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If this year's Union Budget is any indication, the government clearly wants to boost the social sector spending. However, the biggest question that the 108 crore Indians are asking is about how the government actually proposes to deliver these services. Certainly, e-governance is the most suitable approach, as mentioned in the Declaration of Principles at the World Summit of Information Society: "ICTs should be used as an important tool for good governance." However, for all the talk about e-governance, is it really taking off in India?

On the brighter side: There are islands of success across the country; last year's government spend of $1.2 bn on e-governance; a strong IT sector in the country; and last but not the least, the recent World Bank announcement to support India's initiative through a massive $500 mn loan, over the next four year period.

Further, the World Bank is in discussions with the Center for providing Rs 25,000 crore financial assistance for a network to inter-linking all States and Union Territories under the National e-Governance Action Plan (NEGAP).

All this while the Indian Government has already announced its intention of spending Rs 12,400 crore on e-governance. Not surprisingly, the country has already moved up from 85 to 37, amongst 198 countries, in the fourth annual survey conducted by Brown University in 2003.

On the flip side: The successful local initiatives have not been followed through; support mechanism, service objectives, and service level agreements-all not institutionalised; and high failure rates, to mention a few.

Nevertheless, there is a definite push for e-governance from the government, in tune with the resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly "to ensure that the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communication technologies, in conformity with recommendations contained in the ECOSOC 2000 Ministerial Declaration, are available to all."

But how do we make e-governance happen?
Summits discussing e-governance issues where all stakeholders put their heads together to find out what needs to be done to make it e-governance happen in India, are quite prevalent now.

What ails e-gov in India?
The essential ingredients that fails most e-governance projects in India, include improper conceptualization and implementation, beside domain knowledge. Strangely, in the country which boasts of being the IT service provider of the world, people who understand government do not know IT, and not many who understand IT have the necessary domain knowledge.

Another big problem: lack of stakeholder involvement. Most of the time, the IT secretary or the IT departments attempt to replicate a project just because it was successful in some part of the world. The logic: there should be something intrinsically inbuilt in the project that makes it beneficial for the user department, in terms of reducing labour.

The next problem is government process re-engineering (GPR). Most of the time, either there is too much of GPR, or too little. Too much of it creates many problems, in terms of changing rules and regulation forms, so much so that it bogs down the project. Similarly, too little of it also create problems in terms of meeting the state's objectives.

In many cases, there is a lot of pressure to roll out a pilot project-even before it has acquired critical mass without ownership at the political and administrative level. Most of the projects are individual driven, and once the champion is changed, the project dies a natural death.

Then comes the vendor factor, with IT companies trying to push their product by over-emphasizing on technology without taking care of the main objectives. Also, ignorance of technology 'domain' knowledge amongst government officials results into a situation where vendors take governments for a ride, with regards to their products.

According to Aman Singh, joint secretary to the CM-Chhatisgarh and CEO, CHIPS, "As a country, we need to understand that there are primarily three components of e-governance-people, process and technology, strictly in that order. Unfortunately, majority in the country are obsessed with technology, often at the cost of people and processes." Adds Prakash Kumar, Secretary (IT), Delhi: "We can't allow vendors to learn at our expense."

It's all about processes
Technology has never been a problem for implementation of e-governance projects, given the country's pre-eminence in IT. However, the problem lies in understanding the intricacies of implementation of meaningful e-governance projects, as rightly put by Ravi Kant, Special Secretary (IT), West Bengal: "Technology is a small piece of the puzzle. Execution is the key. Governments need an innovative agenda-not an IT agenda."

In our country, the government is probably one of the biggest employers, and the biggest sector, from the economic point of view. The main problem is managing process change and change management within the government. Processes are very much linked to government rules, regulations, and procedures. These need to be changed. But changing them would be a very slow process, with long gestation period.

Community: The missing link
Any e-governance project should always keep the 'citizen' at the core, which has not happened so far. "Most of the projects in India have so far been made by sitting in an office and looking at a department's computerization efforts, forgetting the central person-the citizen," said Satish Kaushal, country manager, Govt (SWG), IBM. When Uttaranchal, for instance, appointed IIT Roorkee to conduct a people response-assessment exercise for putting up the various services on the portal called 'Uttara', it was found that the citizens' expectations were dramatically different from what the bureaucrats were talking about. Therefore, whenever e-governance projects are taken well beyond the pilot stage into the next stage, decision makers need to look at the whole eco system.

While most agree that there is a need to involve citizens at the grassroots level, in conceptualizing and strategizing an e-governance project, the fact is that today most of these projects are conceived by the 'champions' without involving the identified groups of stakeholders and consulting them to understand their needs. Quite a few NGOs are propagating the government-PPP-community-NGO partnership concept, but, overall, the country is still pretty far off from the time where the benefits of ICT would reach the masses in the real sense of the word.

Capacity building is a must
Apart from these, there are three other challenges in the form of people, process, and technology. The most important part is people-not technology. What is the government doing for capacity building? Only of late, government has realized that it needs to do some capacity building. "They should have taken up these activities of training generations of leaders who would have led the e-governance movement in the respective states," said Aman Singh.

The good news is that the Planning Commission and the DIT have already announced the policy to fund 'capacity building' under the National E-Governance Action Plan (NEGAP).

Think beyond RoI
Last year about $1.2 bn was spent on e-governance initiatives in the country and most of the projects so far are based on a return on investment (RoI) matrix. Any e-governance project would allow cost reduction to the government, but the important question is, will it enhance the operational efficiency? Will it bring in higher revenue to the government? Will it bring better citizen satisfaction? Experts suggest that all e-governance project needs to be judged on a performance matrix based on certain parameters-not just RoI.

Explore new sustenance models
There is a confusion that a private public partnership (PPP) necessarily means that citizens will be asked to pay for the services delivered. However, this is not entirely correct. Introduction of ICT in good governance involves appreciable capital cost and revenue cost. Public resources, available with the government, are limited. Many states, with high fiscal deficit and rising non-plan expenditure, cannot roll out e-governance projects for want of funds. "Therefore, the governments need to explore avenues for funding," Kant said, adding that, "even if the capital expenditure is made available, the governments would have a liability for the revenue expenditure, which adds to the non-plan budget."

What this means is that there has to be a mechanism for meeting the revenue expenditure for e-governance projects, and maybe some contribution can come from the citizens for using the services, but that requires innovative thinking.

While Singh believes that the citizen should not be made to pay, he agrees that "for any model to be sustainable, there has to be some revenue stream built into it, or else the project will hit a roadblock in a year or two". RR Fuliya, Commissioner & Secretary (Electronics & IT Department), Haryana suggest a way out when he says that a mixed approach of cross subsidizing can be used in cases where situations demand.

Agrees Singh: "If we integrate the check posts through use of automated smart cards or other similar technologies it would often lead to increase in revenues. So, definitely, that revenue can be utilized to pay for the project cost or cross-subsidize other e-services."

While Avinash Chaurasia, founder president, Force 3 is of the strong opinion that the government should not try to take a short drive by charging the citizen, Sivarama Krishnan, associate director, PwC said that in most of the cases the question of sustainability is raising its head because the government is only focusing on peripheral changes in e-government, without making requisite restructuring at the backend. "Today, we are worried about how to raise money for rolling out and sustaining an e-governance project without considering the fact that if we substantially change the way we run the government, the question of sustainability would not arise because this can possibly be absorbed by the savings made."

Are we talking process re-engineering again?
Interestingly, most of the experts believe that one of the biggest advantages of PPP is that the investment comes from another party, which is driven by the bottom line. However, there should be service-level agreements to ensure that the projects meet its objectives. "PPPs, apart from the obvious ones in bringing together all the huge competencies that exist outside the government, are very important in calibrating the project and determining the goals in a cost effective manner" said R Chandrashekhar, Joint Secretary & CVO-DIT.

Measure the success
While many of the India e-governance projects boast of winning national and international laurels, including the Stockholm Challenge Award, many of these projects have fallen flat on the ground with time. Experts suggest that it's high time that the country moves into the project management mode. The first and the most important point is that the objectives, the milestones and the benchmark should be clearly articulated before we embark on any e-governance project. The evaluation of the project should be done against these milestones and benchmarks. In this context, the emphasis should be on identifying measurable results because what can't be measured can't be improved.

Says Singh: "In most of the cases, there are vested interests-often those who have spent money and those who have implemented it-to declare the project a success. Hence, there should always be a third-party evaluation of the projects."

Can we bridge the digital divide?
"Digital divide has created a wide gap between the urban and rural masses and if we seriously want e-governance to happen in this country, it is important to attack this digital divide," said Dr GD Gautama, Principal Secretary (IT), West Bengal. How to plug it then? The digital gap has to be narrowed by putting in place a national infrastructure by developing and nurturing the necessary human resources to design, develop, and operate the national information infrastructure, e-enabled services, and associated chain management.

According to Vivek Harinarain, Secretary (IT), Tamil Nadu, it's a given that most of the champions understand that e-governance is not hardware, software, networking or mere digitization or computerization. "The 'e' aspects of hardware and software are tools you need to implement, after you visualize the overall picture of what the service is that you want to deliver. It is imperative, but e-governance is not the business of the IT department of the government," he said, adding that "e-governance will have to be driven by champions at different departments and the IT departments can, at best, do hand holding."

Suresh Pachauri, Minister of State, Personnel, Public Grievances & Pension had this to say: "We need to ensure that digital divide does not become a reason for denial of information. It has to be made available to them in a language understood by them." And who should know it better than him, for the Department of Administrative Reforms, under him, has been at the forefront of driving
e-governance in the country, from the process-reengineering front.

Shubhendu Parth/CyberMedia News (With inputs from Rahul Gupta in Mumbai)

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