Avinash Chaurasia
CEO of Vama IT & president, Force 3 India
avinash@vama-it.com
Opportunity Lost is a Cost
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.
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.
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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