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Avinash Chaurasia

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CEO of Vama IT & president, Force 3 India



avinash@vama-it.com

Opportunity Lost is a Cost

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Case 1: Scores of old citizens are given pension every month at

a significant cost to the government. Currently, a Rs 250 pension is delivered

per month with an extra Rs 25 as money order charges, delivered to an old man at

his doorstep. There is no real savings here as the burden has got shifted to the

citizen. Now imagine if the pension is distributed through credit cards, every

month. It would be convenient to all; the pensioner and the government as well.

Yet, when the collector in charge of pension disbursement in Maharashtra was

challenged in IIT-Mumbai to do it differently, and try to use this as an

opportunity to create an IT-enabled job opportunity for handicapped youths who

could earn a living by distributing pension. His response was "giving jobs

to handicapped is not my job".

Case 2: In 2003, the Maharashtra government decided to make

citizens' 'land related documents' freely available, but the budget was

not sufficient. So the government made available a grant of Rs 5 lakh payable

over 5 years, and wanted to create a Web-based repository on document management

software (DMS) for selling this information to elite citizens who can pay for it

through credit cards. The government called for a tender, limiting participation

to only those vendors who have the experience of integrating payment gateways on

a DMS. Even in such a small project, there are entry barriers set-up.

These two cases really highlight the biggest problem afflicting

e-Governance in India: apathy. E-governance can benefit even the uneducated,

underprivileged citizens provided the projects are done in the right way; and

above all, for all the right reasons.

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Till date e-Governance on a BOT basis was done mostly in the

name of non-availability of funds. Project officials have used this lame excuse

to avoid the rigorous exercise of making a well thoughtout proposal, justifying

it with close scrutiny of departmental financial controllers, and giving

rigorous cost/benefit analysis.

Economists consider, 'opportunity lost' as a cost. There

have been quite many e-Governance projects that have failed to capitalize on the

'opportunity' of touching more and more people. The result, a valuable

opportunity is lost, but who pays the cost, and why?

Let's take the cases mentioned above. In each of these

projects, there was a unique opportunity the government failed to capitalize on.

In the first, not only would pensions through credit cards save on costs the old

pensioner but also make it easy and convenient. It could have also looked at as

giving jobs to less privileged people, thereby touching many more lives.

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In the second, the authorities decided to take a narrow view of

the project and involve only big companies thereby creating artificial barriers,

while a lot many small ones could have taken part in the same. Going back to the

basics, what was important here? To give information to citizens without

discrimination or without bothering about their capacity to pay. So there was no

necessity to enforce restrictive and unreasonable conditions to prevent

competition to only those vendors who have experience of integrating credit card

based payment facility.

Even the private sector has not really capitalized on the

opportunity. We find SREI, Reliance or other such private organizations cashing

in on an opportunity to work in rural India. But have we seen any local village

body benefiting out of it? Is the NGO federation under the banner 'Every

village a Knowledge center' under the mentoring of Prof MS Swaminathan or Prof

Ashok Jhunjhnwala's acclaimed 'nLogue Chirag' kiosks anywhere to be seen?

All giants in the US/India had their humble origins in a garage

or one-bedroom apartments. So let us not create any entry barriers. Let us not

provide free lunches to erstwhile garage organizations who are now big corporate

behemoths. Let's promote the small and emerging company that could turn out to

be a big player tomorrow and in this way make the best use of the opportunity

that has come up.

The article is based on personal experiences of the author in

Maharashtra since 2002 till date as an e-Governance evangelist. Dataquest takes

no responsibility for opinions expressed.

 

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