Bharat Chalo!

A few months back, I wrote a piece for Dataquest governance quarterly, titled

Enough of low-hanging fruits. A senior bureaucrat told me the tone was a little

harsh, though he agreed with many of the points I made. I argued in that column

that most of the e-governance projects undertaken are ones where the IT

solutions are fairly similar to those implemented in the corporate world and

hence vendors have an almost ready solution, which they have offered with

minimum customization. In other words, IT deployment in the government sector

has so far not been decided by prioritizing the needs but by ease of

implementation. I also acknowledged that there is nothing wrong in that;

successes in the first few projects are extremely critical to silence the

critics. I just expressed my impatience in not moving fast enough to the next

phasetake up more important governance areas where solutions have a more

pressing need, even though implementing technology may be a little difficult as

the solution has to be thought through starting from scratch.

CK Prahaladnow considered the worlds greatest living management

thinkertalked about value at the bottom of the pyramid more than half a decade

back. All of us keep quoting Indias population figure in forums to show how

great Indias IT potential is. Mobile phone usageand SMS usage in

particularhas shown that people are not afraid of using technology when there

is a pressing need and it is available at the right price. So the traditional

excuse that people are not willing to use technology sounds really poor. It may

be applicable for an older age group. But cutting across social and economic

strata, the young peopleand India has a lot of themare comfortable using all

the technology.

shyamanuja das

Very recently, I got a lesson on why I should bank with a bank with core

banking from a farmer in Orissa who looked at least 40. He was not only

satisfied with the services of his bank, a branch of State Bank of India in

Angul, a small but industrially developed town in Orissa, but he also explained

to me the advantage of core banking (as they call automated branches) over

traditional banking in a way that I doubt the bank staff could have done. SBI,

no doubt, has done a great job!

On the other hand, when it comes to government services (land records,

especially), while most of the users are aware of the services and many have

even used them, they are far from satisfied. Most of them, though not too

educated, are mature enough to understand that the problem is not with

computer but with the people who have implemented it and are running it.

It is the same point I argued earlier. The solutions are not designed keeping

in mind the need of the end user but in terms of what is easy to implement. The

difference between the satisfaction levels of the customers of SBI and

customers of the governmentvery often the same peopleare significant. SBI

does not have the luxury of acting on its own whims. It competes in the market.

The government does not. Political parties do not compete on these issues.

One solution could be to make the government services available in multiple

competing channels, at least in areas where scope for market-like competition

exists, like in urban areas. Another could be to resort to total outsourcing of

citizen services, as the government has done in a few areas like passport

services.

But as the senior civil servant told mein a sarcastic tonethe IT companies

are deciding what the government should do for good governance. While that is a

little exaggerated, it is true that they often influence government decisions. I

have no hesitation in appealing to them: now that low-hanging fruits are

becoming scarcer, it is time to try real innovation to solve Indias unique

problems.