Bringing All Into One

In this issue, we have attempted to provide an excellent snapshot of how the various states in India fare in terms of their maturity in use of ICT for governance and inclusion. The spectrum of maturity and achievements is vast and the opportunity for one state to learn from the other is high.

During the research for this issue, we had various discussion sessions with experts and one of them rightly pointed out the key malaise of Indian e-governance efforts. He said that the number of applications and solutions implemented within India by government entities is huge, but the willingness to learn from one another is lacking. This leads to the reinvention of the wheel over and over again, which means the time, effort, and money to do it is expended as many times.

Surprisingly, the key reason for this was ‘ego', the expert said. It is a point difficult to construe at first, but the answer lies in the strategic importance accorded to e-governance projects and the size of the financial outlay for such projects. For an Indian bureaucrat, during his tenure, it is the chance to prove an accomplishment and she/ he wouldn't want to take the easy way out by simply replicating what others have done. Because it would diminish the impact of the bureaucrat's achievements, so it seems. In summary, if India's e-governance record has to be speeded up, ‘ego' has to be removed from ‘eGov', the expert pointed out.

But at the DQ-CMR e-Readiness Conference and Awards event that followed our research, we saw a very different level of enthusiasm amongst various e-governance leaders from Indian states in showcasing and sharing their experiences and learning. Hope this is the start of a massive movement to identify best practices and replicate them. This movement has to be sustained if we have to race ahead with our objectives of building a smart, secure, and inclusive governance mechanism using ICT.

It would need a separate mechanism and organized system to identify best practices, share them, and create the structure to replicate them. It is not only relevant at the level of applications or solutions, but also at the level of governance processes. Transfer of land ownership, registration of birth and death, and so many other citizen services are the same in Meghalaya as in Karnataka, so why should one develop separate bespoke applications? If local language is an issue, localization of language is a very simple problem to tackle. If cloud is the IT architecture, why not build a government cloud that would deliver infrastructure, platforms, and applications to the center and the states? Why can't all e-governance applications in India be catalogued? The opportunities are many, the potential is huge, but it would require very high levels of motivation and initiative.

We do have the National E-Governance Plan, NISG, eGov Knowledge eXchange, and various initiatives that point in this direction in letter, but evidence suggests that it lacks spirit. Do we have a CIO equivalent for the government? Our plans are all too decentralized, too much off-center. We would need to begin with a new set of principles, an ICT manifesto of sorts. Let the minds meet before the actions converge.