India is a vast and diverse country with multiple ethnicities and cultures.
Different groups of people living across different geographical terrains have
their unique sets of problems and aspirations. While urban India clamors for
more power and better infrastructure, rural folks are still grappling for basic
amenities such as potable water and adequate food. Then you have farmers'
concerns over the quality of seeds, irrigation facilities and lack of technical
knowhow that hamper agriculture output; critical issues for a country with more
than a billion people to feed. On the other hand, if you look at urban India,
you'll see the omnipresent issues of people fighting out of their skins to get
basic bits of information from corrupt babus in various government depts,
wasting months and years of productive life over trivial issues. These are but a
few examples of the enormity of tasks that stare central and state governments
in the face. You may think of central and state governments (hereinafter
referred to as government) as one large enterprise running various subsidiaries
across the length and breadth of the nation trying to get rid of the roadblocks
at the most elementary level to lead the country to progress as a single,
cohesive unit. Where does IT figure in all this? Well, it has the potential to
act as a major accelerator of this scantily oiled, bulky machinery on which lies
the onus of getting the nation moving.
Last month we carried our special story on IT implementations across various
verticals in India. We received a glut of nominations from various government
ministries and departments. A careful scrutiny of all nominations revealed many
interesting facets of the IT activity across various government depts. What came
out was that there is still a great deal of automation required in various
government depts to ensure faster movement of files and to provide information
for the benefit of the public at large. Procedural delays are one of the reasons
why citizen related queries are never answered within the stipulated time frame.
Information Technology acts as the medium to ensure efficiency and
effectiveness of governance, the two being clubbed together to coin the term
e-governance. 'Electronic governance' is meant to be a synonym to describe an IT
driven system of governance that improves speed, flexibility, saves on costs and
is capable of servicing citizens' needs better. Around a decade back, the
National Task Force on IT and Software Development, appointed by the Prime
Minister, prepared a comprehensive set of recommendations in its 'Information
Technology Action Plan,' to further India's position as a global IT superpower.
The benefits of e-governance as implemented through various programs can be
clubbed into the following:
1. Transparency in Government operations and Government-public interface.
2. Improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of Government's service
delivery systems.
3. Improvement in the efficiency of administration.
4. Faster dissemination of information.
5. Improving financial management through effective monitoring at all levels and
building better regulatory mechanisms.
Salient features of RTI 1. The Right to Information (RTI) Act came into force on 12th Oct 2005 and covers the whole of India except J&K. It includes the right to inspect docs, records of govt; take certified samples of materials; and obtain info in the form of printouts or through electronic means. 2. Excluded from its purview are central intelligence and security agencies specified in the Second Schedule like IB, R&AW, Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, Directorate of Enforcement, NCB, BSF, CRPF, etc. 3. Each public authority is supposed to appoint a Public Information Officer (PIO) to provide information to citizens under the Act. A person seeking information has to apply in writing or through electronic means to the concerned PIOand provide reasons for seeking information. 4. A department is bound to provide a suitable reply within 30 days of application. Failure to provide the information within the specified period is deemed refusal. 5. In case a person is not satisfied, he can appeal to the Central Information Commission, comprising of eminent persons from law, science, education, etc, within 90 days of the date on which a decision was given or should have been given by the lower appellate authority. |
Various phases of IT deployment
The deployment of IT in government departments began in phases. Each phase
was unique and had its own set of advantages during the concerned period. During
the first phase of deployment in the mid-80s, deployments were concentrated
around automating basic clerical operations. During this phase all those
involved, be it the IT deployers or the end users were very enthusiastic over
the prospects of using a new technology. And even though IT awareness spread
across all levels of State machinery, it created islands of IT resources,
concentrated mainly at the headquarters of various departments. There were
either little or absolutely no linkages amongst those islands and therefore they
could not include customer orientation.
Nevertheless, the success of that phase led to government departments and
agencies beginning to take a hard look at their roles in the years to come and
they were more willing to re-engineer processes through enterprise wide
information systems. Government departments now explicitly want their IT plans
to be intrinsic to the planning process, to improve efficiency and effectiveness
of service delivery systems. Once the bottlenecks in the initial phase were
over, the second stage of deployments focused on enhancing the quality of
service for the common man and increasing transparency in the day-to-day
functioning of the government. This would facilitate empowerment of people and
fulfill their right to information. This proved to be a lengthier process and
various ministries and departments needed to gauge the extent of computerization
of their core activities, infrastructure requirements and enhance IT awareness
amongst users.
This is where the role of National Informatics Center (NIC) as the nodal
agency in providing IT support to government comes to fore. Not only does the
agency look deeply into the processes of various ministries and their associated
departments, it also carries out the necessary re-engineering to bring those
processes in tune with IT requirements. This not only ensures efficiency but
also transparency. The organization has its own officials deputed at various
ministries to coordinate with the local staff and continuously develop, monitor
and maintain all of their applications. It also identifies local champions, ie,
people who have a keen eye on IT, and regularly trains them so that more and
more responsibility could be shouldered within an office.
The main challenge faced by the government is to integrate disparate data
that is spread across the entire length and breadth of the country. You can
imagine the ordeal that network service providers must be facing while laying
out cables be it fiber optic or copper across the rugged terrain in far flung
areas, thereby trying to spread the usage of applications to the remotest
corners of the country. An integrated IT center for each ministry that centrally
monitors all of its remote offices is the ultimate goal that can truly establish
e-governance for the masses. To attain this, wherever possible, the government
is looking at public-private sector partnership. This is best exemplified by the
outsourcing of the backbone of most of the networks to private organizations. In
fact the 'National IT Action Plan', envisages the Government to encourage
private sector to become ISPs in their domain areas. The Government can even
instruct DoT and VSNL to extend optical fiber links to specific districts on
priority. Not only that even the AMC for various networks has been outsourced to
specialists.
Once e-governance applications have been rolled out, a crucial step is to
ensure that information regarding those reaches out to masses. For this, at
district level, data warehouses having local contents have been created. It is
important to note here that India is a country of diverse cultures, languages
and dialects. So, it is essential that public interface of these applications is
topped with the local flavor. This would enhance their appeal to the citizens.
The information can be made available to masses at the local administrative
centers such as block development offices, panchayats, etc through information
kiosks. Again, to spread a large network of such kiosks requires active
participation from the private sector. The government can make such partnerships
financially viable for private enterprises by charging nominal fees from the
public for services being provided.
The simplest application of e-governance is the facility to fill forms online
while applying for any service or clearance from the Government. The Government
has taken tremendous measures in this regard. We see forms related to most
municipalities, Election Commission, universities, state education boards,
regional passport offices, etc freely available on the Web. This level of
e-governance can be enhanced by online monitoring of routing processes in
various departments. e-Lekha and e-Samarth are such kind of applications that
bring about transparency in the working of Government. Further, each public
dealing department should clearly define the contact points and the level of
information interchange between it and citizens. The information kiosks would
facilitate the citizens to actually practise information interchange with the
Government. No e-governance application is complete unless it is backed by an
effective redressal mechanism. To attain speedier information flow across the
hierarchy, state-of-the-art computer network and other related communication
peripherals should be installed across all offices. Linkages between the central
network and the Statewide WANs should provide e-mail, voice, data and video
communication facility up to ministerial levels.
Next comes security. Once you have deployed applications to enable
e-governance, securing data is a primary concern. The Government should
formulate a uniform data security and privacy policy, and other legal frameworks
including cyber laws so that there is no confusion in interpretation of laws at
any stage. The Information Technology Act, 2000 is the right step in this
direction and contains provisions for authorizing electronic records. This is
important as we need to reduce paperwork to the max if we want greater
transparency and speedier transactions and monitoring of processes. A regular
monitoring of the IT utilization in various departments has also been
implemented through electronic documents.
These days, computer proficiency of a specified level has been mandated as an
essential qualification for appointments in most of the Government depts. The
'IT Action Plan' submitted by the IT Task Force set up by the Government of
India has suggested a proactive drive for 'IT for all by 2008'. It has
recommended 'OPERATION KNOWLEDGE' to spread computer literacy and the use
computers and IT in education. The Government has already taken the lead in
establishing IT training centers for the benefit of its employees at each
district headquarters. Its personnel are regularly sent for high-end computer
training courses in India and abroad to be in touch with the latest
technologies. The Government has also established contracts with leading and
reputed IT services vendors to avail a wide range of IT consultancy, specialist
services and IT products. This way services are outsourced to specialist service
providers and government can save on infrastructure and manpower costs.
Dr N Vijayaditya, Controller of Certifying What is the current state of IT usage across various government What areas (infrastructure, ERP, workflow automation, etc) is most of the Scalability of applications is a major concern for Government. What do you What are the challenges while carrying out IT deployment in government |
M Moni, Dy Director General, NIC What is the state of ICT usage across various deptts? Is lack of resources (monetary, skilled manpower, infra-structure, etc) What is the level of support given to NIC by central or state governments What does the future promise? |
NIC provides ICT support to the Office of How has IT helped in automating accounts process across various What are the challenges you face while carrying out IT deployments in Accounts offices have a lot of dusty files lying stacked up in dingy |