authority dipped by 4.2%, while site health declined by 0.2%. These results highlight opportunities to enhance Site Performance by updating infrastructure and refreshing content and optimisation practices to ensure government services remain trusted, efficient, accessible and future-ready.

The three measures are interrelated: faster load times improve user experience and site health, while a technically sound site is easier to index and rank, indirectly supporting stronger authority. Though each metric can be improved individually, a truly high-performing site requires attention to all three. As this report will explore in more detail, poor results in any of the Site Performance metrics can impact a ministry's AI readiness, as AI-powered search prioritises fast, reliable sites with strong authority.

Digital Self-Service.

The Digital Self-Service assessment measures how easily users, including those with diverse needs or who use assistive technologies, can locate and navigate government services independently. It evaluates three areas: accessibility conformance, based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG); the availability of digital and assisted language translation services; and content readability, assessed using the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease formula.

Digital Self-Service was the only dimension that witnessed positive movement, increasing by 2.0% to 62.2. The upward movement was driven primarily by improvements in language translation, an important development in a country with a highly multilingual population. For example, the UMANG platform, which aggregates hundreds of central and state government services into a single mobile app, supports 23 Indian languages and includes features such as text-to-speech and adaptable text spacing to support diverse users.

However, these gains were offset by a 4.1% decline in accessibility and a significant 23.7% drop in readability. In practice, this often reflects the pace at which services are updated or expanded, sometimes without accessibility checks being fully embedded into design, content and engineering workflows. Even relatively small changes to layouts, navigation or underlying codes can introduce barriers for users if compliance with the WCAG is not actively monitored or governed.

As part of building a digital government foundation, some ministries are experimenting with more inclusive approaches that harness AI. For example, Indian Railways has integrated Bhashini, the national AI-powered language platform, to support AI-enabled chatbots that help users navigate services and enquiries, in multiple Indian languages, using conversational interactions that reduce reliance on dense written content.

At a national level, Bhashini, led by the MeitY under the National Language Translation Mission, is aimed at enabling real-time translation and voice-based interfaces across government services. However, adoption remains uneven. These capabilities are currently concentrated in a small number of highly public-facing services and have not yet translated into consistently accessible, plain-language experiences across government websites and portals.

Readability remains a challenge for most ministries, with scores ranging from 2.4 to 41.5 out of 100. The evaluation rewards clarity and penalises dense or complex writing, highlighting the need to simplify language, improve content structure and prioritise communication that supports independent use. Without this shift, advances in translation and AI-driven interfaces face the risk of being undermined by complex source content that is difficult for users to understand, regardless of language or channel.

Over the last decade, India has focussed on strengthening the foundations of digital government, with AI being an integral part of that agenda. Through the MeitY, the government has established responsible AI principles, policy frameworks and institutional guardrails, as well as attempted to build a stronger AI ecosystem by introducing initiatives such as the IndiaAI Mission, which was announced as part of the Global AI Summit. These initiatives signal a clear intent to develop a sovereign, trusted and inclusive capability that supports both public and private sector innovation. While much of the work so far has focussed on driving enablement and building capacity, India now stands at a pivotal point — moving from laying the groundwork to ensuring ministries are truly AI-ready, so they can adapt as AI reshapes how citizens discover, access and interact with government services.

In response to this shift, the 2025 DGI introduced an assessment to capture how effectively government departments perform in an AI-driven landscape. Alongside measures of foundational digital maturity, it evaluated how well government websites can be found, trusted and used by both people and AI systems. It examined three areas:

1. Trust and authority: The credibility and reliability of an online presence based on domain authority, reflecting a website's overall strength and the integrity of sources that large language models (LLMs) draw on when retrieving information. Essentially, it shows how confidently both users and AI can depend on the content as authentic and accurate.
2. Technology structure and discoverability: The technical foundation that shapes how easily a website can be surfaced and navigated. It covers visibility and sentiment on AI search platforms, site speed (because LLMs prioritise faster pages) and how content can be accessed and indexed.
3. Brand and content relevance: The significance and authority of a website in the broader information ecosystem. It assesses active backlinks, user recognition and trust, keyword demand and the share of traffic generated through LLM referrals. Together, these indicators reveal whether a ministry is being sought out, cited and recommended, reinforcing its visibility in AI-driven discovery.

By combining these dimensions, the assessment not only reveals the current performance of government websites but also their readiness for an AI-enabled future.

The results range from an AI-readiness score of 51.1 to 73.1, highlighting the diversity of ministry functions. Ministries that offer open, unauthenticated services or public information tend to perform well on certain AI-readiness measures, as their content is more easily discoverable and referenced by LLMs. By contrast, those operating behind secure logins naturally record lower scores on specific indicators, though this does not necessarily reflect a lower level of overall digital maturity.

When examining the three key pillars of AI readiness, trust and authority scored the highest, reflecting the reliability and credibility of government information used by LLMs. However, the weakest area — technology structure and discoverability — stems from low AI visibility, suggesting that trustworthy information is not being effectively surfaced in AI-generated responses. The issue is compounded by slow page loading speeds, as LLMs favour faster, more accessible content.

Share of traffic is constrained by limited referrals from LLMs and low user demand for ministry-related keywords. This suggests that despite high levels of trust in government authority, official information may not be reaching citizens through AI-assisted channels, creating the risk that less reliable sources could fill the gap.

Lessons from the region: Content authenticity.

Across Asia Pacific, Singapore is a leading example of how governments can strengthen trust in digital content through innovation and standards. Singapore's Centre for Advanced Technologies in Online Safety (CATOS) initiative is exploring tools to verify the authenticity of digital content, including images and videos, by tracking provenance and modification history. This aligns with global efforts such as the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), which counts The Times of India among its signatories. Together, these efforts highlight a growing emphasis on content verification and provenance as a key lever for building trust in public information.

Connecting India's citizens with the right digital services, efficiently and when intent is strongest, depends on identifying individual needs and contexts. When ministries base their engagement on what they know about individual citizens, such as their location, primary language, ability or life stage, services become more intuitive, relevant and easier to navigate.

Adobe assessed eight aspects of citizens' digital journeys across government websites to understand the extent to which interactions are personalised. This acts as a more granular measure of personalisation capability, with each ministry assigned a ranking on a 100-point scale. Across Indian ministries, average personalisation scores ranged from 50 to 81.5. Despite this breadth, the top-scoring ministries were among the Asia Pacific leaders.

While citizen engagement with government doesn't always follow a linear path, the analysis identifies the stages where personalisation capabilities and gaps are evident. For Indian ministries, like many other countries in the broader study, personalisation capabilities are more prevalent in the early stages of a citizen's journey. However, personalisation is present across stages, including in half of offerings that provide chat assistance, which is higher than in other Asia Pacific countries.

We observed comparatively higher scores in areas such as services, updates and login experience, and in the consistently moderate personalisation of geo-based interactions and forms. This progress was likely supported by initiatives under the Digital India program — including the national identity system, Aadhaar, and the integration of the UMANG app with India's digital wallet, DigiLocker — which together help provide citizens with access to a wide range of services and personal documents through a single platform.⁵

No single government ministry or department currently excels across all DGI dimensions and capability measures that are markers of leading experience-driven public service delivery. However, examples from top performers globally demonstrate how strong foundations, connectivity across government and experience-enhancing capabilities deliver better outcomes for citizens at scale.

Indian ministries can improve their DGI scores by taking practical steps to modernise service delivery, promote self-service and accelerate adoption of digital services by citizens.

What's next.

Every year, Adobe's DGI evaluation aims to deepen the understanding of how digital government services are evolving in India and internationally. While the previous assessment reflected steady progress as ministries focussed and built their core digital foundations, more recent results indicate a period of consolidation, with overall performance stabilising rather than accelerating. This plateau highlights an opportunity for ministries to shift from establishing a strong foundation to driving targeted improvements that strengthen user-centric design, accessibility and day-to-day service performance.

We partner with government ministries to embed the index framework and strengthen ownership across the citizen journey. By leveraging digital enablers such as personalisation capabilities and AI readiness, we help build the digital maturity required to deliver services that meet citizen needs — today and in the future.

To understand how your benchmarking performance compares and discuss specific opportunities, please contact Deeksha Thakur at deethakur@adobe.com for a preliminary discussion.

ESources

1. State of Citizen Experience in the Public Sector in an AI-Driven World: A strategic guide to modernizing citizen services and digital governance, Adobe, 2025.
2. National e-Governance Service Delivery Assessment 2025
3. State of Citizen Experience in the Public Sector in an AI-Driven World: A strategic guide to modernizing citizen services and digital governance, Adobe, 2025.
4. Desktop vs Mobile Market Share in India – GlobalStats statcounter
5. Ministry of Electronics and IT (October 2024). DigiLocker Partners with UMANG: Unlock Seamless Access to Government Services