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:

E-governance is all about governance. It is not technology and investment in IT that is important, but the re-engineering of the processes behind the screen that actually deliver the services. Bhoomi was successful because Rajiv Chawla spent time with the village accountants and was not merely evaluating the merits of Intel Vs AMD or IBM Vs HP or Windows Vs Linux.

E-governance is everyday governance. It is easy to “demo” an interesting idea but for sustenance in government, it must run day in and day out for years, that too not just in air-conditioned, city environments, but even in remote rural areas, a key success factor for Bhoomi.

E-governance must be economic. A number of e-governance projects are criticised for the excessive implementation costs. Unless the project is affordable, it is unlikely to succeed. Bhoomi charges Rs 20, which is higher than Rs 2 in the manual system but much lower than the “real cost”. That is the secret of its success.

E-governance must embrace and not be exclusive. Many e-governance projects across the globe have failed because they addressed exclusive needs of ministers, bureaucrats or industrialists. Such exclusiveness attracts so much criticism that they are doomed to fail. Bhoomi was successful because it addressed the needs of the “common man” leading to a groundswell of goodwill among the public.

I have used the example of Bhoomi because I am familiar with it. What is important is not to forget such elementary principles in our enthusiasm to launch one more e-governance project. The e-commerce boom and bust taught us that “e” is only an enabler; the same is true for e-governance too.