Digital Governance and State Power in Higher Education: A Political Analysis of Odisha’s Higher Education Information Management System (HIMS)

Abstract

The Higher Education Information Management System (HIMS) is an ambitious digital governance initiative that was launched by the Odisha state government in 2025 to transform the administration of higher education. The present paper investigates HIMS from the perspective of political science, taking into account the institutional design, the objectives of governance and the socio-political impacts. We explore how recent scholarship on digital governance, policy, and case studies can inform our understanding of how HIMS centralizes administration, increases state data capabilities, and promises efficiency and transparency, and ask questions of bureaucratic power, accountability, inclusion, and privacy. The study is qualitative, focusing on policy analysis and a case study analysis based on the policy orders of the government of Odisha from 2015-2026 and academic sources. We conclude that HIMS embodies both New Public Management values efficiency and new governmentality digital state, in which the state uses ICTs to transform the behavior of colleges, faculty and students. While certain aspects of the rollout of HIMS have helped to enhance administrative coordination and decision-making based on data, others have been of concern, including rural-urban divides surveillance of staff/students and the centralization of control. Comparative and theoretical comparisons point to the role that HIMS can clarify in the context of the larger debates in e-governance between promises of efficient services and the difficulties of digital inclusion, privacy, and democratic controls. We argue that the Odisha HIMS is a test case of political e-governance it strengthens capacities and accountability of the state in some respects, but also centralizes power and reallocates responsibility to digital infrastructures. Recommendations focus on policy interventions for more inclusive, data-driven and institutional safeguards for HIMS to facilitate equitable and transparent governance of higher education.