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Wednesday, Sep 29, 2004

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

The web of e-governance

By G. Ananthakrishnan

Can e-governance add any value if it is implemented merely as a virtual version of labyrinthine government processes?

IT MUST come as a surprise to the average citizen that some analysts think e-governance in India is witnessing healthy double digit growth and appears to be worth at least Rs.1,400 crores a year to software companies. For most citizens the only brush with e-government is a visit to rudimentary websites put up by individual departments that offer no alternative to the difficult relationship they have with Government to get their entitlements. In theoretical terms, e-government in the country is still largely in the `information' phase and faces an uphill task to reach interactivity and actual delivery of services.

Few States have gone beyond the theoretical realm, in what they can do with Information and Communication Technology to serve citizens. Some of them even show off office automation and real estate projects for the Information Technology sector as e-government initiatives. In the absence of a national mission to evolve technical standards and share resources, citizens have ended up funding costly piecemeal programmes with few tangible results.

When the leaders of the IT bureaucracy meet periodically, as they did at iGovern, a stock-taking session on e-governance held in Chennai recently under the aegis of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), they lament that there is no consensus on inter-operable standards that will enable exchange of data, no sharing of best practices and no realistic vision on how to effect change.

On this generally barren landscape there are some blips of promise. Kerala and West Bengal have centred their e-governance initiatives round the local bodies. They are used as the base to deliver services to citizens, who are often neo-literate, while fostering a sense of involvement and accountability at the grassroots.

Kerala has tested its pilot project of modernising 10 local self-government institutions and is now ready to roll out a Rs.150-crore project to upgrade 1,250 panchayat institutions. West Bengal's vision is also guided by the philosophy that its panchayats and municipalities must bear primary responsibility for e-governance as they are closest to the community. The success of any e-effort would depend on the number of people who are touched by it.

Many `advanced' States are yet to even capture electronically the health data at their best Government referral hospitals. However, West Bengal claims a leadership role by defying sceptical technology vendors and implementing a telemedicine project that links its rural hospitals with referral centres using a combination of satellite and plain old copper cables, aided by digital compression technology from IIT Kharagpur. Kerala's Akshaya kendras bridge the digital divide by making at least one member in each family e-literate and create shared access through computerised kiosks for citizens to get information in the local language. What began with 600 `kendras' in Malappuram district is being expanded to cover 6,000 points Statewide, adopting an entrepreneurship model that also generates employment.

West Bengal's e-Governance packages adopt open source models, and the State has expressed its readiness to share its achievements with others. The State has made effort to network all police stations and even issue First Information Report (FIR) copies electronically. West Bengal has also shifted to the e-mode the process of accepting and clearing applications for industrial licences by the State Pollution Control Board.

Andhra Pradesh, long seen as an early mover in e-governance with its e-Seva portal for citizen services, is focussed on expanding its bandwidth to 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) to the district headquarters, one Gbps to the taluks and 50 to 100 Megabits per second to the villages. To put this network to optimal use, it has a wish list for commercially viable services such as entertainment and Internet-protocol telephony that would use the surplus bandwidth.

The availability of adequate bandwidth is today seen as less of a challenge than reordering government to eliminate complexity. With competition, the existing telephone links in the country coupled with wireless can adequately cater to bandwidth requirements. Greater difficulty is posed in unifying coding and inter-operability standards.

Can e-governance add any value if it is implemented merely as a virtual version of labyrinthine government processes? A sample statistic pulled out by an expert shows that to export something as simple as flowers, the system compels the entrepreneur to deal with 14 departments and secure a total of 260 signatures for a consignment. If the e-process were to move an application in the same linear fashion through these departments, it may not be very different from physical paperwork in its complexity.

The test for the e-mode lies in the elimination of needless procedures. It also depends on the political will in each State to provide the leadership for such a mission. Even with such measures meaningful e-government outside the urban milieu will require that the basic literacy level of the population is raised over time, as the Kerala experience makes clear.

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