ICT in Governance

Information brings knowledge, knowledge yields empowerment and empowerment, in turn, opens up choices for better livelihood. For the last few decades, governments across the world are under pressure to provide better governance, making governments more citizen-friendly and service conscious instead of being government agency centric, moving towards citizen centric. There are concerted efforts all over to make governments more efficient by reviewing and streamlining the key processes and by adding more value without the need to increase taxes.

There are signs of appreciation that a public sector organization could be more efficient and effective, if it were more like a private sector entity, using market-style strategies and even using incentives to drive public policies better. There are evidences of decentralizing the bureaucracy through empowerment of smaller agencies. There are also felt needs that the potential conflict of intentions between policy making and public service delivery should be eliminated. Slowly but steadily governments are shifting focus from processes and structures to outputs and outcomes, in order to become more accountable to citizens and the public.

Governments worldwide are under pressure to become more transparent, to remain sustainable over their initiatives and to avoid quick fixes and populist measures. There is a constant urge for inclusive development by way of providing development opportunities for all sections of society, especially benefiting rural and traditionally under-served communities. All these goals and objectives are driving the agenda for transformation and reform in the governments.

The ICT Revolution

It is the most interesting and fascinating fact that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can effectively address in fulfilling all the above goals and objectives. It is now evident that ICT can overcome all the boundaries of society and penetrate all sectors of human activity. Over the last few decades, it has proved to be the major driver of an improved quality of life, and specifically of the economic growth.

There is a common argument that the ultimate impact of the ICT revolution would be far larger than the industrial revolution, the combustion engine and the telecommunication per se. Through singular adoption of ICT in all sectors of governance and society, it is now possible to march towards an inclusive information society. However there is a possible caveat in the process of establishing an inclusive information society. What is that? The answer: one has to work on a 'digital economy' first, before embarking on establishing an inclusive information or knowledge society.

And what is this digital economy? Comprehensive integration of ICT into all aspects of economy and society creates a digitally enabled economy. It has been established through various surveys in the West that large-scale ICT adoption has provided a higher rate of growth for the economy. The first important aspect of ICT proliferation is that it creates greater proportion of the value in the economy. Let's take a note of the service sector. Use of ICT in service businesses and industry provided much better operating conditions, thereby promoting innovation and value creation.

In fact, the entire service sector has opened up with new opportunities after the abundant use of ICT. The tasks are automated and processes are re-engineered, thereby allowing organizations to use capital and other natural resources more efficiently. Moreover, ICT enables better market alignment and decision-making which would also indirectly enhance productivity. Human capital resource is also enhanced by proliferation of ICT in the business. Work force is increased by allowing differently-abled people including senior citizens to work from home. Quality of products and the services is also enhanced by using ICT in a cost-effective manner. Further, ICT makes innovative research easier which ultimately creates new products and services.

To make all these above happen, the policy makers are required to appreciate that promulgation of a mere ICT policy would not be sufficient. To march towards digital economy, it is to be appreciated that ICT should take the pivotal central position in the entire economic policy for the government. A digital transformation of the governance and the society would only happen when digital innovation and digital transformation of economic sectors are pro-actively encouraged through appropriate policy interventions. For a simple example, it may be said that the entire tax policy should be reformed around encouraging investments in ICT so that its diffusion takes place throughout the economy. There are other important issues like digital literacy and capacity building, better digital access with cost-effective facilitating technology (read mobile broadband access) which are vital for everyone to participate in the digital economy, ultimately to become a member of the information society. There is also a need to get into standard universal design of ICT solutions, so that everyone can skillfully participate. Consequently, good digital content with easy access would be the requirement to skill acquisitions.

The Indian Scenario

For the last 2 decades, India has observed isolated efforts on adoption of ICT for better governance in various states across the country. Historically, most of these interventions sought to improve upon the delivery of citizen-centric government and private services through limited to moderate use of ICT. The National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) of the Government of India is a logical culmination of all these interventions by the way of consolidating and standardizing 27 major areas of citizen services. It can make a vast difference in public convenience, opportunity cost in availing those services, quality, time, etc. There are ICT policies in place in almost all the constituent states and union territories of the country. Lack of penetration of broadband and high-speed internet in the country is also being addressed in a projectised mode by the Department of Telecommunications through the National Broadband Plan.

As far as proliferation of ICT infrastructure is concerned, core e-governance infrastructure, eg, State Data Centers (SDCs), State Wide Area Networks (SWANs), State Service Delivery Gateways (SSDGs) and Common Services Centers (CSCs) are getting into place as core components of NeGP, thanks to the very pro-active interventions by the department of IT. It is obvious that all these efforts are towards fulfilling the vision and mission of NeGP, which does the provisioning of basic services to the common man, anytime, anywhere, and cost-effectively. However there are pertinent issues, both generic and specific, which remain to be solved.

Is there any sign of overall adoption of all these infrastructure components by the government departments, ministries, relevant government agencies and other government entities, as important gateways to enter in the ICT era of government functioning? Is there any all round feeling of ownership and compulsion among the departmental officials to provide e-services replacing the traditional manual services? Is there any sight of readiness and comprehensive program for ICT capacity building for the departmental officials, to embrace the new ICT order in all walks of governance within a limited time of next 2-3 years?

It is to be mentioned here that this argument is being put only in a limited way in case of delivery of public services to citizen through ICT means. There appears to be much larger gap in other spheres of ICT adoption in a comprehensive manner. As explained earlier, there appears to be no comprehensive policy in preparation so that ICT becomes pivotal in the information system of the Indian economy.

Is there adequate cohesion between ICT related policies and implementation means cutting across all departments in the government (read the RTI act and its requirements of electronic records for all government documents)? Is there any over-arching tax policy which would encourage ICT investment in businesses and even would incentivise for the same?

With the exception of few cases, the broad answer to all these queries is 'no'. Successful implementation of NeGP will definitely take the country 1 big step forward towards ICT adoption in delivering public services. However e-service is only 1 component for making India a digital economy and subsequently an information society. It is important that we have a cohesive ICT policy which would transcend the barriers of traditional policy areas to impact upon cross-sectoral initiatives. The rapid technological progress in ICT makes it more demanding than before. The 5 important pillars of digital economy are-ICT adoption across the board, government, industry, research organizations, other private sectors, in order to foster competitive and knowledge oriented business; comprehensive ICT policy, permeating all sections of the economy and society to encourage and incentivise of ICT adoption; appropriate ICT infrastructure enabling everyone in the society to participate inclusively in all activities; effective protection of the huge data to be gathered due to very large-scale ICT adoption; digital skills for all, to access universally designed digital content and applications.

If one intends to carry out an appraisal of the readiness of the country for becoming a digital economy marching towards an information and knowledge society, we have to undertake the exercise with respect of these 5 above mentioned pillars. Successful implementation of NeGP Mission Mode Projects, states' specific projects, e-Services Bill/Act with a specific timeline, National Broadband Plan to take OFC to all 250,000 villages, SWANs, SDCs, SSDGs, 250,000 CSCs across the country, National Knowledge Network to connect hundreds of academic and research institutes, etc, may not be sufficient to convert the current state of affairs into wholesome digitally-enabled economy. The all pervasive potential of ICT in driving the national economy is yet to be explored. ICT is fast becoming a ubiquitous and omnipresent general purpose technology for the society, promising very long-standing impact on human activities for the forthcoming decades. The faster the policy and decision makers in the government appreciate this fact and get prepared to act accordingly, the better it is for the country.