platinum special issue of the egov magazine

Celebrating the

75thissueASIA’S FIRST MONTHLY

MAGAZINE ON E-GOVERNMENT

juNE 2011 > `75/-VOLuME 07 n ISSuE 06 n ISSN 0973-161Xwww.egovonline.net

www.facebook.com/egovonline www.linkedin.com/groups/eGov-Magazinewww.twitter.com/egovonline

watCh out for

1-3 AuGusT, 2011 THE ASHOk, NEw DELHI, INDIA

www.eworldforum.net

r Chandrashekharthe witness to the Journey of e-GovernanCe

“The first IT revolution took Indian IT to the whole

world. The second one would bring the world of IT

to India”

The eGov that was and the eGov that will be...

03 June 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov

he eGov magazine is delighted to bring you its 75th Platinum issue, which celebrates the very exciting journey of eGov over the past 75 months. The eGov magazine started as a mission to build a bridge of communication gap between the various stakeholders within government, private, civil society and academia,

working towards ICT initiatives in the area of Governance. In 2005, when we started the eGov magazine, India was avidly talked, in the international communities, as a land of ‘pilots’ and satirically a ‘graveyard’ for e-Governance projects. We thereby saw an immense need to create a platform where these ‘pilots’ and the ‘champions’, who were leading them can come together to discuss the challenges and opportunities they were facing with the wider world inside and outside their respective ecosystems.

To say the least, this journey of 75 months has been an amazing one for us. We have ended up creating an incredible community of national and international experts, practitioners and analysts on the multifarious issues of e-governance. We have built a phenomenal knowledge base by carrying out interviews, features, news and views on the myriad issues of e-governance. In these 75 months, we also ended up creating the eIndia and eAsia conferences, duly known for their size and impact. In order to celebrate the 75 months of our inception, we are organising eWorld Forum in August 2011 in New Delhi, which will be a global forum for knowledge sharing in e-Governance.

To the best of our knowledge, eGov has become the first monthly print magazine on e-Governance in whole of Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa to have achieved the feat of bringing out 75 issues of uninterrupted publishing month by month on a regular basis till now. It gives us a sense of immense pride that eGov magazine contributed in some way to have made a mark in the global e-Governance arena.

With the voice against corruption getting louder and louder, there is an inherent inkling in the government to use ICTs more and more to make public service delivery hassle and corruption free as much as possible. There is whole new generation of officers in the government, who have no aversion to ICTs and who are championing e-Governance at various levels in the government. The initiation of large projects like UID, e-passport, MCA 21, APDRP, e-district etc is giving a new life to e-Governance in the country. This is good news. The other good news is that with more than 800 million mobile connections, the country is now connected by cell phones in a big way. Both urban and rural areas are growing in mobile phone adoption at an amazing pace. This has considerably reduced the problem of digital literacy and connectivity. We are excited to take on the future and are geared up to work towards the empowerment of effective governance through e-governance in this country.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all my colleagues, who worked at the eGov magazine and took it to great heights. I would also like to thank the people in the industry, who took time to encourage us both morally and through supporting us through advertisements and sponsorships of our events. Also, we would be failing in duty if we don’t acknowledge the government organisations, who have supported us in all our endeavors.

We look forward to the path of next 75 months and beyond with all eagerness and excitement. We remain committed to inform and update you month by month on the exciting arena of e-Governance.

Looking forward to your continued support in this life changing journey...

ravi [email protected]

From the historyEmail at [email protected]

to get previous issues March 2011 April 2011 May 2011

t

grid name second grid

04 egov / www.egovonline.net / June 2011

30interviewsandeep rainaon the overall performance

of the government in the last

seven years

56spotlight rana guptawhat has changed in the last

75 months in e-governance and

what more to expect

20interviewLt CoL (retd) Hs Bedion tulip’s focus on broadband

and future plans

39interviewavinasH guptaon the need for capacity building

and it training in india

egov 75 vision

Contentsjune 2011issue 06 n volume 07

12 KisHor CHitaLe, Capgemini india

13 deBraj dam, digisol

14 ravi Kumar, emerson network power

16 ram prasad, epson india

22 durgadutt nedungadi, Hp enter-prise Business

23 venKat patnaiK, niit teCHnologies

24 sameer Batra, iBm - india/soutH asia

25 sanjeev Kapoor, infosys india

28 nitin garg, lenovo india

34 asHanK desai, mastek ltd

42 ramsunder papineni, mCafee

44 ranBir singH, miCrosoft india

45 gopaLaKrisHnan paLaKKiL, mindtree

47 eriC Kuo, msi – india

49 sandeep menon, novell india

52 neeraj giLL,polyCom

54 sandeep seHgaL, red Hat india

57 r K BansaL, uniline energy systems

r Chandrashekhar shankar aggarwal

0658

17 ritoBaan roy, giZ

18 tapas gHataK, former direCtor, kmda

29 CHetan vaidya, direCtor, national institute of urBan affairs

43 m K yadava, amtron

46 sanjay saHay, igp, Bengaluru

48 s n tripatHi, dept of rural development, minsitry of orissa

53 sudHir KrisHna speCial seCretary ministry of panCHayati raj

Leaders speaK

industry speaK

second grid grid name

5June 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov

President Dr M P Narayanan

Editor-in-Chief: Dr Ravi Gupta

editorial team

Dr Rajeshree Dutta Kumar, Divya Chawla,

Sheena Joseph, Dhirendra Pratap Singh

SaleS & marketing team

Bharat Kumar Jaiswal, Fahimul Haque, Jyoti Lekhi,

Rakesh Ranjan ([email protected] )

SubScription & circulation

Gunjan Singh (Mobile: 9718289123)

([email protected])

graphic deSign team

Bishwajeet Kumar Singh, Om Prakash Thakur

Shyam Kishore

Web development team

Zia Salahuddin, Amit Pal, Anil Kumar

it team

Mukesh Sharma

eventS

Vicky Kalra

editorial & marketing

correSpondence

egov – G-4 Sector 39, NOIDA–201 301, India

Phone: +91-120-2502181-85

Fax: +91-120-2500060

Email: [email protected]

egov is published by Elets Technomedia Pvt. Ltd

in technical collaboration with Centre for Science,

Development and Media Studies (CSDMS).

Owner, Publisher, Printer: Ravi Gupta, Printed at

Vinayak Print Media, D-320, Sector-10, Noida, UP,

INDIA and published from 710 Vasto Mahagun

Manor, F-30, Sector - 50 Noida, UP

Editor: Ravi Gupta

© All rights reserved. No part of this publication

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retrieval system, without publisher’s permission.

INboxjune 2011issue 06 n volume 07

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www.twitter.com/egovonline

readerS’ accoladeS on egov’S 75th iSSue

i like egov magazine because it keeps me updated with latest happenings in terms of People, Projects, Practices and Technological advancements of my home land.

—Saiyad Shamim Raza, Asst Engineer - GIS Projects & Engineering - Infrastructure Information & Permits (II&P), Dubai Electricity and Water Authority

egov magazine is the only publication that reflects and focus on the transformation of one of the most critical contributory in india’s success as an economy, as a nation...very well called the ‘Public sector enterprises’! A collection of truly inspiring and self educating experience!

—Gulab Somaya

egov magazine gives in-depth analysis with proper information synthesis; it never leaves out any major issue and other important topics.

-Dr Monika Koul, Assistant Professor, Department of Botany, Hans Raj College, University of Delhi

i like egov magazine because it is “all embracing”, it encompasses the newest of technologies to clasp the e-governance policies of the government to the fullest and comprehend most of the developments in the iT world with alacrity.

—Jayadeep Nair, Kerala

The magazine facilitates e-governance knowledge, provides e-governance based project insights and enables best e-governance practices to the citizens of the nation.

—TGK Vasista

egov magazine is the first magazine to cover latest e-governance news and updates around the globe .—Vinod Kakde, General Manager, National Institute for Smart Government

i like egov magazine because it gives us great visibility to look around the best happenings of e-gover-nance around us and a chance to implement new things in our area too”.

—Neelkanth Mattar, Gujarat

i read egov magazine and realised that there are no distinct boundaries for e-governance. The govern-ment services are now made available to the citizens in a more convenient, efficient and transparent manner through icT (information communication technology).

—E Ramesh, Hyderabad

The very firsT issue of egov, being releAsed by The Then union minisTer of iT, dAyAnidhi mArAn, minisTer of iT And The Then chief minisTer of orissA, nAveen PATnAik

egov 75: vision


egov 75: vision


The rural areas though have the mobile connectivity, the data connectivity is abysmally low. So, what is the roadmap or vision for the rural data connectivity?

One of the key objectives on communications infrastructure has been to provide connectivity to the rural areas, to support various kinds of activities including broad-band services, simple financial services ranging from education to entertainment which are bandwidth intensive and livelihood services. It would be a wrong model if we look at rural areas as mere consumers of various services and the communica-tion infrastructure to provide the services. Given the economic profile in the rural areas, its equally important that this broadband infrastructure can be used by people in rural areas for purposes related to their livelihood enhancing their own income, opening opportunities for earning additional income by way of greater access to markets, buying the kind of things that they need for the agricultural activities, train-ing programmes for enhancing their skill sets and rural BPOs for providing market-able services. So all of these, are linked to free flow of money. The combination of all of these is important to make the communication revolution also result in economic revolution for people in rural areas. If this does not happen then the mere avail-ability of communication and broadband will only result in underutilisation of this infrastructure as people will not have the buying power to consume the services. This should be the emphasis. Between connectivity and services, it is connectivity that should happen and open up markets. So the broadband has an important purpose of integrating rural and urban areas, thereby spreading economic opportunities evenly in both the areas.

What are the activities that are happening at the block level?As of now, we do have reliable connectivity and more than 95 per cent blocks are con-nected as there is optical fibre. But it is below the block level that the problem arises as there is no optical fibre, where the quality and reliability is not so good. So the effort

reach out to 850 million people”

R Chandrashekhar

talks about the noble

responsibility that he

is shouldering, and

the road ahead in the

Department of Telecom

in a freewheeling

interview with Dr Ravi

Gupta and Dr Rajeshree

Dutta Kumar.

“mobile is theonly medium which can

R Chandrashekhar Secretary, Department of Telecom & Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communication & Information Technology

egov 75: vision


is to extend the core network to connect the district headquarters to block levels and panchayats also. The objective is to reach every significant habitation which is a mammoth task. So the first step is to go with the aggregation layer which connects the tributaries to the core like in the telecom sector. Various service providers can be connected through the aggregation layer. When it comes to the last mile, the strategy is to use wireless in conjunction with wireline which will be provided by service providers and also pursue the goal convergence at the carriage level to make use of all infra-structure. Getting optical fibre to all the village is a difficult task

Please throw some light on USO funds. Are they optimally used. Can you throw light on the ongoing changes?Yes, the USO fund has not been aggres-sively used in the past. So we are work-ing on a strategy to use this funds to achieve the goals. The key government programmes are increasingly getting digi-tized, especially the rural programmes, so the need for ensuring connectivity to the last mile has increased. The next impor-tant thing is targeting or identification of these programmes are also important. So UID is also getting its importance. So

digitisation of these are happening now. In the coming 2-3 years, the maturing of all these programmes can be seen.To ensure the utilisation, we have created a dedicated organisation to rule out the role of optical fibre. So that no time is lost in building this organisation.This organisation is nucle-ated within the organisation i.e BSNL. The next important aspect we are working aggressively is working on spreading infra-structure. Getting optical fibre to every panchayat is what we are targeting. But for all this creating the right content, digitiz-ing and creating the necessary ecosystem are the challenging areas for us. The most challenging part is to change the people’s mindset.

Please share your agenda on connecting all institutions, offices and schools ?The ultimate goal is to provide optical fibre to each and every village with intention of connecting the key institutions, with developmental focus area like education, health, skill development. These three are the major areas we have to work upon extensively. Along with this, there are

other governance related areas which also need to be taken care of. The institutions at the local level are panchayats, hospitals, schools etc which need to be connected. This is a mammoth task to achieving. Too big a task which cannot be achieved by one organization alone. The connectivity is entirely the job of the Telecommunica-tions Department. There are other aspects which are also time taken. For instance, if a project for health services has to be imple-mented through the digital medium, there are a number of functions that needs to be put in order other than just laying of the optical fibre, upon extensively. Along with this, there are other governance related

areas which also need to be taken care of. The institution at the local level are panch-anyats, hospitals, schoolsetcwhich need to be connected. This is a mommoth taskto achieve which ia too big a task which cannot be achieved by one organisation alone. The connectivity is entirely the job of the Telecommunications Department. There are other5 aspects which are also time-consuming. For instance, if a project for health services has to be implemented through the digital medium, there are a number of functions that needs to be put in order other than just laying of the optical fibre atleast equipped with some functions ready. Like in schools, the HRD is already equipped with a massive pro-gramme—National Mission on Education through ICT, in which connectivity is an important part. As far as the hard infra-structure is concerned, the involvement of private and public sector are involved.The incremental infrastructure that is created is very important to achieve the goal. What is of prime importance is that it should be available for a non-discrim-inatory usage of every service provider.The mobile revolution is the only revolu-tion that has touched a billion people in a

GeTTinG PeRSOnAl

education

M.Sc Chemistry

M S Computer

Science

area of

specialisation

Finding innovative

solutions to IT

related problems

positions held

Associated with

organisations like

UNESAP,

Massachusetts

Institute of

Technology

rural and urban areas to spread

“the broadband has animportant purpose of integrating

economic oppurtunitiesevenly in both the areas”

egov 75: vision


short span of time. This could happen only when the price points were brought down and became affordable and acceptable to people. We are work-ing on this kind of revolution. The second thing is faster distribution. We are not rigid as to whether government or private sector has to do it. It is whoever does it faster.

How do you see e-Governance in the coming years?e-Governance has come a long way in providing services to people which has improved the effi-ciency. Many of the departments and organiza-tions have done great job but the progress has not been as quick as it should have been. Of course this is a journey which cannot be done in a day’s time. So the advent of cloud computing has tre-mendous significance on e-Governance.

There is no shortcut or there is no magic wand and the only thing is to keep planning. That’s why the overarching vision and the overarching con-vergence of approaches was so important . With-out this, different people doing different things at a different pace would become difficult. once the overall vision and strategy and the architecture is common, then if people work at a different pace, it is not disastrous.

Having a global experience, how do you foresee the future of the iT industry in india?As far as IT policy is concernced, our key goal has to be as to how to accelerate and proliferate the services. Technology and infrastructure are small part in the whole creation of services. The real issue is about people, institutions and procedures. This requires huge amount of rethinking of the implementation of plans. This rethinking cannot be done by technologists. For instance, people in

the health sector have to actually imagine how it would be in 2020, when the whole sector is con-nected through broadband and whole system is digitalized. One should be able to envision an ideal endstay and this requires intimate knowledge of

the domain and should be able to reconfigure. There is a need for change leaders to emerge in each sector by a few forward looking individuals.

What are the various initiatives being taken in healthcare?When NeGP was approved by the union cabinet, health and education were not put as explicit mis-sion projects. The mandate was that in both these sectors the mission is to deliver health and educa-tion. Wheras the other projects, the mission is the service itself like the license. So there is a qualita-tive difference in both kinds of services. But while approving various mission projects, it was clearly mandated by the Cabinet that major developmen-tal areas like education, healthcare etc would also be moved on to e-Governance mode. For the health, the critical element is actually packaging the real service itself and ICT is only a small part of it. Whereas in other services like income tax or others, its different.

Do you think there is a need for an evangelist push to happen?When you evengelise something, it is essential that

each and every village with

“the ultimate goal is to provide optical fibre to

focus on education, health, skill development”

E-governance is 20 percent ‘e’ and 80 percent ‘governance’, so says R Chandrashekhar. His journey with e-governance started in

Andhra Pradesh with turning Hyderabad into ‘Cyberabad’. He established the first Department of Information Technology in the

country in Andhra Pradesh, and also heralded the most innovative and path-breaking efforts like the public-private partnership

(PPP) concept in e-governance projects. He was the first Andhra IT Secretary. Chandrashekhar is credited with the conceptualisa-

tion and implementation of various key initiatives like the setting up of the IIIT in Hyderabad. The plum of the pudding was his role

in developing the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP), CSC and SWAN as well as driving the evolution of the concept of integrated

service delivery in e-governance projects.

R ChandRasekhaR : his soJouRn with e-GoveRnanCe

it is done vigorously, that too in an appropriate time. We should be able to implement it quickly. Today, we are on the threshold of bringing broadband in the next two or three years in the rural areas, the timing is right to look at how those sectors can be

reinvented. You could not have done it without connectivity or broadband. So what is important is doing the right thing at the right time. So this is the right time to really put people together. It is evident in the education sector that things are moving in a positive mode but whereas in health, it is at an early stage where the seeds have been planted in differ-ent places to really trigger that process.

How can the national information Utility framwork, as proposed by the Technical Advisory Group for Unique Projects play a role in e-Governace?As far as, information utility is concerned, the emergence of cloud computing services and platform-based services are important. But for the provision of platform, utility is important. So the utility is the organisational phase of the cloud and the platform. The concept of Utility, which was brought in by Technical Advisory Board, is the model going forward for the e-Governance across different projects as well. The generic platform and the generic utilities will be driven by DIT.

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egov 75: industry speak

“We should see ‘rights’ not as stated rules of access to PSI – Public Sector Information, but as fluid environment of information practice” – Michael Blakemore, Professor in Geography, Durham University, UK

August 2005

Governance in India has steadily evolved from mere com-puterisation of Government departments to initiatives that summarise the finer aspects of Governance, such as citizen centricity, service orientation and transparency. An important

observation is that India has developed consciousness and cognizance towards ‘citizen centricity’.

The Indian Government has already set up the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) with a vision to make all Government services accessible to the common man in his locality, through common service delivery out-lets and to ensure efficiency, transparency and reliability of such services at affordable costs. Also a move towards ‘self-service’ wherein the control moves to the citizen rather than the service provider has been initiated, this brings in transparency by eliminating intermediate touch points between the citizen and the service provider, in this case Government agencies.

Appointment of professionals from the corporate sector to drive proj-ects like UID is also a huge evidence of the shift in the intent and com-mitment of the Government. A few e-Governance programs have been implemented in India so far and the results have been encouraging. The government’s effort on creation of various NeGP programs, policies and implementation are in the right direction but the journey has just started and we must ensure that we do not make the same errors as others have made while undertaking this journey.

In the coming years too, e-Governance will further move from simply e-enabling a particular service or department to a large program with a solid governance structure, ultimately resulting in economic and political development. This speaks of a radical shift from ‘what technology can do’ to ‘what citizens need and how can it be delivered’. So the focus shifts from a technology stand-point to a user-driven perspective.

The globalisation of business, greater awareness among citizens and the revolutionary force of IT have changed the perspective of what govern-ments can do. All the work that is being done by the government and pri-vate sectors will be wasted if we don’t devise a mechanism that incentivises the people at large to adopt e-Services over conventional methods.

e

Finer aspects of governanceThe next decade will define all the building blocks for the design and running of effective e-Governance

Kishor ChitaleHead, India Domestic Business Capgemini India

From Archives



n India, e-Governance initiative was started by late Rajiv Gandhi and after that a lot of transformation has happened specifically in the past six to eight years. In the last few years, the Government has been putting lot of efforts to reduce the gap between citizen, industry and government. Department of Information Technology (DIT) is also putting lot of efforts to boost up IT infrastructures for the state governments including districts, blocks, municipality levels. The

thrust has varied across initiatives, with some focusing on enabling citizen-state interface for various government services, and others focusing on better-ing livelihoods. e-Governance is now an integral part of India’s multifaceted development strategy to take advantage of demographic dividend and is moving beyond technological aspects.

We have seen very slow implementation progress in different projects under National e-Governance Plan (NeGP). It is mainly because of lack of inter departmental or ministry coordination, transparency between agen-cies and multiple nodal authorities. If we can bring all NeGP plans under a single monitoring authority agency to grass root levels for all projects then only we can see or expect better results. It can be further enhanced by getting inputs from citizens about unresponsive and unreliable providers. Government should also imbibe better mechanisms to carry out proper survey to understand the ground level ICT requirement for urban and rural areas by involving different agencies in consultation with state, village and other councils in coordination with business people and citizen.

Capacity building is the prime factor where the local ICT manufac-turing sector can play a key role in many e-Governance initiatives and Government should invite and involve them for larger participation in e-Governance initiatives and thus improve the life cycle of Indian ICT industry. This facility has already been implemented by most of the coun-tries including China, US, and Taiwan. Green governance is an important part of e-Governance and to reduce OpEx costs of all projects under NeGP, the manufacturing sector needs to be involved on a larger basis. Proper power saving, RoSH-compliant (RoHS Directive stands for “the restric-tion of the use of certain hazardous substances in electrical and electronic equipment”) green products will help reduce energy costs and thus make e-Governance even healthier.

I

Debraj Dam Vice President - Strategic Business and Partner AllianceDigisol

single Window MonitoringBringing all NeGP projects under a single monitoring authority would accelerate the pace of implementation

“One of the important components of a complete e-Governance solution is the Geographic Information System (GIS).” - Lokesh Sharma, Business Development Manager, Government, Education and Healthcare, Oracle India

eGov August 2008

From Archives



“Internet is simultaneously a world of both ‘opportunities and challenges’ and online challenges are just an extension of real life challenges” — Rajnesh D. Singh, Regional Bureau Manager, ISOC Asia

October 2009

hough e-Governance began in India way before National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) but it was brought into one consolidated effort by the NeGP only. The basic vision is to provide all government services to the citizens in the comfort of his home through internet. It also reflects that the programme aims to reduce per-sonal interface with officials to a basic minimum.

NeGP has laid the foundation of what can be called the digitisation of governance. But, what pose as major roadblocks in this path of digitisa-tion are IT illiteracy among officials as well. Those who have to drive the project don’t have the basic knowledge of the technologies being used and thus ownership is not at that level.

Also, basic infrastructure used to be a problem, but, since now its majorly a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model we are working on that issue is more or less taken care of.

In the coming years we will see more and more projects being deployed under the NeGP. There will be no more bureaucracy or the department-centric structure. The structure will be more a citizen centric. In the coming years, India will have younger population than any other country, thus literacy rate will be encouraging. Under these circumstances people will have more tendency towards ICT to avail various Government ser-vices and it will be wiser for the authorities also to govern through innova-tive use of technology.

In the coming years a couple of things should be taken care of. Firstly, consultancy and vendors should have more ownership over the project and not be involved in bureaucratic processes, which only takes up more and more time and yields nothing and secondly; there should be better and more efficient utilization of funds. There are huge funds allocated to each of these projects but there is no proper monitoring for the utiliza-tion. Thus fund utilization can be worked upon.

T

Ravi KumarCountry Manager - Govt & BFSIEmerson Network Power (India) Private Limited

Becoming of an it eraIn the coming years, India will have more younger population than any other country, thus literacy rate will be encouraging. Tendency towards ICT to avail Government services will, hence increase

From Archives

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he various e-Governance initiatives in India have changed the way we interact with the government. There are so many areas where we have made progress- online land record details, income certificate, interactive classrooms, e-Passport, online income tax return; technology has transformed the way we do those necessary but time-consuming activities.

Obviously, a lot more can still be done and there is a long way to go. Not talking of bigger changes but simple services like booking movie or rail tickets online has made life easier. Such small (though big in reality) changes actually make citizens feel empowered as these are the ones that actually make a differ-ence, make life easier for everyone across classes. Rail ticket is the need of all the segments of people whereas filing income tax online might not be. In the coming years such more services should come up coupled with better capac-ity building and awareness programmes for the rural population.

Continuity is a major problem in majority of government initiatives. Suddenly we see a lot of new developments happening in a project and then all of a sudden it’s on a standstill, nothing is happening. A good exam-ple here could be Common Service Centers (CSCs). We started off very well but where are we now? We have not yet achieved the target of one lakh CSCs and many of the ones started have been shut down. So how much was actually implemented? Post-implementation analysis and impact analysis are very important to map the success, failure and causes of both.

Feedback from citizens is also very essential. The authorities should have clear targets. What is it that they want to ultimately achieve? Is it just computerisation of some departments or they actually want to deliver some application-based services too. Last-mile connectivity, disconnect between employer and employee and non-awareness among citizens; all these are major setbacks and need to be tackled.

Awareness is needed at a large scale. Common everyday education is the key to success for these e-Governance initiatives and ultimately achieving a digitized economy.

T

Ram Prasad Senior Business Manager - Consumer Product GroupEpson India

Continuity: an issue in initiativesPost-implementation analysis and impact analysis are important to map the success, failure and causes of both

“e-Government should be the enabler of public sector transformation, and as such it has to be an integral part of administrative reform programmes rather than a stand-alone initiative” – Oleg Petrov, Programme Coordinator, e-Development Thematic Group, Global ICT Department, World Bank

January 2008

From Archives


egov 75: leaders speak

ll is not as well as it seems with the National e-Gov-ernance Plan (NeGP). Various NeGP projects are still under implementation and have progressed very slowly from the year of implementation. State gov-ernments are implementing their own e-Governance projects for certain departments but the status too is dismal in certain cases.

The reasons are many for this condition but mostly it is lack of IT pen-etration and capacity building among the stakeholders. There are large remote pockets where technology has not seeped in and even where it has proper training is not there to use it efficiently. The coming years though could see more adoption of broadband in urban areas; rural areas however still would be a challenge.

Given the special status of NeGP, one expected faster implementation. Longer the time to ‘go live’, more difficult is it to contain skepticism about expected benefits from eGovernance. There could also be resistance to continued funding of such projects if legislators do not see visible progress.

If we are to expect radical changes in the pace of implementation in the coming years we should follow some strict measures like giving more consideration to mobile technology and shifting towards m-Governance as most users irrespective of the rural or urban category will access inter-net on their phones.

A dedicated government task force at operational level that can go from location to location and act as project manager on the government side should be made for all the projects for e-Governance. Certain prominent projects should be selected and deemed ‘critical’ and should go live by December 2012. These projects should also be under a Ring-fence corpus so that they are unaffected by changes in government or budget reviews. Also, the power or media, marketing and advertisement is undermined when it comes to government projects. There are several good schemes up and running about which a major section of the beneficiaries are not aware. Thus, for each of the major projects there should a big launch with proper media promotion which will not only increase its visibility but also enlarge its reach.

A

Ritobaan Roy Technical Expert, MSME Finance and Development Umbrella Programme, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)

Miles to go for e-governanceThe power of media, marketing and advertisement should be duly utilised to increase visibility and outreach of e-Governance projects

“An examination of different areas where ICT impacts the overall framework for governance shows a clear trend towards a more international and a more market-based type of governance” – Morten Falch, Centre for Tele-Information, Technical University of Denmark

January 2005

From Archives


“In the next one year, we would like to have high speed connectivity in 6,000 blocks and 4,000 tehsils across India.” – Subas Pani, Secretary, Planning Commission, Government of India

eGov January 2009

t is about a decade when the process of governing the Municipal Management System through certain electronic language has been initiated with a hope that thereafter a better services can be provided to the tax payers of the town and a holistic planning approach can also be taken by using different sources of electronic media. This of course includes certain hardware components, certain dedicated software developed with customization for the use of local bodies,

net work facilities to interact with each other and finally sustenance of the entire system through a knowledge sharing effort with the officials of the urban local bodies along with the citizens. It is observed that in most of the cases, the planning of such programme of any governance starts with the initiative of the central planning system and gradually percolates through different official procedures till it reaches the local Government and finally to the citizens of the town. The stake holder remains cut off from such adop-tion. So the change is yet to be felt in the citizen level per se.

The expectations of the citizens are no longer restricted in down loading some applications forms or by using some of the maps showing his own house. The citizens have started demanding more information through this system for their daily use like bus routes, location of the services provider, integration of education and health delivery system and so many other daily required areas. Looking deeply in this arena, it seems that the effort in this electronic dissemination of information to the citizen’s needs to be high-lighted in any adopted programme of e-governance for Urban Level Bodies’. It is not just a specific section of people who are able to handle PC’s on a regular basis anymore. A large population has access to Internet through their mobile devices Cyber Café.

If the development of human resources within the local bodies for carrying out the use of the application set is not addressed and in proper system it may collapse without yielding proper result that was envisaged during the concep-tion of the project. Citizens should be inducted in such programme so that their active participation makes the entire system acceptable.

I

Tapas Ghatak Former Director Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority Govt of West Bengal

‘Change’ Yet to be Felt by CitizensCitizens should be inducted in such programmes so that their active participation makes the entire system acceptable

in person


Wblock in the form of a strong database”

“Uid has provided the first bUilding

Lt Col (Retd) HS BediFounder and Managing DirectorTulip Telecom Limited

hat was your vision when you founded Tulip?When we founded the organisation, the only competition of data connectivity was with BSNL. At that time data con-

nectivity was confined to only few cities. In 1999, after seeing a huge potential in the wireless business, Tulip

started its operations in this field. We started covering the whole country with wireless connectivity. We were looking for a big order and we got one from a bank. In 1999, we were able to connect a bank across multiple states through wireless technology. This became the first and one of our biggest successes. We quickly captured the low bandwidth market.

With India’s economic growth, every Indian is going to prosper. Today, Indians are at par with the Americans. India has suddenly become popu-lar because of improved governance. We’ll be increasing market share in data services and looking at international long distance, corporate Internet and national long distance markets. Over the last two years, the wholesale market has changed; companies like AT&T, Orange and even Tulip have got international licenses.

What are the major policy hurdles?The government also realises that they have to ensure the upliftment of every person. They have to provide the services of the last man. Only challenge is telecommunication i.e. data connectivity. Government needs infrastructure to deliver services. This infrastructure can be in the form of road, water or data connectivity. Data connectivity is fundamental infra-structure for delivering services, today.

Government already has preferences; it creates certain degree of uncertainty. There is a need of some clarity on this policy. There is lack of clarity in government policies in wireless network. There should be no subsidy for anybody. The telecom companies have already set up their networks. There is no need to create individual networks.

Tulip IT services is one of India’s largest network

integrators. Lt Col (Retd) Hardeep Singh Bedi served

in the Indian Army for 22 years before he set out to start

his own company, Tulip.

In conversation with Dr Ravi Gupta, he talks about

Tulip’s focus on broadband and future plans. Excerpts:

in person


vices. We have successfully laid optical fiber in various cities covering major commercial areas. This fiber rollout has helped Tulip grab more

and more customers pan-India, successfully using Tulip fiber for their data connectivity requirements.

The government is planning to roll out fiber that goes beyond the block level to the panchayats. So our recommendation is that the government takes on rollout of fiber from between the blocks to the panchayats, which is the big void today and which does not make commercial sense for the current telecom companies, and thereafter make this infra-structure available to all telecom players for rolling out of services. My suggestion is that that there should be private participation in its implementation.

What are your views on Cloud Computing?

It is an application focus. Cloud computing, virtualisation and unified communications are giving substantial boost to the enterprise data

connectivity segment. Server virtualisation is driving the adoption of the latest data center unified fabric technologies that seamlessly

merge storage and network infrastructure into a unified, highly flexible transport.

What are your future plans?We are a premium Data Company. Our aim is to reach every village within two years, but that depends on us to be able to pick up the orders. The point is that we are willing to make the investments to reach out, but now it is for the government and business organisations to see whether they need services there. If it becomes profitable, then we will go there. Last year, we had about `2,000 crores of revenue. We should see an increase as the pattern has been of about 20 percent and if we continue to see this kind of a growth, we should cross about `3000 crore as we go forward in the next three years. We also expect about `1,000 crores revenue to come from the data centre business, so in the next three years, we should be on track for a billion dollar revenue.

With the help of UID, you have a database; you will have the first building block. We can be way head for developing world.

What type of opportunities do you see in enterprise data ser-vices space in India?There are enterprise networks and retail net-works. We are enterprise network. We have a unique portfolio of enterprise data services ranging from MPLS VPN, corporate internet, managed services, data center solutions, and international connectivity. Tulip does not address the retail market. I believe, in India the enterprise data services space has tremendous opportunity and Tulip is strategically placed to offer data services to all customers.

We could not go to the smaller times pri-marily because linking copper is becoming more and more challenging.

The government is connecting every panchayat through optical fibers. How do you see such steps?The government has come out with a good plan of fiber connectivity. The government decision to connect every panchyat by fiber is a good step. The reality is that as of today, a lot of fiber and telecom facilities are available up to the level of most districts. But the moment they start going beyond district, that is to block and taluka level, a lot of telecom facilities such as fiber are not available, fiber. With our own fiber we can now offer high bandwidth data ser-

giving sUbstantial boost

connectivity segment”

“cloUd compUting, Uc and virtUalisation are

to the enterprise data

CATCH UP WITHlatest news, articles, interviews and case studies at

@

www.egovonline.net



“The State Data Centre (SDC) would provide common secure infrastructure enabling seamless delivery of Government to Government (G2G), Government to Citizen (G2C) and Government to Business (G2B) services.” – SP Singh, Senior Director, Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and IT, Government of India

eGov December 2009

he government at all levels is embracing e-Governance and adopting proven best practices and technologies for improving customer service and business performance. Internet and technology are drastically changing the way the government operates and delivers services to the residents and businesses. Moreover, implementation of e-Governance has seen a paradigm shift from the depart-

ment centric structure of the government to citizen centric structure where the citizen deals with one government.

The past years have witnessed the emergence of e-Governance as a potent tool for the government in improving their productivity and enhancing customer satisfaction levels. India has made significant strides in the application of e-Governance in improving the interface between the government and its constituents.

Although India has seen great development, we still face challenges to smoothly execute e-governance plans. However, the awareness and demand for better services from people has led to many developments in e-Gover-nance. Lack of IT literacy and awareness regarding benefits of e-governance is one of the biggest challenges for successful government initiatives.

Technically, what needs to be looked at is re-engineering of government departments and procedures. Effective usage of communication and IT is the biggest opportunity in the government’s efforts towards achieving the goals of financial and social inclusion. The availability of broadband in the heart of rural India will result in a quantum leap in the effectiveness of healthcare, education as well as efficient disbursement meant for the rural citizens. Once we also cross the regional language hurdle, we will see sub-stantial positive impacts in agricultural productivity as well as rural wealth creation. With initiatives like UID Aadhar we can clearly see that effective use of e-Governance could galvanize the rural development of India. All these projections indicate that the next 5 to 10 years in the e-Governance domain will be even more interesting and challenging than the past.

T

Durgadutt Nedungadi Director - Sales HP Enterprise Business

soaring High on e-governanceThe awareness and demand for better services from people has led to many developments in e-Governance

From Archives



“In most advanced countries, power utilities have made major gains in terms of productivity, efficiency, reliability and commercial management through the use of modern IT tools” – Karan Bajwa, General Manager, Public Sector, Microsoft India

April 2010

any things have changed in e-Governance in India but not with the desired results nor with the expected speed. Many programmes were announced during last six years but remained in the vicious circle of EOI, RFP or a pilot and did not achieve the desired scale of economics.India, no doubt is moving towards becoming a power-

ful nation on world map. My personal opinion is that we may still con-tinue focusing on micro-level things and lose focus on the goals planned through perspective planning. More and more citizens will be IT savvy but not because one is enabling people at village level but because villag-ers are moving towards cities. The next 5-6 years focus should be and will be more on integration of various different services and infrastructure platforms which are presently working in silos and not able to talk to each other. Going forward, one may end up having “cloud” as the suffix or prefix to all ICT based services. Government institutions will be forced to move towards paperless offices. Judiciary will have a major overhauling in terms of people, process, speed etc. Similarly education and Health sectors will look different as ICT will play a critical role in their transformation.

The processes initiated or created, intended for large participation of society did not happen. The outcome is still driven by the large, big and the powerful entities. Hence, the mismatch or the digital divide is still continuing. In short, either the wrong stakeholders are occupying the right place or the right people are made to sit at wrong places. This needs corrections.

We must ensure that the basic infrastructure reaches the last mile for digital connectivity, electricity and financial transactions. There is need of tax holidays for private entities for providing citizen services at the village level. Last mile employability, wherever there is scope, should be programmed in all initiatives. Citizens should be taken on board at operational level decision in each and every citizen related projects and programmes.

M

digital divide ContinuesThe next five years focus should be more on integration of various services and infrastructure platforms

Venkat PatnaikHead - Government BusinessNIIT Technologies Limited

From Archives



n India, we have seen a rapid deployment and progress of the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) and large IT modernisa-tion projects. The government is now looking to leverage IT to improve citizen services, efficiency and lower the total cost of opera-tions. They are re-orienting their structures and policies around the citizens they serve. The progress in the recent past is enviable by any global benchmarks. This journey has just started and we have a

long way to go before the impact of IT is felt across all sections of the soci-ety. IBM has a powerful technology stack of Software & Hardware which offers proven frameworks and solutions to the Government. IBM strategy is to leverage the technology stack and experience with various Government organisations across the world, to build customized solutions for Govern-ment organisations.

Some of the major solution areas which have great potential for the future are- postal services, defense, homeland security, GST, municipal bodies and other databases related to Government functions.

In future, we need to look at the unique challenges that the country has. No country in the world can be compared with India—no other country has a challenge of dealing with so many languages that a solution provider needs to handle for a pan India deployment or while doing projects across various states. Besides, while deploying technology in rural areas one needs to be practical and prudent in their approach in terms of under-standing the infrastructure in these areas. They should first go for a pilot and then opt for a full scale deployment. There is no dearth of technol-ogy as it can be delivered but infrastructure in India’s rural areas is not so good, non-existent in certain areas and hence one has to look at solutions which are more pragmatic and relevant and can meet the needs of these local markets.

PPP is certainly a step in the right direction. In the last few years there has been immense learning on implementing PPP projects for both Gov-ernment and the Industry. Both the sides should work together to apply the learning for implementing future projects.

I

Sameer Batra Director, Public SectorIBM - India/South Asia

ppp has been a right ChoiceThere is no dearth of technology but infrastructure in rural areas is not so good and hence one has to look at solutions which are more pragmatic

“The biggest challenge in developing e-Procurement systems is the lack of widely adopted data exchange standards, which leads to the incompatibility of various procurement systems. As a result, government procurements are heavily fragmented.” – Mark Fleeton, CEO, Development Gateway

eGov April 2007

From Archives



rior to the approval of NeGP in 2006, various state gov-ernments, ministries and departments had embarked on e-Governance initiatives that created “islands of informa-tion.” There was no systematic approach to information management, integration and no unified architecture to

inter-connect these islands. The focus was more on automating the business process with less inclination on service delivery or transparency. NeGP has certainly changed that. It has taken a holistic approach by creating a road-map and identified the initiatives required to address the needs of citizens.

It is still early days for most NeGP projects. Very few projects have reached their post-implementation phase and we are yet to see the challenges of steady state operations for large programs in government. The next wave will be to get the internal functions of each department automated, which will feed into the various delivery channels (portals).

Initiatives like e-Office, e-District are going to be key in the next several years, not only in improving the internal efficiencies of the departments, but also in being able to provide, timely, transparent services to the citizens.

Planning and executing multiple programs in parallel has created several implementation challenges around the inter-dependency of these programs. Case in point is that the CSCs were setup much before electronic service delivery has been enabled for citizen services such as caste/birth certificates, thereby creating viability issues for the CSCs.

In order to have uniformity and to accelerate implementation, the best approach is to define centrally and implement locally. While many initiatives in the recent past, like CCTNS, SSDG have adopted this approach, we need to look at making this the preferred model. Given the scale and diversity of a country like India, we will need to continually optimise our approach, based on the new learnings from across the diverse set of NeGP projects and thus progress on the path of e-Governance.

P

next Wave of service deliveryGiven the scale and diversity of India, we will need to continually optimise our approach based on learnings from various NeGP projects

Sanjeev KapoorBusiness Head - Government and TelecomInfosys India

“Governments tend to leave the security decisions to their integrators; our recommendation is that it is a mistake, as governments need direct access to security, even if the security comes through integrators” – Chris Fedde, President and COO, Safenet Inc.

April 2008

From Archives

IGNOU SchOOlS• SchoolofAgriculture• SchoolofEducation• SchoolofForeignLanguages• SchoolofHumanities• SchoolofLaw• SchoolofSciences• SchoolofTourismandHospitality

ServiceSectoralManagement• SchoolofTranslationStudiesand

Training

• SchoolofSocialSciences• SchoolofManagementStudies• SchoolofInter-DisciplinaryandTrans-

DisciplinaryStudies• SchoolofGenderandDevelopment

Studies• SchoolofEngineering&Technology• SchoolofComputerandInformation

Sciences• SchoolofContinuingEducation

• SchoolofExtensionandDevelopmentStudies

• SchoolofHealthSciences• SchoolofJournalismandNewMedia

Studies• SchoolofPerformingandVisualArts• SchoolofSocialWork• SchoolofVocationalEducationand

Training

Thefour-yearperiodfrom2006to2010has

witnessedremarkablegrowthineverysector,

startingfromrevenuetostudentsinflow,from

regionalcentrestocollaborationwithvarious

developmentalinstitutions.ThebulkofIGNOU’s

expansionhascomeaboutfromnotably

themodesttuitionfeethattheUniversity

chargesitsstudents.IGNOUwasoneofthe

firstUniversitiesinthecountrytoimplement

therecommendationsoftheSixthPay

Commission.Thenon-planexpendituretowards

staffwelfarealsoshotupfrom`9.23crore

to`57.02crore.Theseexpensesaretowards

contributionsforthenewpensionschemes,

bonus,pension,gratuity,leave,encashment,

leavesalaryandhonorarium.

SOCIALCOMMITMENTWITHPrUDENCE

the GrOwth StOry

INDIRA GANDHI NATI ONAL OPEN UNIVERSITY Maidan Garhi, New Delhi – 110068, India, www.ignou.ac.in

ImpreSSIve GrOwth IN receIptS…

pOwered by StUdeNt FeeS…

AcAdemIc prOGrAmmeS hAve INcreASed…

ANd SO hAS FAcUlty StreNGth…

ANd the NUmber OF cONSUltANtS…

ANd the NUmber OF rtAS…

AcAdemIc GrOwth

• Universityunfailinglyreportedanexcessofreceiptsoverexpenditure

• Studentenrollmenthasdoubledinfouryearsfrom1.5milliontoover3million

• UNESCOdeclaredIGNOUas2010’slargestinstitutionofhighereducationintheworld

• Feesfromstudentsvirtuallydoubledinfouryearsfrom`158.52croreto`312crore

• Shareofnon-planadministrativeexpensestototalexpenditurefellfrom28.24to17.14percent

• Universityablymanagedhigher

payoutonsalariesonaccountofSixthPayCommission

• BulkofUniversity’sexpansioncameaboutfrominternalaccruals

• Largestnumberofgovernment-supportedschemesintheSocialandruralDevelopmentSectors

• Thebulkoftotalreceiptshasincreasedto`448.55crore(2009-10)from`286.54crore(2000-07)whichnowcontributesahealthy88percentofinternalrevenuegeneration

• regionalcentreshasgoneupfrom59to62,whilestudycentreshasrisenfrom1468toover3000

• ProgrammeslikeAkashdeep(AirForce)andGyanDeep(Army),generatedrevenueofalmostrs14crore;similarforNavyinpipeline

• BesidesGyanDarshan-24x7TVchannelandGyanVani-FMradiostation,atwo-wayteleconferencing,interactiveradiocounsellingandrelayeducationalprogrammescomingup

• Paymentsofwagesandsalarieswentupfrom`35.68croreto`86.12crore

• Non-planexpendituretowardsstaffhasseenahikefrom`9.23croreto`57.02crore

hIGhlIGhtS ANd AchIevemeNtS



“India is a very good example of a country that has embraced the telecentre concept, and people want to hear about what you have done. It really shows how we can combine public money and private money in a very effective way” – Valerie Faudon, Vice President, Marketing Programmes, Alcatel-Lucent

March 2008

he evolution of e-Governance in the last six years has been phenomenal. Government reforms, sound policies and active participation by various government agencies have played a key role for this evolution. The need for innovation, self initiation and creativity has been realised by Government agencies which were earlier curbed by centralisation. An effective decentralisation of services

has helped e-Governance evolve substantially. An increased Internet and mobile connection has also played a vital role in creating awareness among the citizens about exploiting new modes of access. Application of these factors in implementing e-Governance activities has been evident since last 5-6 years.

Looking into the future, States are expected to be given more autonomy in implementing different projects across the country, extending a self-reliant mode of governing system.

We can expect e-Governance to remove citizens’ resistance towards change and transform the entire outlook of citizen-Government relation-ship. In India, the diversity of the country in terms of language is also a challenge. e-Governance in the local language is a big task to achieve, considering the lack of manpower, connectivity and skills in distant areas.

e-Governance can benefit from effective decentralisation. Deployment of authority to state and district levels for better management and control would work wonders in India. e-Governance should be able to bridge the gap between a citizen’s traditional approach and modern technology.

An effective change management would help mitigate the digital divide in India. Proper Infrastructure in terms of connectivity, electricity and digital devices in remote areas would work towards fighting illiteracy to adopt e-Governance. Further, if the Government localises its applications to better meet local needs, it would ensure greater participation from masses.

T

Nitin Garg Country Manager - Government VerticalLenovo India

Citizen participation is a MustIf the Government localises its applications to better meet local needs, it would ensure greater participation from masses

From Archives



“For any large-scale event like the Special Olympics, building and managing key components of the IT infra-structure come with considerable challenges. A critical IT requirement for any sporting event is to provide game officials with secure and easy access to applications, game results and information in real-time” – Dennis Rose, Vice President – Pacific, CITRIX Systems, Inc.

February 2007

Chetan Vaidya Director National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA)

n 2003 the initiative “Horizontal Transfer of successful e-Governance initiatives” resulted in the introduction of automated systems in important domains of land records, property registration and trans-port across the country. Another momentous event was the launch of the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) that provided a roadmap for the implementation of the e-Governance program in a planned manner across the country. e-Governance, capacity building and

Jawahar Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) Roadmaps of all the states have been formulated under the NeGP which has facilitated state specific prioritisation of projects and services for electronic enablement. Establishment of key IT enabling infrastructure such as State Wide Area Net-work (SWAN), State Data Center (SDC) and computers for departments to enable the advent of e-Governance in government is another way forward.

e-Governance in urban India has made significant strides even though major challenges and irritants to the progress do remain. Implementation of e-Governance is likely to usher in a paradigm shift from the current depart-ment-centric structure of the government to citizen centric structure where the citizen deals with one government. New applications of e- Governance such as those for e-Voting, innovative location related services through Geo-graphic Information Systems (GIS), various e-Services are envisaged to bring about a sea change in the way government and its constituents interact.

e-Governance initiatives in recent years are being considered as a major step to providing better quality of life to Indian citizens. If one looks at the effect of these efforts, it is seen more as an urban phenomenon, even in developed states like Gujarat, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Maharash-tra. It has not touched the masses in many other cities and rural areas to make a major difference. This is primarily attributed to lack of connectivity in India both at the Government level and other areas. If India has to bridge the digital divide; actions are needed in a number of areas. This is not simply a question of technology deployment, but the need of a broad package to help the citizens to benefit from the shift to an information economy.

I

shifting to Information economyJust technology deployment won’t do,a broad package to help citizens shift to an information economy is needed

From Archives

grid name


in person

what is your roadmap or vision on how e-Governance should evolve in India. What are the achievements of e-Governance in these seven years?

Technology when applied appropriately not only improves performance and lowers cost of government operations but also brings a paradigm shift in relationship between government and the people. Government agencies across the country have been experimenting with the use of ICT, first to improve their internal work and thereafter for improving service delivery but with varying degree of success. However, it is only with National eGovernance Plan (NeGP) that this area has got the right direction and the requisite focus in terms of common ICT infrastructure (SWAN/SDC/CSC) and detailed guidelines on e-Gov application. There have been failures and successes, time overruns, cost overruns but that is expected in a plan of such large magnitude, especially when programmes are being taken up for the first time by many states/UTs, which are at different levels of ICT development. While infrastructure has largely been put in place, development of application has been delayed, which needs to be accelerated. Cisco has always accorded high priority to the Government and public sector vertical and this will continue in the years to come. The company has a dedicated team to address the grow-ing business needs of this sector. Cisco’s strategy has been to deliver the highest degree of operational excellence to governments, enabling them to make timely and accurate decisions and improve operational efficiency. Governments, world over, are under pres-sure to deliver services more efficiently and effectively that are focused on the needs of their constituents. IT systems are a critical foundation as governments seek to be more connected to citizens, business, partner agencies, and other governments.

Cisco solutions allow multiple departments to securely share infrastructure and services in order to drive greater service effectiveness and organisational productivity. To address the sector in India, Cisco is working with partners such as IBM, HCL, Wipro, Infosys to draw synergies in their applications being developed for governments. Some of the large proj-ects that the company is involved in are the implementation of State Wide Area Network

Sandeep Raina, Senior Vice President, Cisco

India and SAARC is an industry veteran with

over 20 years of experience in the IT industry.

In this freewheeling interview with Dr Ravi

Gupta and Lakshmi Singh, he talked about

the overall performance of e-Governance in

the last seven years in India

e-governance to e-citizenship”

“the shift has to happen from

Sandeep Raina Senior Vice President - Govt & Defence Cisco India & Saarc

grid name


(SWAN) and State Data Center (SDC) creation. In addition to the on-going engagements with state and central government organisations in ICT infrastructure creation, Cisco is also work-ing closely through its strategic consulting arm Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) with Department of Information Technology (DIT), National Institute of Urban Affairs, National Institute for Smart Government (NISG), Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and few State Governments. The IBSG helps Fortune 500 companies and leading public organisa-tions across the world, improve the customer experience and increase revenue growth by transforming the way they do business. Drawing on a unique combination of industry experience, business acumen and technical knowledge, IBSG consultants work as trusted advisers to many of the world’s governments and leading organiza-tions on pro-bono basis.

Recently Cisco has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with CSC e-Gover-nance Services India Ltd.The purpose of the MoU is to make education and healthcare solu-tions available to rural India and to promote social inclusion through CSCs.

What is the plan behind intro-ducing legislation on electronic delivery of services (EDS)? How optimistic are you with this legis-lative framework, since achieving the same would have been chal-lenging under NeGP? What has to be the new mission of the NeGPs?In a broad perspective, the NeGP initiative owing to a vast outreach, with 27 Central Mis-sion Mode Projects over a period of five years has progressed very well in our country. The most important thing that needs to be imple-mented is the review mechanism in the entire process. It is necessary to check if a particular model is working well in all the 27 departments across 35 States. With a review mechanism, we can analyze as to how we help them achieve a mission or how many mission modes are to be modified or how do we help them manage the infrastructure. Secondly, we must undergo a thorough research to analyze how many state mission modes have been successfully imple-mented? One must use cloud to replicate that. If a model works well in state, it is not necessary that all the 35 states should follow the same but there’s no harm in replicating best practices. A body needs to be constituted to review whether

a particular model has been implemented successfully and analyze the feasibility and rel-evance for another state. Thirdly, accountability has to be done around all the projects. There is a need to show a substantial cost difference in terms of what a service would cost. A citizen may be happy to pay a slightly higher amount for a more efficient delivery of the service through ICT. However, that price difference

cannot be significantly higher. Productivity gains have to be at the core of implementation while keeping customer delivery in mind. Ulti-mately it is the quality of service and the cost of implementation that are important. There is a need to divide the concept of e-Governance into lot of sub sectors—common functions, utility, use of infrastructure and productivity.

What is the role of education, healthcare and power in e-gover-nance?The most important connecting links for e-governance to succeed are education, health-care and power. The government should focus on these three sectors for expansion. What is important to analyze is that how much synergy is there in all three sectors and what should be the public- private participation. In healthcare sector, bringing down the cost and accessibility is the most important consideration. Power and broadband connectivity are the most important aspects for delivering healthcare ser-vices. Not only that, what really is of concern to technology providers is to see the disjointed effort of government in the education industry as there is no single programme that drives ICT in education.Talking of connectivity made more sense at a time when there were no roads constructed. Therefore, for education and broadband, there needs to be one single policy, one single blueprint in the country.

The last year has witnessed several landmark projects for Cisco A key project has been the Restructured Accelerated Power Distribution Reforms Project (R–APDRP) by the Ministry of

Power (MoP), Government of India, which has a mandate to reduce power transmission and distribution losses by strengthening and upgrad-ing transmission and distribution networks. For instance, Railway reservation system, MCA 21, Stock exchange, Income tax and Customs are some of the success stories under central govern-ment. On the other hand, land records, property registration, driving license, vehicle registration

certificate and VAT have been automated by many state governments.

What are the programmes under e-governance which are promising?Unique Identification Number (UID) will revolutionise e-governance. It will improve the service delivery aspect. UIDAI has been given the onerous task of putting in place a mecha-nism to issue Indian residents with a unique number which can be used with ease and con-fidence to establish identity and can be verified and authenticated in an easy, cost-effective way to eliminate fraud and duplicate identities and thus enable common man to avail government services easily. This is also expected to give a big boost to e-government initiatives by enabling online application for various services. The absence of a reliable system for such purposes has been an impediment to improve targeting of developmental schemes. The Unique identi-fication number would be used for identifica-tion of individuals, enabling better delivery of various Government services and leading to better targeting of poverty alleviation and other social welfare scheme to beneficiaries. The UID is intended to be used in the first instance, as the basis for efficient delivery of various social and welfare services to persons below the poverty line (BPL). Cisco IBSG worked closely with UIDAI on its working paper titled “Creat-ing a unique identity number for every resident of India” detailing the proposed approach, pro-cesses and architecture for implementing this programme.

in person

is the review mechanism

“the most important thing to be implemented

in the entire process”


What role is NIIT Technologies playing to promote e-Governance and what are the key focus areas ?NIIT technologies is working closely with many Governments and offers e-Governance applica-tions and services to enable key sectors to interact with the citizens and corporates in an efficient, cost effective and transparent manner. One of the key focus areas is the optimisation of the upstream and downstream Supply Chain of the public administration. Better con-trol of procurement services, for example, offers immense potential to cut down costs and cycle time while bringing in transparency and compliancy, which are high priorities for every government. In this space, NIIT Technologies is offering a comprehensive e-infra-structure called Procure-Easy that helps governments to realise the vision of fuelling growth via prof-itable B-to-B e-commerce.

Can you tell us about some of your Government customers?Hosted and supported by Defence Science & Technology Agency(DSTA), the applica-tion drives the procurement of all the Government agencies of Singapore and helps all govern-ment users with features to raise

Procuring made easyBetter control of procurement services, for example, offers immense potential to cut down costs and cycle time while bringing in transparency and compliancy, which are high priorities for every government

advertorial NIIT TeChNoloGIes

By sujoy Choudhury, General Manager, NIIT Technologies

Purchase Requests, Tenders, Cor-rigendum, Invitations To Quote, Evaluate the quotations sent by suppliers, Recommend supplier responses, Purchase Orders, Goods Receipts etc. As per the statistics for FY 2008, Procure Easy supported 10,000 buyers and 41,000 suppliers across137 Gov-ernment agencies in Singapore with 5800 Tender cycles. Many other Government and corporate clients are using this application. In India, the Ordnance Factory Board is using this application across their 40 factories.

What is the UsP of Procure-easy platform of NIIT Technologies vis-à-vis your competitors?Being used extensively by many

governments and corporates Pro-cure-Easy is a highly scalable, secure, configurable and workflow-enabled procurement platform, which offers best practices to the procurement organizations and seamlessly con-nects them with the supplier com-munities. While most products in the market offer e-Tendering, Procure-Easy offers end-to-end procurement functions – right from demand aggregation, to sourcing, ordering, invoicing and payments. It is a complete procurement platform that allows supplier collaboration, negotiation and closure in a secure Internet environment.

The Dynamic forms in Procure-Easy can be easily configured to create a library of templates, which are used in RFPs / Tenders to collect item specific technical and com-mercial inputs. The inputs, which

are provided by the suppliers can be easily compared and ranked as a part of a detailed evaluation process. The configurable approval processes, supported by alerts and escalations, closely mirror the tra-ditional manual processes and bring about significant improvements in terms of compliance and process time. The E-Auction services allow the the government departments to facilitate dynamic bidding and on-line exchanges for realizing unprecedented cost-advantages. The mobile interface allows buyers and suppliers to interact on an anytime-anywhere basis. Overall, Procure-Easy works as an umbrella application that sits over standard back-office Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application(s) and seamlessly integrates with the exist-ing back-end processes.



he Government of India has embarked on an ambitious e-Governance initiative when the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) was approved by the Cabinet in May 2006, which aims to provide a host of services to the citizens, businesses, employees and the Civil Society in a conve-nient, efficient and transparent manner. The scope of ‘e-Governance’ includes attributes such as Service-Centric

approach, Citizen-Centricity, Speed and Certainty of Delivery, Integrated Delivery of Services, Accountability, Inclusive Socio-Economic Policies etc. so as to ensure empowerment of the poorest of the poor and the margin-alised groups through access to information and critical State Services.

The focus thus has shifted from translation to transformation meaning, thereby, that it is not about procurement of hardware and software but changing the way services are delivered to and accessed by the common man. Six years ago, IT players struggled to sell their so called Solutions (read Products) to the Government in various areas; today the Govern-ments know what they need and demand the specific, bespoke or cus-tomized or configured Solutions to meet their specific requirements.

Pleasant and proven experiences of various IT automations such as Railway or Bus Reservations, Utility Billings, ATMs, SMS on Mobile have convinced even the illiterate masses about the effectiveness of such initiatives adding to the pressure on the Government and further triggered the ‘inter-polate’ demand for the Governments to become more responsive to Citizens.

Technology alone never achieves the change without the necessary Business Process Re-engineering (BPR). This will be the most difficult task, a step towards truly democratic society. Dissemination mechanism plays a crucial role in this context. Authorities having a dashboard view of operations, officers having an integrated view of operations and citi-zens having control on operations is what we can term as empowerment. e-Governance needs to come with this promise; without which it is dif-ficult to mitigate the digital divide.

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Ashank Desai FounderMastek Ltd

it sans re-engineering Won’t HelpIt is not about procurement of hardware and software but changing the way services are delivered to and accessed by the common man

“In the times to come, government websites would be the first point of contact for citizens” – Rajni Razdan, Secretary (AR & PG), Ministry of Personnel, PG & Pensions, Government of India

Febuary 2009

From Archives

in person


Y to improve governance”

“We are helping the government

Avinash GuptaPresidentTally Solutions Pvt Ltd

ou have been pivotal in bringing Tally to this level. How has been your journey?

We have been in the business for more than 26 years now. We started this more as a require-ment for our in-house business. After starting, we realised that many businesses are struggling with the same issues and problems. And that is where the thought got seeded of taking it to the market rather than an in-house product. Today, we are addressing much larger scope of the typi-cal business faces. In the initial stages there were some versions and then elementary got added, then some newer versions came with new fea-tures. In 2005-06 VAT regime came in and stat-uary compliance became very important. That was the time when we got compliance as part of the integrated product. It was a challenge. Each state has their own format. Government indus-tries were learning and we were facing challenge in developing our product. This was the when chances of your return get refused and you can’t take that.

Please shed light on your key projects of Tally and its relevance in Indian context?We are focussing on small and medium enter-prises (SMEs). In any developing economy SMEs fuel the growth. They are the biggest

India’s top branded Tally Solutions’ products

are transforming businesses across industry in

over 94 countries. Avinash Gupta, President,

Tally Solutions Pvt Ltd has expertise in building

highest operational efficiencies by directing

and coordinating activities consistent with

established goals and policies. In an interaction

with Dr Rajeshree Dutta Kumar, he shared

his perspective on emerging trends in financial

accounting and threw light upon the challenges

in India. Excerpts:

employers in any country. India is home to over 80-lakh SMEs, which contribute almost 40 percent to industrial output. These are the potential customers we are targeting for our growth. We are looking at almost doubling our turnover in this fiscal. The main drivers of our growth would be the growing SMEs, large mobile subscriber base and an emerging retail sector. The company is expecting a 300 percent YoY growth.

Having said that this doesn’t mean that large organisations don’t use Tally. I am sure large enterprises are already using Tally account-ing solutions but want them to migrate to our enterprise versions. We are very confident about bagging a huge chunk of marketshare even among the large enterprises and govern-ment customers. A lot of government depart-ments have started to use Tally without any hesitation. Our pricing strategy is such that it should be affordable and available to the common man.

Within the company, we have the belief that if the customers buy our software, they should be able to operate it without any training. The person who is using my software should find it easy to use. He need not to have any business training to use the software and this goes for the government sector also. Software must be flexible enough to imbibe what the government departments require. In the last couple of years, governance has become much more effective with the use of such softwares.

in person


Government organisations have adopted Tally.ERP 9 in flag-ship programmes like NRHM and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and more, what has been your experi-ence with them?In National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) they had already solutions, but it was not working. They get fund but the money was unutilised and underutilised. The problem was compounded by untrained work force, poor infrastructure and

electricity. We have worked with district, block and PHC level. We are progressing layer by layer. We are proud to say that NRHM is most effective run department in India.

Please share your solutions for diversified stake holders like government and educational institute?Over a period of time, we have identified that, there are three niche areas where we need to work, they are money, material and men. Fund-ing is related to money. A lot of inventry is to be handled i.e. material part. We should contribute towards improving governance capability of the nation. We approach them as a solution pro-vider. We are helping government to improve the governance. In return, it gives to understand the behaviour of the government. Second is skill development. Last year, we trained 50, 000 students.

There is huge requirement of Tally-trained people in the country. We have 20,000 part-ners. There is another in-house demand which requires trained people. India is one of the youngest countries, so we need to repair and prepare.

Can you please throw some light on capacity building and employ-ability initiatives?We have started working with the academia. 80 percent of the people trained by us have been

employed. In Karnataka we have worked with Karnataka women Development Corporation. Here we have trained the women from margin-alised section of the society. It was a challenge to get them out of the house. We are happy that after training, most of them have continued their jobs.

Similarly, we have worked with women development ministry. We are also working with state governments of Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. We are also

working with the skill development depart-ments of north east states and Jammu Kashmir. In Bihar, recently we have worked for Bihar Maha Dalit Department.

What are your future plans?We have the youngest population; it can be boon or bane. If it is skilled they are asset, if not they become a huge liability. In India, Below Poverty Line (BPL) family are huge. Today, we’ll built capacity with the help of product partners, service partners, and education partners. In totality there are 20,000 partners with Tally. They help in government requirement and industry requirements.

The company is banking on repeating the success it had with Tally ERP Gold in the SME segment. As we have our legacy solutions, we understanding what an Indian enterprise needs and so shall integrate CRM, SCM into our future Tally ERP software editions.

What are the challenges you have been facing while bridging the digital divide?We don’t look challenges as challenges. We look it as opportunities. We feel that we have still long way to go. India is huge place to operate. Last year, we worked in north east with minis-try of skill development. It’s like learning and delivering at the same time. Technology pen-etration and net access is improving. We have long way to go in terms of infrastructure.

What benefits Tally.ERP 9 offers over other solutions?Tally, the Indian business accounting and inventory management software, popular with small and medium corporates, is growing beyond national boundaries into neighbor-ing geographies. This initiative has created a talent pool of business software professionals with expertise in Tally.ERP 9, not just in India but across the Middle- East, Africa, China & Asia- Pacific. This software helps companies access information remotely either through the Internet or a mobile phone even as it seeks to minimise maintenance costs. The product is more efficient and easy to access. Here we need to type our query and SMS to the required centre, which will revert with all details.

It is estimated that India alone needs some 1.3 million business software trained manpower annually to serve over 8 million IT–fuelled SMB units. The tremendous potential that Tally products have generated across industries has helped to empoweran upwardly-mobile SMB segment with aptly-skilled manpower.

It has lead to creation of highly-skilled and comprehensive business software professionals for the SMB sectors in India and overseas.

trained manpoWer annually

it–fuelled smB units”

“india alone needs some 1.3 million Business softWare

to serve over 8 million



“Cities account for more than 80% of global economic growth and are yet at the biggest risk of sustainability from most perspectives – power, water, safety, health and transport” – Adaire Fox-Martin, Vice President, Public Services, Asia Pacific Division, SAP

September 2009

Ramsunder PapineniDirector - Enterprise Business - India & SAARCMcAfee

eGP has changed the way citizens receive services from the government and in the last six years we have seen a major shift in technology availability and adoption. MMPs under the NeGP envisage service delivery to be uniform and inclusive. It aims to be all inclusive with service delivery designed with all stratas of society and rural population too in mind.

A good aspect of NeGP would surely be the continuity in terms of people involved in the project. In terms of implementation it has brought about ownership and accountability at the policy making level.

The next 6-10 years could be even more exciting times for the Indian government as well as citizens. Citizens will get better value for all services. New technologies such as 3G will open up newer opportunities for various new application and services. The coming years belong to smart technologies and smarter means to deliver services. As the years are passing availability and affordability of technology are on the rise. We are bound to see more mean-ingful projects in the coming few years. However, there are some issues that need special attention before we bring more on our plate. Technology is avail-able but capacity building for that technology is not given that much concern.

One of the main problems which might come in the way of e-Gover-nance development is last mile connectivity. Making broadband available is just half the task done. It has to be affordable and also training to use it effectively has to be provided.

Non-availability of various e-Services in local languages is another cause for concern. If e-Services under Mission Mode Projects (MMPs) are made available in vernacular languages it will increase its acceptance and usability both. Lastly, technology needs to be studied deeply. More technological advancement brings network security threats with it. However, we should not forget that threat offers challenge and thus opens an array of opportunities. e-Governance in India is at a threshold where we are progressing past many milestones and with a but more planning we will scale greater heights.

N

Walking through that Last MileMaking broadband available is just half the task done; the other half is training and capacity building

From Archives



ational e-Governance Plan has steadily evolved from computerisation of Government to citizen centricity, service-orientation and transparency. The govement’s approach has the potential to enable huge savings in costs through sharing of core and support infrastruc-ture, enabling interoperability through standards. A massive countrywide infrastructure reaching down

to the remotest of villages is evolving, and large-scale digitisation of records has taken place to enable easy, reliable access over the internet. The ultimate objective is to bring public services closer home to citizens, as articulated in the Vision Statement of NeGP. Some extensive work has been done by the issu-ance of digital certification in Assam, Tamlnadu and many other places which are a welcome change. This has made communication more quick and in a way has transferred government itself. There has also been reduction of inter-mediaries between the Government and citizen. The Government of Assam created a separate IT Department to focus its thrust on the development of ICT in the state. Assam Electronics Development Corporation (AMTRON) is responsible for implementing a range of ICT programmes on behalf of the government of Assam. One of its key projects is the Anundoram Borooah Award Scheme (ARBAS), which gives a free PC to every student in Assam who achieves 60 per cent or higher in their high-school leaving exams. But the major bottlenecks are trying to reach billions of citizens. With this ambi-tious endeavour, there is a need to bring in transparency in everything. Still lot more has to be taken care of. Power is an issue of major concerns haunting the remote areas. Connectivity becomes a problem as power supply is not available. Reaching out to all the people in one common language becomes a major problem. Government should also think of localization of content.

The intent of e-Governance is to accelerate the processes by automating them and making them accessible to the citizen. But this accessibility is in infancy still in most of the areas.

N

M K Yadava Managing DirectorAMTRON (Assam Electronics Development Corporation Limited)

reaching out to every Nook and CornerThough e-Governance has taken off in full swing, but the bigger challenge is to reach out to the remotest areas of the country

“ICT and e-Government implementation is most effective when appropriate skills and HR systems are developed in government and user organisations support it” – Clay G. Wescott, Capacity Development & Governance Division, Regional and Sustainable Development Dept., Asian Development Bank, Philippines

December 2005

From Archives



“The Bengaluru International Airport is the first airport to introduce Digital TETRA for Trunk Mobile Radio Users for all airport stakeholders to use within the airport for operational requirements” – Francis Rajan, Head – ICT, Bengaluru International Airport

March 2009

ver the past six years, the scope of e-Governance has grown substantially in India. India’s expertise in e-Governance initiatives has demonstrated significant success in improv-ing accessibility, cutting down costs, reducing corruption, extending help and increased access to un-served groups.

The government is completely focused towards accelerating this progress by coming up with new projects regularly. Therefore, it is a very important area for the government today and that is the reason we are seeing huge investments in the sector. After initially investing `10,000 crores, the government, early this year, announced that it will invest another `20,000 crores in the next few years. In addition, the Government of India has also recently signed a loan agreement with the World Bank for $150 Million for the ‘e-Delivery of Public Services Development Policy Loan’ under the National e-Governance Plan [NeGP], a flagship e-governance initiative of the Indian government aimed at transforming the service delivery system across the country. This is a testimonial to the growing focus and impor-tance on the e-governance initiatives by the Government.

IT is slowly becoming a strategic mechanism for more substantial trans-formation of government across the country. Some of the sectors present-ing huge opportunities are power, education, healthcare and agriculture. And as we move forward ‘Innovation’ and ‘Inclusion’ will be the key for any e-Governance project to be successful and impactful. Technologies like ‘Cloud Computing’ will go a long way to provide a shared and secured infrastructure for consolidation of data, services and applications. Addi-tionally, the ecosystem of applications that are likely to develop around ICT backbones of SWANs, SDCs, CSCs and Aadhar would present some of the most exciting and bigger opportunities in the area of e-Governance.

With our population, geographical spread, diversity of resources, disparity of skills, capabilities and learning curve, e-Governance is indeed a very daunt-ing task and it shows up in varying levels of successes across the country.

O

inclusion through it innovationWith our population, geographical spread, diversity of resources, disparity of skills e-Governance is indeed a very daunting task

Ranbir SinghGeneral Manager - Public Sector Microsoft India

From Archives



“Virtualisation is currently the ultimate remedy for CIOs who are faced with growth challenges, compute power utilisation issues and data centre utilisation problems” – Karthik Ramarao, Director – Technology, Systems Practice, Sun Microsystems India

April 2009

he fact that e-Governance can make service delivery by the government far more superior and predictable has been embraced by all sectors, be it corporate, government or the civil society. Citizen satisfaction has certainly gone up, as government services have come closer and are available 24/7 in many cases. Also, there is more transpar-ency and innovation that is happening across the board.

Conceptualisation of National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) leading to mission mode projects (MMPs) at the central and state level has been undoubtedly the landmark event in the e-Governance scenario in the country. The pro-gramme has given a framework and a structure to the initiative of using IT.

However, technology is not yet being utilised to its full potential. It is pertinent to have dedicated technology champions, who are empowered adequately, in each entity which takes up all these e-Governance projects.

The future, though, looks good. We are rapidly progressing on the path of speedy delivery of governance services and thus becoming digitally governed successfully. In the coming years, there will be more back-end computerisation and connectivity between different government departments leading to a single window delivery of services to citizens. Common Service Centres (CSCs) would be the main channel of service delivery, education and information dissemination in rural areas in the days to come. We are late on the track of achieving 1lakh CSCs, but can look forward to achieving the target in near future.

The next wave in terms of innovations could be in business Intelligence and cloud computing. Electronic service delivery should be mandatory for all departments, the first step in this regard has already been taken in the draft bill. Governments should trust and incentivise the private industry to acquire domain knowledge and also select vendors on a more transparent basis rather than a price-based approach. Public-Private partnership is the key forward for the success of these projects and private sector should be made more involved in the ideation too so as to give them ownership.

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Gopalakrishnan Palakkil India Business Head (ITS)MindTree

ppp should be taken to next LevelGovernments should select vendors on a more transparent basis rather than a price-based approach

From Archives



“Non-availability of connectivity has been a major roadblock in making India e-Ready for e-Governance” – Shankar Aggarwal, Joint Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of India

November 2008

ast five to six years have experienced transformational change in the perception, attitude and spread of eGov-ernance- both horizontal and vertical. Many successful models await replication and integration to transform the scale and value to unimagined levels. No sector remains untouched from the technological touch, but, the gaping digital divide still daunts the whole exercise of transfor-

mation to an e-Governed nation. With the present pace and the likely increase in pace of implementation

in coming years, in another six to ten years all major citizen centric services and data would be available at the click of the mouse.

In this whole journey of eGovernance, software solutions have played a big role and need to be given more consideration if targets have to be achieved. The next wave has to be a software revolution. In our country software development and application certainly needs to catch up with infrastructure creation. Also, capacity building of planners, executors and end-users needs to be incorporated for greater efficiency of all e-Gover-nance initiatives. The quality of project delivery and its sustenance also depends on proper training and capacity building.

In coming years, standardisation of ICT infrastructure and uniform spread of the same will reap the desired results of the efforts. Another major issue that needs to be addressed is the need of proper replication policy. The successful projects in all the states should be seen as model projects and be replicated over the country with customised modifications rather than inventing a whole project from scratch. The successful models can be put in the cloud and other states can use them for a fee. Such systems will help in proper utilisation of resources and also uniformity would come in the processes. Development of ERP solutions helping complete function-ing to get into the digital mode would make the whole process comprehen-sive and irreversible. Further, creation of ICT infrastructure and quality capacity building is the key to mitigating the digital divide.

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Sanjay Sahay IGP - Police Computer WingBengaluru

replicate successful ModelsCapacity building of planners, executors and end-users needs to be incorporated for greater efficiency of all e-Governance initiatives

From Archives



ndia has transformed significantly over the past few years. If you look at the country today you see change enabled by ICT. National e Governance Plan has been a comprehensive “programme” of the Government of India and has gone a long way to leverage capa-bilities and opportunities presented by ICT to promote good gover-nance across the country.

With the widespread usage of IT, computers, smart phones, tablets, faster and widespread Internet connectivity and other components of the ICT technologies in India over the last couple of decades, the need for e-Governance has finally got the due importance it always deserved. Articulated in the form of the report on Second Administrative Reforms Commission titled “Promoting e-Governance - The SMART way Forward” which is defined as ‘Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsive and Transpar-ent’ government. The report defined the need for e-Governance to bring the government closer to its citizens (G2C) and businesses (G2B) while promoting inter-government agency cooperation in a friendly, convenient, transparent and inexpensive fashion.

For success of an e-Governance project and superior service delivery, it is imperative that the government agency focuses on whole citizen expe-rience. Focusing on the citizen is essential for long term success. The govt. agency needs to integrate information from all points of citizen interaction. The overall architecture for e-Governance needs to ensure that the archi-tecture components are extensible and scalable to adapt to the changing environments. The e-Governance applications that are emerging as islands of successes have to be interoperable.

Challenges such as lack of IT Literacy, awareness regarding benefits of e-governance, underutilisation of existing ICT infrastructure, attitude of Government departments towards e-Governance application and Resis-tance to re-engineering of departmental processes is the need of these times. If we successfully tackle these issues and we are bound to achieve our targets and become entirely e-Governed soon.

I

Eric Kuo General Manager MSI – India

iCt is the Change agentThe SMART way for promoting e-Governance is defined as ‘Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsive and Transparent’ government

“There are three basic things in connectivity: Access, Affordability and Application. If one of these is not in place, the other two would not work” – Yogesh Kocchar, Head e-Governance Unit, Tata Teleservices

May 2008

From Archives



“Law enforcement agencies in many parts of the world lack expertise, knowledge and resources to investigate and prosecute cases related to cyber crime. We must understand that it is a funding issue. We believe that training law enforcement agencies should be the first step to combat cyber crime” – Guillermo Galarza Abizaid, Senior Programme Manager, International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC)

March 2007

ot of changes have happened in the last six years in India in the area of e-Governance. The major breakthrough is NeGP. Attempts have been made at different levels to make Government more effective, transparent and accountable through the use of technology in the name of e-Governance. We may cite some best practices adopted in the country like PRIASoft (Panchayati Raj Institutions Accounting

Software), one out of twelve modules comprising Panchayat Enterprise Suite (PES) of e-Panchayat MMP.

Similarly the e-Procurement system, has given a dramatic change in the tendering process. Floating of tenders for Prime Ministers Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) projects all over the country is done through this system. This has minimised the tender fixing and enhanced the transpar-ency in the whole process. The same is for Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). The Management Information System (MIS) designed for MGNREGA and PMGSY by the Ministry of Rural Development makes the whole system transparent and the information is available in the public domain.

Another important aspect of e-Governance is service delivery i.e G2C. The NeGP speaks clearly about it; to make all government services available to the citizens in their locality at affordable costs. We need to work more on this aspect now. ITeS is not for governance but only a “tool” for government. The challenge is to use this tool effectively. Best example is Railway reservation, first e-enabled Train Table then computerised ticket and now even e-Ticket.

The internet-enabled governance requires not only change in mindset of implementers but also a rule-based governance and prior setting of rules of game. The digital divide is not one of access only but that of affordability and accessibility. My dream government would be like the ‘Apple Apps Store’, where one can register identity and get entitlements without any personal interface of delivery agents. Technologies such as Cloud Computing and GIS can make it happen.

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S N Tripathi Principal Secretary, Department of Rural Development, Minsitry of Orissa & BP Mishra, Tech Officer, NIC

simplification Beyond ImaginationMy dream government would be like the ‘Apple Apps Store’, where one can register identity and get entitlements without any personal interface

From Archives



“In some markets, interoperability means that all products have passed some external conformance test, usually against some “reference” software” – Michael Mudd, Director of Public Policy for Asia Pacific, CompTIA

August 2009

e have definitely witnessed a huge transformation as far as e-Governance in India is concerned in the last 5-7 years. From simple computerisation of various departments in the past, to SLA-based delivery models now, it clearly shows the entire focus is to ensure a speedy delivery of citizen cen-

tric services. Coming from an era of infrastructure-based projects, we now see that most of the projects are application driven (MCA, Passport, ESIC etc), so as to ensure that citizens can access various services in an online or physical format which can improve efficiency and bring transparency into the system.

The future though lies with efficient use of technologies such as cloud computing. Cloud Computing is going to play vital role in e-Governance in the near future. We can visualize a scenario where general services like mail messaging, office automation softwares can be offered to various depart-ments though the cloud platform (for eg. on pay per use basis).

There are some great projects from the government but there are certain reasons which are pushing us backwards and preventing us from achieving our targets. The remote parts are still not-so-well connected and this pushes all the schemes/e-services backwards. Local language enablement in all the e-Services is another cause for concern as there is a major chunk of popula-tion which still is not proficient in either Hindi or English. The citizens don’t have much of a say when it comes to feedback regarding any particular ser-vice. This acts as a major speed-breaker as the beneficiaries don’t get to say what is good or bad in a particular service.

Last but not the least we need to let go of our mindset that IT means PC. With such high penetration of mobile phones in the country, it should be the preferred medium of bringing services to citizens as it is the most accessible medium today. This can also resolve the issue of PC penetration, broadband penetration and computer proficiency to a cer-tain extent.

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Let go of the Mindset that it Means pCWith such a high penetration of mobile phones in the country, it should be the preferred medium of bringing services within reach to citizens

Sandeep MenonCountry HeadNovell India Pvt Ltd

From Archives

Presents

Powered bysuPPorting Partner

Co-organisers

www.eworldforum.net

EvEnt HigHligHts l Power packed thematic sessions on governance and

healthl exposition on e-governance and e-Health technologiesl Platform for exploring new business avenues in

government and health sectorsl awards for excellence in governance and health

standards across the globel opportunities for networking with key international

government influencers

WHy participatE?l Meet top level decision makers, experts, leaders and

stakeholders in iCt arena on governance and health from across the world at one platform

l great networking opportunity with policymakers from different countries, analysts, experts, iCt entrepreneurs

l a pla tform to engage with colleagues and experts handling similar iCt projects from all across the world

l expo to showcase cutting edge developments in iCtl sharing of best practices and knowledge

dElEgatE profilEl Ministers of different countries from world overl secretary/Chief secretary level officials from various

departments from india and abroadl Key decision- Makers from governance and health

institutionsl officials from bilateral and multilateral agenciesl representatives from ngos and civil society

organisationsl iCt entrepreneurs, industry representatives and experts

1-3 August 2011 | the ashok, new delhi, india

THE PREMIER GLOBAL PLATFORM FOR E-DEVELOPMENT

Launch of the eworld Forum 2011 by shri Kapil sibal, Hon’ble Minister of Communication and information technology on 20th april 2011 at the Claridges, new delhi

EXpoeworld Forum expo will feature an elaborate exhibition and demonstration area where leading international iCt4d players in egovernment and eHealth sectors, manufacturers, suppliers and service providers will present their latest products and services.

Professional service providers, it vendors, consulting firms, government agencies and national/ international development organisations involved in e-government, e-agriculture, telecentre, Municipal it and e-Health domains are encouraged to participate in the exhibition.

KEy spEaKErs at eWorld forum 2011

For ProgrAmme enquiry ContACt: shuchi smita, Mobile: +91 8860651649, [email protected]

For Business enquiry ContACt: ragini srivastava, Mobile: +91 8860651650, Jyoti lekhi, Mobile: +91 8860651634, Email: [email protected]

(for further details visit our website www.eworldforum.net)

www.eworldforum.net

Kapil sibalunion Minister of Communication

and information technology, government of india

Jyotiraditya scindiaMinister of state for Commerce

and industry, government of india

Hon. tassarajen pillay chedumbrum

Minister of information and Communication technology,

Mauritius

ranjith siyambalapitiya Minister of telecommunication and information technology,

sri Lanka

Walter fustPresident of globethics.net

geneva

smt d purandeswariMinister of state, Higher

education, Ministry of Human resource development,

government of india

agatha sangmaMinister of state for rural development, government

of india

anil K sinhaVice Chairman, bihar state

disaster Management authority Chairman & Co Founder, global Forum for

disaster reduction

dr amirudin bin abdul WahabHead of iCt policy Cluster,

Ministry of science, technology and innovation (Mosti)

Malaysia

r chandrashekharsecretary, department of telecom, Ministry of Communication & it, government of india

shankar agarwaladditional secretary, department

of information technology, government of india

B Bhamathiadditional secretary, Ministry of

Home affairs, government of india

dr ajay KumarJoint secretary

department of information technology

government of india

r s sharmadirector general, unique

identification authority of india (uidai)

sharda prasadJoint secretary and director

general employment and training, Ministry of Labour and

employment, government of india

oleg petrovCoordinator e-development

thematic group, the world bank

Kamolrat intaratat (ph.d.) director, thai telecentre.org

akhtar Badshahsenior director- global Community

affairs, Microsoft Corporation

aruna sundararajanJoint secretary, Ministry of Housing & urban Poverty

alleviation, government of india (goi)

shambhu singhJoint secretary (north east),

Ministry of Home affairs, government of india

purushottam sharmaigP, Madhya Pradesh

Brendan doyleHead of institutional relation Line, Centre for information technology

and Communication

dr sudhanshu raiFaculty, department of

informatics, Copenhagen business school

naimur rahmandirector, oneworld south asia

James clarkestrategic eu Liaison Manager,

telecommunications software and systems group (tssg)



“There is a strong willingness in the governments to partner with the private sector, but it is going to be a bit slow because of the regulatory concerns” – Foo Jung Wei, Director, e-Government, Oracle Corporation, Asia Pacific

January 2007

n 1995, when the Internet was in its infancy stage and had only 16 mil-lion users worldwide, governments across the world were realising the benefits of utilising new technologies to share information over private networks and deliver public services through Web portals. Over the years governments across the world have been investing in e-services

to coincide with new technological advancements, from phone to computer and then to the Internet and high-speed broadband. With the initial goal of providing basic information through Web portals, governments worldwide soon launched more interactive services that were progressively made avail-able across multiple communication channels, platforms, and devices to keep up with social changes and improve the satisfaction of increasingly demanding businesses, tech-savvy citizens, and more advanced government departments. As a result of this development over time, almost every coun-try has an e-government plan and an ICT strategy in place today.

Indian government has to be applauded the way has taken forward the e-Governance initiatives during the last few years. The way all the states and central government are connected with people proves the effort of Govern-ment. The only factor that is a hindrance in the communication is the band-width accessibility, which is also being looked at with a serious concern.

As far as technology is concerned Unified Communications (UC) is the way forward to achieve all many targets for successful e-Governance. UC is all about transforming lives of people in general. One of the biggest advantages of UC can be seen in the space of e-Governance, wherein state headquarters are linked to districts, - thus making administration more accountable and seamless. This translates to better governance and trans-parency for people in general. Also, education and healthcare are some of the areas where UC is transforming lives of end users. Just imagine an individual in a rural area not having access to best of health care facilities, being treated remotely by the best of breed doctors, through video con-ferencing and other UC tools. Thus, with the advent of new interactive technologies, governance will never be the same again.

I

aiming for aninteractive governanceAs far as technology is concerned Unified Communications (UC) is the way forward to achieve all many targets for successful e-Governance

Neeraj GillMD - India & SAARCPolycom

From Archives



“In healthcare what we are trying to do is digitise medical records and for example, in the US, Obama’s adminis-tration’s key initiative is how to have simplified medical records through digitising with appropriate privacy and appropriate access”– Joe Kremer, MD & Vice President, Australia and New Zealand, DELL

June 2009

he public expenditure on regional and local develop-ment programmes has gone up 6 folds, reaching the level of INR 300000 crore (USD $ 50 Billion) annually. Almost 20 percent of this goes through the local gov-ernment (LGs), whereas for yet another 20 percent, the LGs are associated in planning and monitoring, though not in execution.

The LGs number 240,000 and need to be provided ICT facilities to undertake the responsibility of planning, execution and monitoring of the welfare and local development programmes. At the same time, their performance needs to be watched by the people’s assemblies (the gram sabhas), which number over 600,000. This large network of local institu-tions can handle their tasks effectively only through ICT. As of now, we have been able to provide the ICT infrastructure and connectivity for only about 20 percent of the LGs. However, plans are underway to extend the coverage to over 90 percent in the next 2 years.

e-Governance has already set its foot in almost all activities relating to public services as also in management of personnel/HRD matters in the Governments at the national and State levels. The focus now is to extend the reach of e-Governance to the local levels.

The measures that need to be taken for proper and uniform e-gover-nance are many. Firstly, the artificial distinction between the rural and urban areas needs to be addressed as it puts the rural areas at a disadvan-tage in respect of certain infrastructure. For instance, power supply is less stable and less assured in the rural regions, as compared to the urban. The next issue would be to enforce the Right to Information more vigorously, and chanelise its implementation through the mode of e-Governance. Third would be to make the access to information easy for the common man, through information kiosks at public places and in local govern-ment offices.

The bigger challenges are inter-departmental coordination for con-vergence of resources and programs, availability of suitable buildings for installing the hardware, stable power supply and qualified manpower at the remote places.

T

Sudhir Krishna Special Secretary Ministry of Panchayati RajGovernment of India

IT Convergence is the answerThe bigger challenges are inter-departmental coordination for convergence of resources and programs

From Archives



“Italy has taken up a proactive role in the European scenario through the ‘e-Europe’ programme under the framework of Lisbon strategy” – Lucio Stanca, Minister for Innovation and Technologies, Government of Italy

July 2005

ational e-Governance Plan is a very well thought out action plan by DIT. It has streamlined things in a new way. It has brought clarity and focuses in key areas that Government needs to address and has helped India move beyond ‘Pilot Projects’ being done earlier.

SWANs have helped State Governments to connect and ensure eGov service delivery to remote areas.

SDC is helping State Govt to consolidate their IT infrastructure and offer better services to their internal departments who in turn are able to offer 24x7 services to its consumers. State Portals being put in place will help consolidation of information in a single place and SSDG (Service Delivery Gateway) would enable cross department communication. Automation of Districts is helping citizen get info/services from a single window.

More and more government services being delivered through automa-tion of Departments are enabling the CSC model to be successful and benefiting the citizens in remote areas. Service integration among differ-ent departments further enables single-window delivery of citizen ser-vices. Integration with UID would further help reduce fraud and ensure benefits are passed to the actual beneficiary.

Lack of IT penetration still makes for a major challenge and needs to be tackled efficiently. There has to be a proper, equitable penetration of IT and Communication so that all citizens irrespective of their geographic location or income can use the benefits of it.

In the end, adoption of Open Standard leading to seamless integra-tion of Government services would help citizens get services from one place. The power of mobile technology needs to be properly estimated since it is the most accessible form of technology. Service delivery using mobile infrastructure is a big sector in itself and is still to be explored by the government. Adopting newer and innovative technologies like Cloud Computing and m-Governance will only help the government to deploy more and more projects and monitor efficiently also. It would also save government’s money on both hardware and software.

N

Sandeep Sehgal Director-Government Vertical & ISVRed Hat India Pvt Limited

Beyond pilot projectsAdopting newer technologies like Cloud Computing and m-Governance will help the government to deploy more projects and save government’s money on hardware and software

From Archives



n the last six years there is a constant increase in the dependence on e-Governance in India as during this period, Government has introduced e-Governance in a lot of areas. Electronic tendering system, electronic tax payment, electronic transfer of funds, online exam results, online land records, online monitoring of court cases, e-Passport and many more e-Services have been introduced.

The coming six to ten years are very crucial for information age where the e-Governance shall be seen as the reason for transparency because of information available online, information sharing, less dependence on paper work and majority of the correspondence only through internet. From healthcare to education, in any field, e-Governance can be seen practically as a replacement of paper work. The main reason to bring about e-Servcies was replacement of personal interface with the officials so as to ease the process of manually going into offices and reduce the scope for corruption and brib-ery taken to ‘passing’ files. Thus is being achieved through these e-Services.

In India, a major problem is that we can’t work at fast speed, internet con-nectivity not available at village level, wherever internet is available speed is major problem, quality of power is poor, either power is not available at all and if available, there is problem of low frequency, low voltage, high voltage or black out. This is a major problem that plagues and prevents success of major initiatives taken by the government under the NeGP. There is strong digital divide too wherein, rural and urban areas don’t have equal power, broadband or resources. To bridge this gap and increase the benefit and geo-graphical reach of the various schemes and initiatives we will have to move at a very fast pace and connect the masses with latest technology from school level to working class, from district level to village level, from remotest parts of the country to highly developed metros.

IR K BANSAL Managing DirectorUniline Energy Systems Pvt. Ltd.

uniform Connectivity is the Cause for ConcernPoor connectivity, low and scattered broadband and unequal distribution of resources throws the process of e-Governance to a backward motion

“The rise of what some people have called ‘strategic corporate philantrophy’, based on public-private partnerships that seek to address areas where social needs overlap with both corporate expertise and business interest, is an important step forward” – Bill Gates, Chairman, Microsoft Corporation

June 2008

From Archives


Leaders speak

Rana Gupta Business HeadSafeNet


spotLight


spotLight

It is the trust that can make citizens cling to electronic mode of services and that trust can only come through transparency and quality of services; these can make any e-Service successful and put us on the right path of e-Governance

o, what changed over the last 75 months in e-Gov-ernance? As much as I can recall every sphere of my life went through a sea-change. The big-

gest change was in the area of communications - from having to wait endlessly for the luck to smile and be allocated a landline connection to a state where most of us hate having to receive some unsolicited calls for a new cellphone number. This provided a strong boost to an otherwise independent changing landscape in the area of banking whereby I stopped having to spend one Saturday morning every month just deal with my own money and now can access my money through a slew of mecha-nisms (internet, ATM, credit cards, debit cards) ever having to actually visit the branch and that too on 24x7 basis.

This easy access to money and transfer from one account to another, opened the pos-sibilities for a life without hassles - be it making movie reservations without having to visit cin-emas or booking an air/railway ticket without having to physically go to reservation centers, it made the life easier besides making additional hours available for valuable utilisation instead of having to wait in queues. Proliferation of data networks and mobile devices led to paper-less offices and then the virtual offices. I can be anywhere in the world and spending time with my family and yet on top of critical official matters. Summarily, changes in the past have been to the benefit of masses and have worked towards making it easier going through the daily chores of life.

Convenience led to better quality of life and was certainly a driver. However, just like while good marketing campaign can attract pros-pects to try a product/service it is ultimately the quality of the product/service that leads to a sustainable adoption, while the convenience drove people to try the non-conventional ways of doing banking it required them to place their “trust” in dealing with a “virtual” banker to allow it to deal with their money. Earning the public trust while promising the convenience was to be the ultimate catalyst to “achieving” the intended change. I have come across so many people who wouldn’t have a credit card or have an internet banking account or even an ATM card because of their mistrust in dealing with someone who can’t be seen.

Facilitating this “trust” is key to everything we do in life. Essentially “reliability” and “avail-ability” is critical to gaining this trust and if India were to continue on the path of wide adoption of IT-enabled services then all the projects need to have the underlying elements of transaction and data integrity, transaction and data non-repudiation, transaction and data confidentiality, authentication and autho-rization to perform transactions and access/modify data, and traceability of whatever is being done within a system. Let me elaborate with some examples.

Consider that you are so used to Internet banking that you don’t think of any other to bank but to do so through Internet Banking. And without realising, you have come under the farming attack that transparently redirects the traffic meant for a banking site to a fake site that passively listens into all the data being sent

and then passes on the same to original site and becomes active only when the user undertakes a “money transfer” transaction and changes the receiving end of the transaction. So, while you thought you have logged into the genuine bank site, you have actually logged into a fake site and lost your money. One such incident and you will be scared to doing any further internet banking transaction for long time to come.

In general, as more and more workflow automation happens (whether sales tax return filing, land registration, medical insurance, life insurance, treasury) for the purpose of making the lives convenient for the citizens of India and facilitating better use of their time besides facilitating better tracking and business intel-ligence for efficient governance, policy makers and project owners need to increasingly think about the same elements of transaction and data integrity, transaction and data non-repu-diation, transaction and data confidentiality, authentication and authorization to perform transactions and access/modify data, and trace-ability to avoid leakage of sensitive data to those not authorized to have it in the first place and preventing the modification of data and trans-actions causing anarchy.

So, as next 75-months lead to a faster adaption of IT in the areas as diverse as Automated Meter-ing, Mobile Commerce, Highway and Traffic Management, Crime & Criminal Records and Intelligence we may as well do well to be ready for the worst possible scenarios. Readiness for the disaster scenarios will not only help prevent those but also build the confidence in customers, businesses and governments that India contin-ues to be a great place to live and work.

so, What has Changed and What More Will?

S

egov 75: vision


egov 75: vision


what has changed in the last six years in e-Governance in India? Where do you see e-Governance moving in the coming six to ten years?

In the last six years, e-Governance has shown a lot of transformation. Earlier e-Gov-ernance was solely a computerisation exercise. But today, it is all about business process reengineering. Today, the focus of e-Governance’s process is on business transformation. It is only possible with technology to transform business processes. Today, technology is used for the benefit of citizen. The focus is to automate the backend. Even though, it was to automate the government process, it did not give enough results. Unless the benefits are accrued to citizens, it is not going to help. So, the focus should primarily be for the benefit of citizen only and not for the benefit of a particular department. The government has to ensure that the e-Governance has to be citizen-centric. ICT is a very powerful tool. We have been discharging our responsibilities and duties and delivering services in a particular fashion. Now suddenly if you ask, us to change that it is a very tall order, but unless we do that we will not able to achieve the project, so the focus has to be business process re-engineering, that is one part. And secondly, to make use of this ICT, it is necessary that we follow certain discipline, and that discipline would come with standards. So we got to evolve certain standards so that everybody is adhering to those standards, only then we can make advantage of the technology. Thirdly, capacity building is an important aspect. Unless we create capacities, this goes along with that change man-agement and the business process re-engineering, that you got to change the mind of people. You’ve got to train them properly which is a huge challenge, because it requires lot of effort, lot of time and you’ve got to build this capacity across the government, and across the country. This means it includes right from the top most level to the lowest level, within the government and even outside the government. So to create capacity among the public, we go in for the communication and aware-ness kind of a programme and to create the capacity within the government we go in for training and capacity building programme. So our focus is basically on three

citizen-centric”

Shankar Aggarwal,

one of the prominent

e-Governancet

practitioners, is

responsible for realising

the government’s

vision to make services

accessible to the

common man through

the use of information

and communications

technology. The

Additional Secretary,

Department

of Information

Technology, Ministry of

Communications and

Information Technology,

shares his mission and

vision with Dr Ravi Gupta

and Rajeshree Dutta

Kumar.

“e-governance has to be

Shankar Aggarwal Additional Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology

egov 75: vision


areas: capacity building, communica-tion awareness, standard.

How successful has the journey of NeGP been so far? Is there a roadmap to change e-Governance in the coming years?e-Governance is required for public transparency, accountability, efficiency and making life simpler. There is a need to use mobile technology. Today mobile has reached every nook and corner of the country. Mobile governance is going to be the key component of our endeav-

ours to take the NeGP to the next level. We have to create a policy environment so that we can achieve what we want. Mobile phones have a far deeper reach than the internet as nearly 70 crore people have got a mobile connection. That means mobile technology has reached very remote villages also. This means a mechanism is available to com-municate information, transfer infor-mation, seek information, and once you have a communication channel you can seek services, you can deliver services. People are unable to make use of the internet primarily because only two percent of people speak English and most of the content on the internet is in English. We have to have a greater focus on the local language and regional lan-guages. We are trying to convert infor-mation in the local languages and we have already notified a certain standard so that people are able to share informa-tion in different languages.

Out of 27 MMPs, 24 have been approved. In addition to these, what is important is that to ensure whether it is citizen-centric. The NeGP has primar-ily two parts. The first was delivery of services under which we had identified 27 Mission Mode Projects (MMPs). Of

the implementation of negp

“Dit will act as afacilitator anD catalyst for

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egov 75: vision


the implementation of negp

“Dit will act as afacilitator anD catalyst for

by various ministries” GettING PeRSoNAl

eDucation

M. Tech, Computer

Science, IIT

B. Tech, Electronic IIT

experience in

various fielDs

e-Governance,

Housing and Urban

Development,

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Taxes, Roadways,

Divisional and District

www.eworldforum.net

these, 24 projects have been approved by the competent authority and most of these have gone live. However, as far as replication and national roll out is con-cerned, there may be some issues which may have to be addressed, but things are moving at a very fast pace. We have cre-ated State Wide Area Networks (SWAN), the secure network for government oper-ation; State Data Centres (SDC), which are the repository of all information and applications; and the third is Common Service Centres (CSCs), also known as tele-centres. These are the centres at the front end where a citizen can go to seek services.

DIt has been the main driver of NeGP for the past so many years, what is

on DIt’s agenda as far as technology applications are concerned?Content for applications needs to be developed at this point of time. We are at a stage where the the basic infrastructure is getting ready, now we have to fill it up with applications and content. Though it is not a part of DIT, we still have to and will make efforts on this, because we have to improve connectivity. Inspite of lot of efforts, we have not been able to do so in the past years. Another key focus on DIT’s agenda is m-Governance. We all realise the potential of mobile phone as a technology but now we need to tap its potential. It is the biggest asset now as it is accessible by everyone and thus can be used to provide various services. Mobile technology will definitely be a key area of focus in the coming years.

Which according to you is more significant—connectivity, content or capacity?All the three are very important. If there is no connectivity, technology is of no use. If there is no content, merely having connectivity is of no use. All three are interlinked and all three are very impor-tant. It is all a vicious circle, content is not available because there is no con-nectivity. At the same time, if content is there and no connectivity is available, then it becomes useless. So, both con-tent and connectivity are necessary to be developed. Many CSC programmes are not working out due to lack of con-nectivity. Though SWANs, SDCs are available, without connectivity how

is it possible to implement them. The main reason for the not-so-successful status of SWAN can be attributed to low connectivity.

Many states are implementing projects and achieving success. But we are not able to replicate success, what do you think is the reason for this?Learning from one state’s success is good but not always practical. Rate of literacy is one of the main reasons for this. Every state has a different level of literacy and thus every project is not feasible in every state. The willingness to learn and to implement it is to very essential in this whole process. All this can be achieved by education. Unless the conducive environment is created which will comprise of political will, education and implementation, success cannot be achieved. Fortunately, at least no one is questioning e-Governance today, it has become a common term and everyone is aware of it now. With time maybe we will be able to replicate success.

What will be the role of DIt in the next five years?DIT will play an important role in the next five years. It will act as a facilitator and catalyst for the implementation of NeGP by various Ministries and State Governments and also provide technical assistance. In addition, DIT is also imple-menting pilot, infrastructure, technical, special projects and will realise the goal of Process Re-engineering across all govern-ment departments.

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e-DeveloPMeNt1-3 august 2011

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