Time to go back to school where the states are the students and the results are out for their performance in 2004. The Department of Information Technology (DIT), the teacher of the class, has also pointed out their shortcomings and advised them on state-level strategies to improve their performance in the future.

'The India: E-Readiness Assessment Report 2004,' published by the DIT along with the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), has studied and documented the competitiveness of the states and Union Territories in bringing larger sections of the population on the ICT network. The report also appraises the status of the states with regard to their underlying infrastructure, human resources, policy regimes and investment climate.

The Networked Readiness Index (NRI) framework used for the report evaluates the relative development and use of ICT of the states and also highlights their strengths and weaknesses. The framework has taken into account the following broad parameters:

• Environment for ICT offered by a community-market, political/regulatory, infrastructure
• Readiness of the community's key stakeholders to use ICT-individual readiness, business readiness and government readiness
• Usage of ICT among different stakeholders-individual usage, business usage and government usage

Each of these parameters was further divided into sub-indicators to calculate the e-readiness. These parameters are also meant to be used to initiate policies to accelerate IT development by the states still lagging behind in terms of e-readiness.

Lessons Learnt • The National Action plan should focus on • modernizing public services • improved transparency and efficiency in delivery • economized delivery • sustainable/scalable/profitable rural development initiatives • Developing a domestic market for IT applications  • Improving readiness of verticals • Encouraging initiatives like e-Choupal that involves a large part of the labor force and Akshaya where high literacy unemployment is absorbed in kiosks. • Projects that should be replicated across various states and are excellent examples of gain on first mover advantage are • Bhoomi-switching costs • e-Seva-technological leadership • e-Choupal-pre-empting business space • Proactive involvement of private sector in replicating such initiatives

Some of the sub-indicators for the market environment are ICT exports and competition in the cellular and telecom sector. The political and regulatory environment takes into account the existence of an IT policy, a state-level action plan, the existence of a task-force for e-governance projects, cyber laws and tax concessions. The infrastructure environment keeps track of telephone lines and cellular connections, schools with computer labs and internet access, dedicated infrastructure for gateways, IT parks and earth stations among others.

Sub-indicators for individual readiness include household expenditure on education, number of IT qualified teachers, technical students, households with TVs and PCs. Business readiness takes into account total number of IT parks, total IT companies, and registered training centres. Few sub-indicators for government readiness include the existence of an intranet in the government departments, government websites in local languages and the percentage of top officials trained in ICT.

Individual usage is further sub-divided by households with Internet connections, number of ISDN subscribers and PCs in business, penetration of cable TV and radio. Business usage is characterized by total computers in business and companies involved in e-commerce. Sub-indicators for government usage take into account the application of ICT in agriculture, health services, transportation, energy and trade, e-governance projects undertaken and facilities available online.

PC penetration
An interesting analysis defined by the study is on the potential and prospective IT spending by Indian states. The DIT in its analysis has used PC sales as the proxy to IT spending of Indian states, thus measuring it in terms of PC penetration per thousand of population. No wonder, the results indicated that the actual penetration was lower than the potential for most states and also for the country as a whole.

Regions of Delhi and Chandigarh followed by Goa demonstrated the highest potential in PC penetration. Both Delhi and Chandigarh were measured to have all the favorable parameters (income, urbanization and services share), while Goa had high scores in only income and services share. Other states with higher rankings were Punjab and Maharashtra, where the important attribute was income, while other parameters were weaker. The potential penetration in states such as Bihar, Orissa and Uttar Pradesh was estimated to be very poor as these states suffer on account of all the driving parameters of PC penetration.

The e-readiness report comes as a mirror to all the states, which need to work extra hard to score on account of better networking. While the actual penetration of Delhi, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are above their potential, states such as Goa, Kerala, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Andhra Pradesh are much behind their potential. It is noticeable that India spent 2.85% of its GDP on ICT in 2002, while the already advanced countries like Australia, Japan, the US and the UK spent 6.4%, 5.3%, 6.5% and 6.1% of their GDP respectively. A positive attitude towards IT is needed for the states and the country to progress as a whole. High time the dark horses of the race pick up some speed.

Jasmine Kaur in New Delhi

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