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If the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) was a catalyst for
IT adoption in the government sector, the Union Government's 10-point agenda
for IT certainly opened the gates wider. This was followed by the State Wide
Area Network (SWAN) and Common Services Center (CSC) policy announcement by the
Department of Information Technology (DIT), which brought e-Governance to the
forefront in India.
However, there were still some issues. Besides the proposal
to solve the infrastructure issue, a policy to take governance closer to the
rural population and the political will, there was an urgent need for government
process re-engineering, civil services reforms including a certain fixed tenure
for senior government employees and the Right to Information.
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From Summit to
Agenda
What Dataquest did (from the
e-Gov Summit to the 10-point draft agenda)... |
| Step 1: Changed the format of
the Dataquest e-Gov Summit 2006 to make it completely participatory and
consultative in nature. |
| Step 2: Sought feedback and
suggestions from the nearly 600 participants, including speakers. |
| Step 3: Consolidated the huge
list of suggestions into a 14-point charter. |
| Step 4: Had a round one
deliberation with DIT to streamline the agenda. |
| Step 5: The 14-point agenda
was then sent back to each participant for further feedback and
suggestions. |
| Step 6: The suggestions thus
compiled, were incorporated to create the Version 2.0 of the 10-point
charter. |
| Step 7: Had a second round of
deliberation with DIT to get its inputs. |
| Step 8: Publish Version 2.1
for further debate and feedback. |
| Step 9: Incorporate changes as
per the feedback and announce Version 3.0 (this acticle). |
| Step 10: Push for adoption by
DIT and other government departments and ministries and monitor on a
regular basis. |
These challenges were brought up for discussion during the
Dataquest e-Gov Summit 2005 and we decided to push many of these demands through
our reports and stories. Not only has the Cabinet approved the NeGP, Prime
Minister Dr Manmohan Singh is slated to directly monitor the initiatives. An
apex committee chaired by the Cabinet Secretary has also been set up to oversee
implementation and provide policy and strategic directions.
While the Prime Minister has already indicated the need for
a fixed tenure for government officials; the initiatives for increasing PC and
Internet penetration is on its way; and a committee has been constituted to
create standards for e-Gov projects. Besides, the RTI Act is already in place.
No wonder then, the Dataquest e-Gov Summit 2006, across all four regions of the
country, was unison in its view that the Right To Information (RTI) Act was the
biggest e-Gov driver in India. The Summit also recommended that a certain
minimum basic and uniform criteria needs to be fixed for baseline survey before
starting any e-Gov project, besides advocating for a common criteria for their
evaluation before they could to be replicated.
The Missing Link
Dataquest started by asking questions. Can automated death certificate
generation ease the process and reduce the time required for sanctioning family
pension or compensation by doing away with physical movement of files? Will
automation of land records help the government at the Centre and the states in
proper allocation of funds and resource? Can automation of Police services at
state levels lead to better cooperation at the national level? Can any of the
existing citizen service centers-Gyandoot, e-Seva
and Bangalore One-really help in streamlining the passport application
process by improving the backend process? The answer to all these questions was
a big 'No'.
The missing link to 'Good Governance' in India is the
lack of prioritization and cross-functional application of e-government
services. For example, while many states in India have gone ahead with
automating the process of certificate generation-birth, caste, death-the
lack of cross functional linkage between various departments means that there is
still no end to the red-tapism in bureaucracy and governance.
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| S Regunathan, former
chief secretary, Delhi |
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R Chandrashekhar, additional
secretary, e-Gov, DIT |
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Aman Kumar Singh,
joint secretary to CM, Chhatisgarh |
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SB Sawarkar, IG-Prisons,
Maharashtra |
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| Amod Kumar, DM,
Faizabad |
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Anita Karawal, secretary–Administrative
Reforms, Gujarat |
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Ashish Sanyal, director,
DIT |
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Tanmoy Chakrabarty, VP
and head-Global Govt Industry Group, TCS |
Dataquest's analysis of NeGP and the feedback from the
Summit clearly shows that most e-Governance projects in India lack the project
management approach. Besides, in many of the cases, the agenda was found to be
purely vendor driven with 'e' literally superseding 'governance' instead
of the other way round. In fact, in most of the cases, our study revealed the
'e' component was just being plugged in at the front end, without paying
much attention to the back end automation or bringing about the essential
government process reengineering (GPR).
The Summit also advocated the need for e-Governance in
India to graduate further from mere process automation like in the case of
e-procurement to process improvement, knowledge management and process
intelligence in government system.
It also suggested that India should move beyond the NeGP
and announce a National e-Gov Policy, which leads to an e-Gov Act. This could be
on the lines on of the President's Management Agenda (PMA) on e-Governance in
the US, with the key objective of making government services and information
accessible to the citizens within three “clicks,” while using the Internet. Page(s) 1 2 3
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