E-GOVERNANCE: 20 Hot eGov Projects in India

The ubiquitous mouse has a special place in the Indian psyche. It is revered as the vehicle of Lord Ganesha-the remover of all obstacles. Today, in the arena of governance, its Pentium-powered avatar reigns supreme in the hands of an increasingly e-literate janata

One click is deemed good enough to cut the much-dreaded Indian red-tape to shreds. Another one takes the wind out of all those touts hanging around public offices. Public accountability and responsive services seem suddenly just a blip way. Welcome to the transforming potential of
eGovernance...

The term eGovernance has different connotations: 

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25 E-gov projects (November 2009) style="font-weight: bold;">

• E-administration-The use of ICTs to modernize the state; the creation of data repositories for MIS, computerisation of records.
• E-services-The emphasis here is to bring the state closer to the citizens. Examples include provision of online services. E-administration and e-services together constitute what is generally termed e-government.
• eGovernance-The use of IT to improve the ability of government to address the needs of society. It includes the publishing of policy and programme related information to transact with citizens. It extends beyond provision of on-line services and covers the use of IT for strategic planning and reaching development goals of the government. 
• E-democracy-The use of IT to facilitate the ability of all sections of society to participate in the governance of the state. The remit is much broader here with a stated emphasis on transparency, accountability and participation. Examples could include online disclosure policies, online grievance redress forums and e-referendums. Conceptually, more potent.

Global shifts towards increased deployment of IT by governments emerged in the nineties, with the advent of the World Wide Web. What this powerful means to publish multimedia, support hyperlinked information and interactive information meant was a clearer avenue for G to C interactions and the promise of the attainment of the goals of good governance. Governments weighed down by the rising expectations and demands of a highly aware citizenry suddenly began to believe that there can be a new definition of public governance characterized by enhanced efficiency, transparency, accountability and a citizen-orientation in the adoption of IT enabled governance.

Origins in India

E-governance originated in India during the seventies with a focus on in- house government applications in the areas of defence, economic monitoring, planning and the deployment of ICT to manage data intensive functions related to elections, census, tax administration etc. The efforts of the National Informatics Center (NIC) to connect all the district headquarters during the eighties was a watershed. From the early nineties, e-governance has seen the use of IT for wider sectoral applications with policy emphasis on reaching out to rural areas and taking in greater inputs from NGOs and private sector as well. There has been an increasing involvement of international donor agencies such as DfID, G-8, UNDP, WB under the framework of e-governance for development. 

While the emphasis has been primarily on automation and computerization, state endeavours to use IT include forays into connectivity, networking, setting up systems for processing information and delivering services. At a micro level, this has ranged from IT automation in individual departments, electronic file handling, access to entitlements, public grievance systems, service delivery for high volume routine transactions such as payment of bills, tax dues to meeting poverty alleviation goals through the promotion of entrepreneurial models and provision of market information. The thrust has varied across initiatives, with some focusing on enabling the citizen-state interface for various government services, and others focusing on bettering livelihoods. 

The eGovernance market

The Economic Times recently reported that the government in India is emerging as the fourth largest vertical spender on information technology after the telecom, manufacturing and banking and finance industries. According to Gartner estimates, the Indian government has spent around 1 billion USD on information technology in 2002. This includes the expenditure of the Central and state governments on hardware, software, telecommunication equipment, telecommunication services, and IT services, but excludes salary costs of IT staff. In fact, the government accounted for 9 per cent of the total IT spend in India for the year 2002, and in five years that is estimated to go up to 15 per cent. Though e-government is still in its infancy, over 20 states/union territories already have an IT policy in place. In terms of basic computerization, police departments, treasury, land records, irrigation and justice are seen as having the maximum potential.

Nasscom estimates that in the next five years, state governments in India will spend close to Rs. 15,000 crores on computerising their operations. The pressure to be IT-savvy is not only to keep with times, but comes from a more pragmatic dimension; loans to governments from multilaterals have now become more or less contingent upon a proper treasury management system which translates into a computerised system that will tell lending institutions what has happened to the money that it has lent. Currently, India's manual treasury systems don't permit this with the kind of transparency required.

For governments, the more overt motivation to shift from manual processes to IT-enabled processes may be increased efficiency in administration and service delivery, but this shift can be conceived as a worthwhile investment with potential for returns. As is evident in the celebrated case of Saukaryam (Vishakapatnam, AP), computerization and more efficient back-end processes can actually imply revenues for governments. Saukaryam is self-sustaining and does not require government funding. More importantly, the real spin-off is in the enhanced image of the government as being citizen-friendly. 

Even as e-governance signifies a business opportunity for industry and a strategy for the government, from a citizen perspective, there exists an overarching concern. Not how much can be spent, but what could be achieved is really the moot point. Setting up MIS may be an important and necessary exercise but very often cost-benefit analysis is not done and public money is used up in avenues that are not meaningful.

A classic example is of buying hardware (like colour laser printers) far in excess of requirements or buying computers without a clear training plan for staff. There are larger implications of the absence of visioning. Without a clear vision, huge investments in the name of e-governance may not really contribute to improve the quality of life of citizens despite huge potential.

MIS systems like DACNET of the Ministry of Agriculture have received flak for being no more than tools to control agricultural development activities rather than act as a facilitative platform for informing multiple stakeholders about how agriculture can be developed in India and supporting them in improving productivity and participating in markets, including global markets. 

Without clear vision, huge investments in the name of e-gov may not really contribute to improve the quality of life of citizens, despite there being huge potential in this

How have states in India measured up?

Thanks to e-savvy Chief Ministers like Chandrababu Naidu and S.M. Krishna, e-governance has become the buzzword for political success and the key enabler to facilitate reforms. However, a cursory glance at the e-governance map reveals a highly skewed profile. In benchmarking state initiatives, three independent frameworks of analysis seem possible. These frameworks have been presented as possible ways to look at governments' progress and are exploratory. 

• Assessing the e-readiness of states 
• Assessing the stated commitment through IT policy and actual application by governments of IT tools toward reaching development goals
• Applying the lens of good governance — the cornerstones of equity, accountability, transparency, participation, responsiveness, strategic vision, and rule of law - to what is happening on the ground.

E-readiness

The deployment of IT for furthering the priorities and goals of governance is dependent on many factors. There are many constraints on realising the presumed potential uses of IT and these reflect the readiness of governments to appropriate IT for pursuing development. Among the most obvious and critical is the connectivity factor. 

Teledensity

About connectivity in India, the following remarks by Prof. C.P. Chandrasekhar, (from the India Country Paper in “Promoting ICT for Human Development in Asia: Realizing the Millennium Development Goals”) is significant to our analysis:

• Data suggests that India may be on track to realise the required degree of diffusion of tele-communications technology, even if at a slow (but accelerating) pace. Recently released figures indicate that telephone density has touched 5 per 100 inhabitants as on March 31, 2003, compared with only 1.39 at the end of March 1994, when the shift to a new, more liberal telecom policy began. Since then the rate of expansion of connectivity has indeed been rapid, with tele-density touching 2.86 lines per 100 people on March 31. 2000, 3.64 on March 31, 2001, 4.4 on March 31, 2002 and 5 as on March 31, 2003. 
• While this growth in connectivity is expected to substantially increase interactive communication between distant centres, permit improved governance through the more efficient delivery of information and a range of social services in rural areas as well as expand access to the internet and the benefits it can provide, there are some problems with using aggregate tele-density as a measure of the extent of technology diffusion.
  
  The aggregate figure conceals the low penetration of telecommunications capacity and a high degree of urban and regional concentration. Tele-density in rural India in 1999 was just 0.4 lines per 100 people. Rural tele-density, which crossed one per hundred in 2002, stood at 1.49 in 2003, when urban teledensity was placed at 15.49. Further, inter-regional variations were also substantial. As on March 31, 2003 while total teledensity in the state of Delhi was 26.85, that in Bihar was as low as 1.32 (see Table, State-wise
  Teledensity).

Besides, the figures also appear to be substantially influenced by the recent growth of the mobile telephony sector. Given that a very large proportion of cellular phone subscribers are those who subscribe to the service in addition to holding a regular landline, the rise in telephone density as a result of an increase in cellular telephone connections can hardly be taken as indicative of the diffusion of telecommunications technology among those who were thus far marginalized from the network.

If we consider Public Call Offices (PCO) related data as a measure of diffusion among the marginalized, the story is rather discouraging. The number of PCOs that could be converted into telecom kiosks or centres with internet connectivity stood at just 10.6 lakh at the end of March 2002. This figure amounted to less than 3 per cent of the total number of DELs in the country. Further, while the population in rural areas amounted to more than 70 per cent of the total, the number of rural DELs worked out to just 23.5 per cent of the total. Finally, despite the government's efforts to reach a telephone connection to each of India's 600,000 villages, the total number of village public telephones at the end of March 2002 amounted to 469,000.

These figures are clearly indicative of a digital divide driven by asset and income inequalities, such that there a few at the top who are connected while the majority, preponderantly in rural areas, are marginalized from the communications network.

Internet connectivity

Even if connectivity in the form of a communications link is established, there is no guarantee that this can be viably expanded to connect India's villages to the world through the internet. Despite its large population, the success of its IT industry and the government's stated intent of wiring India's villages, India today lags far being many other developing countries in terms of the bandwidth necessary for people to simultaneously access information flow through the Internet. In 2001, the International Telecommunications Union estimated bandwidth availability in India at 1475 megabits per second (Mbits/sec), as compared with 2639 in Singapore, 5432 in South Korea, 6308 in Hong Kong and 7598 in China.

A composite measure of e-readiness that places e-governance initiatives alongside other IT achievements has been employed by NCAER in a national level survey. The survey rated the states' performance on six broad parameters - network access, network learning, network policy, network society, e-governance, and network economy.

Even though performance on e-governance is one of the parameters in this survey, one can argue that the effectiveness of e-governance may itself be implicitly dependent on the other parameters constituting e-readiness. 

Open Source is taking off because buying and upgrading proprietary software is expensive. It is safer to entrust knowledge in the public domain to Open Source, which is also in the public domain, than to proprietary platforms

The parameters are described below:

• Network access included indicators such as tele-density, percentage of households with phones and cable TV, cellular phones, number of PCs and Internet connections, average price per hour of Internet use, number of cellular operators, telecom staff per 100 lines, and the number of villages covered under the village public telephone network. 
• Network learning was monitored in terms of percentage of colleges and schools with Internet access and computer labs, universities offering infotech courses, number of websites of schools and colleges, number of registered training centres, percentage of students passing out from ICT courses, percentage of IT-qualified teachers, and percentage of government employees covered under online training
  programmes. 
• Network policy was evaluated on the governments' efforts to address issues related to telecom, e-commerce taxation, presence of IT policy, and cyber laws. 
• Under e-governance, the study monitored rural connectivity; IT applications in agriculture, education, and health services; and, computerisation of land records. 
• Network society and economy were measured by the number of online companies, local language websites, and number of households having access to Internet. The number of IT parks, employment in the IT parks, and sales turnover of the companies in the IT parks were also taken into consideration. 

The NCAER survey identified Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Maharashtra as the leading States in terms of "e-readiness". It must be mentioned here that the parameters may provide crude proxies to understand the relative performance of states across different IT-related parameters, but nascency in the process of ascribing weightages to the parameters makes ranking a difficult exercise. Also, we must bear in mind that the parameters described cover e-readiness for embracing the IT revolution rather than e-governance per se.

IT Policy and IT initiatives - Taking a human development perspective to look at states

IT polices

This section will take a look at IT policies in the various states and examine them from how governments have conceptualized the use of IT to meet development goals. While it is important to critique failures in implementation, it is equally important to look at statements of intent and identify their lacking. The breadth of vision obviously has a critical role to play in the length of achievement. Interestingly, at least two states - Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh - have redefined their policies, bringing out the second version, in the light of the rapidly changing macro context and to plough back their own learnings. In our analysis of state policies, six areas of focus - agriculture, health, education, local language, welfare of socially disadvantaged groups and e-governance - have been selected to scan through these policies. Some broad observations follow:

• Agriculture is an area conspicuously absent in policies. Even in a predominantly agrarian state like Haryana, there is no mention of use of IT in agriculture extension.
• References to the use of IT for health is confined to few policies and even here, there is a lack of clarity on how exactly IT can help the larger goal of health.
• IT literacy (learning IT) is dealt with in great detail by most governments. However, there is very little reference to the use of IT as a learning tool (learning through IT). Karnataka is one of the few states that has discussed the potential of multi-media applications to promote literacy. Many policies have a narrow emphasis on IT education, focusing on employment in low skilled jobs in data entry, marketing, transcription, call centres, content creation and data processing. Some even look at this as a revenue spinner. Clearly, this is a short-term and narrow perspective.
• Development of applications in local languages has been promised in many policies, but the depth of perspective on what needs to be done to evolve standards, promote local language content and applications and appropriate hardware, is limited to few states like Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil
  Nadu.
• The use of IT to help the socially disadvantaged, including in terms of promotion of enterprises by socially disadvantaged has received attention from very few states. Even where IT is seen as having potential for empowering women and the economically disadvantaged, like in the case of Karnataka, the vision is operationalised in terms of creating beneficiary data bases to monitor programmes and automating social welfare departments. The emphasis is on managing programmes rather than on empowering people.
• E-governance is limited mostly to e-services and vision on how IT can help governments to interact, transact and elicit citizen participation in agenda-setting is absent. GIS, which can be a critical tool for mapping resources and requirements is sought to be used in very few states like Andhra
  Pradesh. 

One overall observation is that there seems to be a lack of clarity of vision in conceptualizing and operationalising the power of IT for development. It might be worthwhile for states to revisit their policies a la Karnataka and Andhra
Pradesh.

In 2001, the ITU estimated bandwidth availability in India at 1.5 Gbps, compared to 2.6 Gbps in Singapore, 5.4 Gbps in S Korea, 6.3 in Hong Kong and 7.6 in China. We have come some way since then, but it's a long road ahead...

E-governance

Although policies may have lofty goals, much seems to have happened only in automation and computerization. All states and union territories, except Daman and Diu, have a web presence. However, few have progressed to delivering e-services. Even among them, efforts are in pockets. E-seva is perhaps one of the few e-service initiatives that now has a clear roll out plan to cover all municipalities in Andhra Pradesh. Despite these trends, it must be said that while five years ago IT was the handmaiden of few states like Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, today most seem to have jumped on to the bandwagon (see table, Some E-governance Initiatives).

Very few initiatives in India seem to have ventured into the more complex areas that transcend the efficiency and management concerns of governments and put in place programmes addressing quality of life issues. Tremendous possibilities exist in these domains. For example, states can use IT for: 

• Services that increase productivity and income of communities -like Warana, Maharashtra; DISK, Gujarat
• Agriculture extension/Better returns for produce - like Krishi Marata
  Vahini, Karnataka
• Service delivery in health - like the Telemedicine Projects in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh
• Service delivery in Education - like Head Start, Madhya Pradesh; Community Learning Centre, Karnataka; Akshaya, Kerala
• Disaster management - like Flood Management, Bihar; Earthquakes Management, Maharashtra
• Use of IT based tools for planning and decision making - like the India Health Care project, Rajasthan

Through the lens of good governance The touchstones to assess the various initiatives in e-governance have to essentially come from expectations of good governance. In that sense, the success of e-governance is not about technological marvels; rather, it is about whether and how good governance has been attained through technology. If we were to operationalise the touchstones, it would encompass the dent that IT interventions have made not only on the goals of efficiency and effectiveness, but equity, transparency, accountability, participation, responsiveness, strategic vision and rule of law. Assessing states by these is a research project in its own right and there is no conclusive evidence on relative performance of states. However, we can attempt to look broadly at how states have attempted to address these goals. 

Equity

The goal of equity addresses the special responsibility of governments to account for the needs of the marginalized. Many initiatives that reach information about policies and programmes and deliver government documents are attempts to reach entitlements to rural populations. In many contexts, such as in the RASI Maiyams of Kanchipuram and the e-seva initiative in West Godavari, micro-enterprise models for promoting employment through kiosks have focused on socially disadvantaged populations. E-seva runs through self-help groups of women in the villages. The partnership between the Government of Karnataka and the Azim Premji Foundation to establish and run community learning centres in the schools in rural areas, especially in certain backward districts aims at equipping the rural schools with state of the art learning resources driven by IT. 

We do not have data on the profile of rural users, and whether socially disadvantaged sections of society enjoy equal access to IT mediated governance initiatives. However, it can be said that governments at this stage have not done enough to look at how IT can address the needs of the poor in general and poor women in particular, towards economic and social empowerment. Such a neglect is also seen in the absence of programmes for the urban poor. 

The goal of equity can be operationalised at many levels since the digital divide itself is a story of multiple divides. However, ground-level evidence reflects attention primarily to the urban-rural divide, and inadequate focus to the concerns of the illiterate, of marginal farmers, and women.

Outcomes in terms of equity also have to do with how despite intentions, processes at the grassroots are influenced by context-specific factors and therefore everything from the location of a kiosk, the pricing of government information to cultural barriers to mobility could impact actual access by the marginalized. Also, e-governance efforts may be built willy-nilly on the super-structure of societal inequities, and therefore what you have after IT came in is no different from what existed hitherto.

Constraints that governments face in operationalising equity in their e-governance initiatives is illustrated in the Bhoomi example Central to the Bhoomi project is the computerised system of producing a farmers Record of Rights Tenancy & Crops, an all-important identity paper needed by the farmer to obtain bank loans (for diverse activities ranging from children's education to buying seeds), settle land disputes and even use as collateral for bail. It is no less than a social ID.

A recent article by Keya Acharya, a development journalist in Bangalore, talks about how the problem with Bhoomi is that
the state government did not tackle fraudulent land records that went online in the Bhoomi project. Secondly, unlike the village accountant (corrupt or otherwise) who used to be at the village, the Bhoomi kiosks are located at taluka headquarters, which implies costs in terms of time and money for a poor villager. 

Transparency and accountability

Robert Klitggard of RAND has an interesting equation to explain corruption : C = M+D-T. Corruption = Monopoly + Discretion - Transparency. In India, the state holds an absolute monopoly over most of the delivery of basic services. This means that for most of the citizens, there is no exit option available to move from an unresponsive and unreliable provider. This is where e-governance can bring in radical changes. In the Indian case, one can showcase a few pioneering initiatives to underscore the potency of technology to enhance transparency and accountability in matters of governance.

Bangalore City Corporation has recently introduced the Fund Based Accounting System (FBAS) as a strategic management tool. Apart from radically altering the basic financial architecture by generating accurate and timely data, FBAS also loops back the information to the public domain. This highly enabling framework of integrating backend reforms with front-end outreach has virtually galvanized civic participation by applying this credible and open information base to monitor the activities of the local government.

This initiative (called PROOF -Public Record of Operations and Finance) is an advocacy campaign that uses the quarterly statement of the corporation as a tool to take information about the financial performance of the corporation to citizens. It seeks to bring multiple stakeholders together in an exercise to track financial statements of the government, develop performance indicators for different expenditures, and create a space for management discussion. It seeks to ask the basic question, where is the money of the government going and what value are we getting out of the money being spent.

The work of PROOF has enabled questions to be raised about the assets owned by the city corporation, the way in which these assets are being used, and also the examination of whether development expenditure, like in education, is giving value for money.

Another highly enabling application has been in the field of procurement. Bids and tenders for public works are widely perceived to be the fountain-head of corruption in local governments. Saukaryam in Vishakapatnam has addressed this issue by an e-enabled disclosure process of publishing all financial transactions - bidding and auctions, decisions, tenders, procurement etc. through the net into the public domain. 

Online Citizen Charters on key services is another example of using the power of ICT to usher in more transparency and accountability. By openly committing to standards and norms, public agencies are now holding themselves to account. And technology has dramatically altered the ease of public access.

However, there a few downsides to this encouraging scenario. In many cases, the government websites seldom get updated and therefore public information is rendered obsolete. The cutting edge of the Internet is its dynamic interface and if that organizing principle is truncated, the relevance of the medium ceases to exist. The problem of the last mile also looms large.

With a highly skewed pattern of teledensity and the highly disabling profile of rural illiteracy, the reach of the Internet remains exclusive and limited. This means that online information put out by governments may not actually be accessed. Also, civil society groups in India are yet to engage with the government on the basis of what is available on the net. Though there are no short cut solutions to these basic problems, a major onus seems to lie upon NGOs to bridge the digital divide by connecting the new information now made available to the voices of the unconnected.

Any new paradigm shift brings with it new risks. The dictum holds good for e-governance too. Some of the unmanaged risks could include misuse of private information bases like land records and demographic profiles, privacy and confidentiality issues arising from the lack of protection to personal identities of the citizens (for example, a potential to sell citizen profiles to corporates for focused marketing). Another unmana-ged risk is the potential for the emergence of new touts-kiosk operators who may overcharge, or middle-men in the procurement of IT hardware and software.

Another unmanaged risk is the potential for the emergence of new touts-kiosk operators who may overcharge, or middlemen in the procurement of IT apps and hardware

Participation and responsiveness

The essence of a true democracy rests upon a healthy contestation of a plurality of views. One undisputed impact of the ICT revolution is the widening of the space for participation and contestation. Space and hierarchy have been virtually decimated by the Internet. This of course, has also meant that traditional power structures have been reoriented and the sarkar-janata relations are showing a shift from a provider-beneficiary mode to facilitator-participant one. How have governments in India responded to this opportunity/crisis? 

Gyandoot and Lok Mitra have a facility for citizens to lodge their grievances and there is anecdotal evidence that complaints have been attended to by the authorities. However, these are sporadic successes. A quick study of the existing scenario reveals that states are by and large, not responsive. For example, though many of the key political figures, such as our ministers and MPs and Chief Ministers have published their email addresses, in reality, most do not respond to e- mails. 

The Ministry of Agriculture has an interesting project that provides e-extension services through computer kiosks in some Indian states. The success of this endeavour in Ranga Reddy district in Andhra Pradesh is primarily due to the continuous flow of information from officials to women in the community and the responsiveness of the officials to the queries and feedback from communities. The officials use tools such as video-conferencing for regular communication with the project sites. 

There are a few cases of citizen-led initiatives that have created the space for people to participate in the democratic process.

The 'Lok Satta' internet-based campaign a