Which is the reason why governments should look seriously at e-governance,he added. The `e' in e-governance was not just about being electronic, butbeing effective too, he emphasised.

Arora defined e-governance as a technology-driven methodology to realiseeconomic prosperity, transparency and higher velocity of business.

He outlined two models of e-governance that could be adopted. The first onewas about providing individual solutions to problems. But such an approach,he said had two disadvantages. One, that software had to be duplicated andhardware replicated. The second problem being that individual solutionswould mean the absence of any standards.

Therefore, Arora suggested, that e-governance models be built around fourpillars. That of technology, infrastructure, content or applications andimplementation strategy.

While he dwelled at length on the intricacies of how the model could bebuilt, he also highlighted the most obvious benefits that could accrue fromusing such systems in governance.

In the case of Maharashtra for instance, he said, it was important to makeonline the registration of land and property records because peopleassociated with the information were uncomfortable handling the volumesinvolved.

While transferring the information online made handling the bulky data thatmuch more easier, it also allows people to walk into the registrar's officeand access the information almost instantly. Earlier, the process used totake a couple of weeks.

In Andhra Pradesh, however, Arora said that the process of creating systemsfor e-governance was easier because much of the information was already onsome kind of computerised database.

In states like Gujarat and Kerala, Arora said, the process would take longerbecause they were still in their infancy when it came to even computerisingtheir records.

Perhaps, the biggest challenge C-DAC faces in creating systems fore-governance, Arora added, was creating multi-lingual interfaces. In thiscontext, he said that the toughest place to implement solutions was TamilNadu. That, because the structure of the Tamil language was unique and verydifferent from any other Indian language. However, he added that C-DAC hadmanaged to weave its way around the problem and e-governance solutions werenow being offered there.

He was at pains to highlight the fact that the biggest beneficiaries ofe-governance had been the Andhra government which now had the benefits of anupdated voter list, industry information, household wise consumptionpatterns, economic levels and almost every other kind of demographiccharacteristic just a keystroke away.