The Hindu : Kerala / Kochi News : e-governance delayed: official

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Tuesday, Jan 08, 2008
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Kerala

Kerala - Kochi

e-governance delayed: official

Staff Reporter

Cites capital and technology constraints

Suggests innovative public-private partnerships as a solution
Sees lack of enough hands with IT skills in government

KOCHI: Constraints of capital, technology and management have delayed the effective implementation of e-governance, Ajay Kumar, Information Technology (IT) Secretary, said here on Monday.

At a meeting organised by the Kerala Information Technology Alliance (KITA) at Infopark, near here, he said it would take $ 1 billion for main government departments to roll out their services using information technology (IT) applications even in a small State such as Kerala.

He cited innovative public-private partnerships as the way out.

He drew attention to the Kerala State Wide Area Network, being implemented with private participation.

Most IT companies in the country did not have readymade e-governance solutions. The Indian government had been encouraging companies to have e-governance divisions and this started yielding results of late.

How this could be done in Kerala need to be considered. The other area which needed tremendous amount of attention was the lack of enough hands with IT skills within the government setup.

As government was the most systematised organisation with well-entrenched procedures, changing it would create a lot of insecurities. Users of government services were used to the system. This would create difficulties in managing e-governance.

Therefore, greater awareness needed to be created about the use of IT in delivering services and its efficiency.

Crash course

He said the government was planning to provide a mass-based special crash course targeted at graduates finding it difficult to get a job in the industry with their present skill sets. As the local industry was the beneficiary, its support would be enlisted.

A feature of the programme was that it would be decentralised and infrastructure of Akshaya and IT@ School projects could be utilised for the purpose. The technical support, however, should come from the industry.

Kerala was better placed than other States to leverage e-governance applications. Inputs in areas of capital mobilisation, technology and management would help the State to take the process forward, Mr. Kumar said.

The biggest issue was that people did not believe that they could actually be trained to secure a job in the IT industry. There was a misconception that one needed to be an engineer or a science graduate to be in the IT industry, he said.

There is the fundamental problem of how to change the whole system of pedagogy in educational institutions to produce quality hands. A mechanism needs to be in place to overcome this and some efforts in this direction are already on, he said.

Mr. Kumar said that KITA could make suggestions to the government without necessarily being in the advisory role. He asked the organisers to approach the government with the specifics about the role they are looking at.

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