You Thought it Wasnt Happening?

The Government of Kerala is committed to fulfill the aspirations of the state
to sustain the position of leadership in economic and social development in the
years to come. It recognizes that the use of ICTs in governments is inevitable
to achieve this goal. ICT can help improve performance, efficiency, quality of
service, and reduce costs, thereby enabling better utilization of resources. In
its IT Policy 2007, the government has declared its intention to bring about a
user-friendly e-government system. The IT policy also envisages optimum
utilization of resources in the e-gov spectrum.

However, ICT means complex systems and implementing requires large
investments of money, time, and expertise. There are both technical and
managerial challenges relating to implementation of ICT systems in the
government. Unless carefully tackled, a lack of understanding of the
complexities can lead to lack of alignment and integration of the ICT systems
with governments goals and peoples aspirations. An appreciation of these
issues and a strategy to deal with them is required to realize benefits from the
ICT investments made by various government departments and organizations.

The Government of Kerala is already implementing many a citizen-friendly
e-governance projects. Several other major ICT applications have been also
planned and are likely to be initiated in the near future. In addition, under
the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) of the Government of India, the Government
of Kerala has sought financial assistance for implementing ICT applications for
major service-oriented departments.

Objectives

E-governance affects everyone, helps build trust, is collaborative, and
engages people. Therefore, for Kerala, e-governance puts people first. The broad
objectives of e-governance in Kerala are:

• To make Kerala a leader among states in India in using ICTs to achieve
  economic and social development, environmental and cultural promotion, and
  benefits to its people.
• Delivery of high-quality citizen-focused services.
• Improving overall performance as measured through better policy outcomes.
  The focus would be streamlining and re-engineering government processes and
  routines so as to obtain measurable benefits.
• Improving efficiency in revenue mobilization and public expenditure.

Powering e-Governance

Existing Infrastructure

All ICT applications run on common ICT infrastructure. The ICT
infrastructure does not create value by itself but is essential for other ICT
applications to generate value. The e-governance in Kerala rests on the strong
pillars of its ICT infrastructure. The Kerala state wide area network (KSWAN)
reaches all district headquarters, block headquarters, and nearly 100 remote
offices in each district. It has connectivity of 14 Mbps at each of its
districts NOCs, which is one of the highest amongst SWAN. The state has two
state-of-the-art tier-3 5,000 sq ft state data centers (SDCs). The first has
been fully-operational with over 100 servers and 150 applications running from
it, and the second is likely to be operation by mid-2009. A network of over
2,000 common service centers (Akshaya kiosks) dot the state at a rate of
approximately two in every panchayat.

Infrastructure Being Developed

Notwithstanding fairly developed ICT infrastructure, the state recognizes
the need that the ICT infrastructure should be expanded and strengthened to meet
the growing needs of government departments and organizations. They are in the
process of developing a supplementary proposal which would help connect all
village offices of the state, numbering around 1,600 to the Kerala state wide
area network. They expect the funding for this to be available during the
current fiscal and therefore necessary RFP to be floated during early 2009.

Civil stations house most of the government offices at the district level. To
connect these district offices with KSWAN, a proposal to create a wide area
network for all civil stations is also under active consideration. A central
infrastructure for e-procurement is in its advance stage of formulation. NISG
and PWC are assisting the state in setting up the centralized infrastructure.
The RFP for this is expected to be floated later this year. The state is also in
the process of setting up an open source-based public key infrastructure that
would enable a number of e-governance applications with digital signature. The
application for PKI is being made shortly.

The state is also in the process of expanding its email server capacity to
provide email facilities to government employees for official correspondence and
stipulate suitable email management practices for storing, retrieving, and
archiving emails. The IT policy recognizes the need to focus on the synergies to
bring about a user friendly e-government system. Accordingly, in the lines of
national service delivery gateway, steps have been taken to formulate a strategy
for state service delivery gateway and expression of interest (EOI) for the same
has been floated.

Citizens First

The e-governance applications in Kerala have a strong service orientation
toward society. Programs like FRIENDS (www.keralaitmission.org) and Akshaya (www.akshaya.net)
with service as focus to citizens have been recognized nationally and
internationally.

Akshaya

The objective of this e-literacy project is to create an IT empowered
society and transform the lives of the common man by familiarizing at least one
member of each of the 65 lakh families in the state with the basic use of
computers (including familiarity with the key board, ability to use the mouse,
browse Internet, and send emails), and subsequently provide to the common man,
easy access to e-governance services. The project involves setting up of around
3,500 multipurpose broadband enabled community technology centres called Akshaya
e-centres across Kerala. Run by private entrepreneurs, each e-kendra being set
up within 2-3 kms of every house hold, caters to the requirements of around
1,500-2,000 families.

The Akshaya centers have since graduated to the next level. They now act as
the decentralized information access hubs, and service delivery points offering
G2C, G2G, C2C, and G2B services. The services include higher level computer
courses and multimedia aided training programmes, Internet and email facilities,
e-payment of select utility bills, e-contents on education, career building,
health, agriculture, and law in Malayalam, platform for transaction between
buyers and sellers through e-krishi (www.e-krishi.org) forum for public
grievance redressal, rural e-banking and financial services.

Ente Gramam

The digital divide is manifested not only in access and tools of access, but
also in the inability to provide locally relevant information in local
languages. Ente Gramam, literally translated as My Village provides a community
portal that provides localized content, which is developed by local people in
the local languages. Typically, local content pertains to the history of the
village, local resources, government and public services, etc. The portal acts
an information service provider for various subjects relevant to local
community. The portal also has interactive features which enable providing
feedback and blogging. Unicode encoding is used available to adhere to the
universal standardization, which also enables the user to search for this
content on the Web.

The Ente-gramam project has been implemented in Kannur district in Kerala
(http://kannur.entegramam.gov.in/). In addition, nine Panchayats in the
district: Azhikode (http://azhikode.entegramam.gov.in/), Vengad (http://vengad.entegramam.gov.in/),
Payam (http://payam.entegramam.gov.in/), Muzhappillangad (http://muzhappilangad.entegramam.gov.in/),
Eramom-Kuttoor, Malloor (http://maloor.entegramam.gov.in/), Sreekantapuram
(http://sreekandapuram.entegramam.gov.in/), Pappinasseri (http://pappinisseri.entegramam.gov.in/),
and Pinarayi (http://pinarayi.entegramam.gov.in/) also have there portals
developed and used by the community. The project also covers one municipality
Kannur district: the Thalassery Municipality (http://thalassery.web4all.in/).

These portals not only take care of the information needs of the people, they
will, in future, also enable them to conduct transactions over the Web. For
example, today it provides the names and contact details of all labour resources
in the village. A carpenter in the village can provide his details and solicit
enquiries from potential customers through the portal. And in the future it may
enable him to sell his wares online as well.

Implementing ICT projects is capital intensive. Apart from investments in
hardware procurement, software design, and development, ICT applications require
investments in complementary assets without which the investments in hardware
and software fail to generate value. Investments in complementary assets include
training of human resources, restructuring of processes, etc. All these require
investment.

To be continued in the e-governance section, Dataquest, Oct 31, 2008