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With positive indicators such as rising foreign exchange reserves, a booming
capital market, and rapidly expanding FDI inflows, India has emerged as the
second fastest growing economy, registering a GDP growth of 9% in FY 08. A
major factor of this boost was the agricultural sector, which grew by 4.5% in FY
08 against 3.8% in the previous fiscal. Though, the services sector managed
10.8% growth in FY 08 against a backdrop of 11% in the previous fiscal, the
manufacturing sector lagged by growing only at 8.8% for the same period viz 12%
in FY 07. This was primarily on account of lack of proper infrastructure and
uncertainties in the global economy. Moving into FY 09, the downward risks are
much higher than in the previous years, much due to inflationary pressures, the
swinging Indian rupee, and financial exclusion of large sections of the Indian
economy. Thus, the role of governments becomes all the more critical to sustain
the new era of growth that India is witnessing.
Though the governments in India are playing their parts to leverage IT for
facilitating governance or, as rightly said, paper-less (less-paper) governance.
Central government ministries are looking to enhance efficiencies in the
administration, drive down communication costs, and increase transparency in the
functioning of various departments. The state governments on the other hand are
looking to give tangible benefits to citizens through low-level applications,
such as online form filing, to high-end applications like distance education,
telemedicine, and agri-portals.
According to an IDC India study Unleashing the True IT Opportunity in the
Indian Government Sector, the governments in India are slowly and gradually
awakening to the needs of the nation and its citizens, and are looking to match
pace with the technological evolution by making themselves more tech-savvy.
While central government ministries are increasingly focusing upon internal
back-end automation, the state governments are focused more on front-end
delivery mechanisms to citizens for bringing in greater efficiency,
transparency, reducing the need for frequent government-public interactions, and
improving their public image.
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| Source:
egovindia.files.wordpress.com |
With the deployment of low-end infrastructure for e-governance projects by
states and for internal automation by ministries, hardware occupies a
substantial chunk of the pie of IT spendings made by governments in India. The
key focus lies on PCs, networking, and servers for large infrastructure projects
such as community service centers (CSCs), state wide area networks (SWANs), and
state data centers (SDCs). Following next are the spendings on IT services, due
to the increased implementation of e-governance projects in the states.
The study also observed that while rate contracts are the most preferred form
of tendering for projects initiated by central government ministries, states
follow a mix of open tendering, limited tendering, and rate contracts.
Interestingly, though most ministries are in a phase of initial hardware
deployments, certain advanced and hi-tech organizations are also keenly looking
at replacing their obsolete infrastructure in the months and years ahead.
Up till now governments had focused on low-end applications like storage,
security, and networking, but moving ahead they are looking at solutions like
ERP, electronic document management solutions (DMS), virtualization, and
business continuity. Next, the country would witness a phase where
infrastructure deployment would go hand-in-hand with advance level application
deployments for the central and state governments in India.
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| Source:
egovindia.files.wordpress.com |
A Status Report
Different state governments across the country are in different phases of
e-governance deployment. While a few states are marching ahead with SWAN and CSC
implementations, a majority of them are still mid-way. Almost all of the states
are yet to set up SDCs. Similarly, while projects like land records, road
transport, treasury, and commercial taxes are the most common applications being
deployed by state governments, projects like property registration, agriculture,
e-courts, and police (law enforcement services) are knocking on the doors. And
with this, the country would soon enter into an era where e-governance would
spread to all departments of state governments. If implemented in the right
spirit, this is expected to streamline day-to-day administrative functions and
increase transparency.
Further, the PPP (public-private partnership) model of e-governance rollouts
adopted by Indian state governments has revolutionized the governance experience
for enterprises as well as citizens. Such a model not only lends long-term
sustainability to the national e-governance programme, but also introduces the
corporate ideology to the age-old slow and lumbering government processes.
All said and done, governments in India still face many challenges on the
road to e-governance developments. Some of the key issues that need to be
addressed are lack of skilled manpower, changing priorities during project
implementation, lack of a CIO approach to project implementation and management,
under-utilization of budgets, and resistance from employees to technology
adoption. Thus, it becomes even more critical for the IT industry to enter into
a larger number of partnerships with governments to support their IT and
modernization requirements and efforts.
While e-governance is the key for state governments to reach the masses, it
has numerous advantages for the business community as well. As has been
witnessed in developed countries like the US and Singapore, e-governance can act
as a channel for e-business in India as well, especially in rural areas.
e-governance, if harnessed properly, has the potential to take India to new
heights of becoming an end-to-end Web-based society.
Praveen Sengar and Arpan Gupta
The authors are analysts, Industry Verticals Research Practice, IDC India
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