The government spending on IT showed a more than healthy increase of 30%-up from Rs 4,089 crore in 2003-04 to Rs 5,334 crore in 2004-05. This accounted for 12% of the total domestic IT consumption. A number of PSU banks like SBI, PNB, BoI, BoB as well as incumbent service providers like BSNL/MTNL were heavy adopters of IT. However, these spendings have been clubbed under the BFSI and telecom categories; otherwise, government would have been the second biggest adopter of IT amongst all verticals, only behind BFSI and ahead of even telecom. Dataquest is only considering the spending on different e-governance projects, both by the Union Government as well as the different state governments, under this category.

The biggest catalyst to the government spending on IT definitely came from the National e-governance Action Plan (NEGP) that is scheduled to be implemented at the central and state levels in the next three to four years. Under the aegis of NEGP, 25 mission mode projects were identified to be executed-these projects principally focused on improving service delivery to citizens and businesses. They were taken up by both the Centre and states for countrywide implementation in a phased, time-bound manner. Obviously, most of these projects required a heavy dose of IT adoption-in fact, the government admitted that only IT could alleviate the shame of being ranked 86th out of 191 countries according to the latest United Nations global e-governance readiness report of November 2004.

The Union Government's  10 point agenda for IT was indeed the veritable opening of the floodgates

Three important elements of the NEGP, which form the core infrastructure for effective service delivery paradigm are Datacentres, State Wide Area Networks (SWANs) and Common Services Centers (CSCs). If NEGP was the initial catalyst for increased IT adoption in the government sector, the Union Government's 10 point agenda for IT was indeed the veritable opening of the floodgates. (See Box: Ten Commandments for IT) There were a number of galvanizing factors that helped in this pursuit-different vendors fought to bring out PCs in the sub-10k range; open source computing got a big thrust to be pushed into the mainstream; broadband at last made its entry, and finally state governments scrambled to outdo each other on the e-governance front.

NEGP was the biggest catalyst to govt spending

In order to bring about a substantially increased proliferation of .IN Internet domain name, a new .IN Internet domain name policy framework and implementation plan has been formulated and the policy announced by the Government in October 2004. The new policy seeks to remove the restrictions in the existing procedures impeding the growth of .IN Internet domain name registrations, and aims at adopting a liberal and market friendly approach to register large number of .IN domain names. The policy has received wide acceptance countrywide. A Centre of Excellence in Wireless Technologies (CEWiT) has been set up in Chennai, with the seed capital provided by the Department of Information Technology through Media Lab Asia. This public-private partnership initiative is aimed at undertaking R&D in the fast developing area of fixed/mobile wireless technologies.

Based on the experience of the Community Information Centers (CICs) in remote areas of North-Eastern States, it was decided to set up 135 CICs in all the Block Headquarters of Jammu and Kashmir. In the first phase of the scheme, 60 CICs were made operational by October 2004 and remaining 75 CICs will be operationalised in the second phase by October 2005. A project to set-up 41 Vidya Vahini CICs in the Government schools of Andaman & Nicobar and 30 schools in Lakshadweep was taken up by the Department. It also set up 328 CICs (95 CICs at the block level and 233 CICs at village level) in an entrepreneurship mode in Uttaranchal.

Rajneesh De