E-governance: Hip & Happening

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Much has been written about e-governance. We have Rajiv Chawla, whose project “Bhoomi”, was nominated for the Stockholm Award (often called IT’s Nobel) last year. He is now officially called “Secretary, e-governance”. Buoyed by the success of Bhoomi, projects with similar focus are being launched across states. Earlier, we had Chandrababu Naidu, chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, demonstrating the prowess of e-governance to then US President Bill Clinton. There is healthy competition among many states including Tamilnadu, Kerala, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Delhi, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh to initiate many e-governance projects.

Abroad, we have large projects such as UKOnLine, a project that brought most British citizens closer to the government at the “click of the mouse”. UK has even a minister for e-commerce and e-governance. There are e-governance projects from Chile to Ghana, from India to Philippines, and from Singapore to New Zealand. They cover rich and poor countries, large and small nations. Some focus on efficient tax collection, others on faster response time; yet others focus on reducing time to deliver citizen services.

Naturally, IT vendors Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Intel and Cisco are very interested as are software houses and consultants such as TCS. With them around we have jargon — G2C (Government to Citizens), G2B (Government to Business) and G2G (Government to Government)!

Harvard University has been pioneering the concept of e-readiness. The United Nations brought out a report just this month on E-Readiness of Nations. There is a “Public Sector Governance Guidebook” brought out by the World Bank recently. Rutgers University in US has an e-Governance Institute; NASSCOM and AP government are busy setting up a National Institute for Smart Government. There is a nice collection of experiments and experiences brought out by Kiran Bedi in her book Government@Net. A number of experiments to use regional languages, so that common folk can also benefit from e-governance initiatives, are underway. In the past three years, there has been a National Conference on e-Governance. One such conference was concluded just this month in Chennai with chief minister Jayalalithaa and home minister Advani participating. There is an International Conference on E-Governance scheduled in December 2003 at the IIT in Delhi.

What is probably lost in all the din is the fact there are some simple critical success factors that should not be lost sight of. Prominent among them are the following: