Why India needs to revise its eGovernance Strategy

The National eGovernance Plan (NeGP) was drafted in May 2006 with a vision to make all Government services accessible to the common man in his locality, through common service delivery outlets at affordable costs to realise the basic needs of the common man. Other objectives behind this grand scheme are efficiency, transparency and reliability of such services. After seven years, time has come to take a stock of situation and suggest corrective steps.

 ICT infrastructure is in place in most of the states which are implementing 14 mission mode projects under NeGP. 30 out of 35 states/UTs have State Wide Area Network (SWAN) connecting offices from state HQ to district HQ to Block/Taluk HQ. Similarly 19 States/UTs have their State Data Centers (SDCs) operational and 14 more are expected to become operational by end of this year. The target of setting of 100,000 Common Service Centres (CSCs) has already been achieved. Thus basic ICT infra is in place in majority of states.

When it comes to service delivery electronically the result has been mixed one. The central government agencies have been successful in rolling out their applications thus offering electronic services to customers be it Income Tax or Excise Tax or Customs or Company registration or Passport or UID or Banks/Insurance companies. Few like postal department are in the midst of implementing their solution which will benefit large number of citizens, especially in the rural areas. However, the situation is not good especially when we look at services provided by state government agencies. In large number of State MMPs, the intended clients and beneficiaries are yet to get services electronically. Preparation and issue of ‘Driving License’ and ‘Registration Certificate’ is the only service which has been automated in all 35 states/UTs. Few departments like land records department and VAT are offering few services electronically in majority of States/UTs. Few states/UTs have done some good work in the field of PDS, Panchyat and eDistrict. Thus out of 14 state MMPs only one is under post implementation stage and nine are under various stages of implementation. Remaining four programs pertain to important sectors like food, employment, health and education and they are far away from delivering services electronically. PDS and Employment Exchange are under ‘design & development’ whereas Health and Education are still under conceptualization stage.   

 Major reasons behind this delay are the slow pace of automation of departmental processes, long and tedious procurement system of various enabling ICT (including ICT expertise) required by the departments/agencies, lack of ICT-skilled staff etc.

With changes in the technology landscape since 2006, including increased e-readiness of end users (e.g. explosive growth in mobile phones) and advent of new technologies like cloud, the time has come to re-visit the approach and strategy of eGovernance in India. Another driver is the need to accelerate electronic service delivery which will facilitate smooth implementation of proposed Electronic Service Delivery Rule.

Therefore, in this context, need is to come up with next generation of the eGovernance strategy which will look at the following components:

·         Provisioning of ICT infrastructure (compute, storage, network and gateway) to departments and agencies “On Demand” rather than their procuring it on their own. Also it will bring the required flexibility in supply and take care of peaks associated with demand of resources on days when examination results are published or last few days of filing returns etc. Cloud makes it easy to provide these on demand and reduces the total cost for all departments put together.
·         Easy availability of “Applications” which can be shared/procured in a convenient manner. There are many applications developed in states which can be used by other states. However, a mechanism is needed to enable easy sharing of such successful applications. Again Cloud can come to help with national information utility which can do the work of customization of cloud based software for other states and provide handholding support in deployment and training of their staff. Under this arrangement successful applications from states can be white labelled so that psychological barrier of using applications from other states will go away.   
·         Enhanced cyber security, which has been a cause of concern with increasing automation and digitization of government data.
·         Simplified procurement specially when state departments will buy applications as a service or resources on pay and use basis.
·         Improved ICT Governance, Organization, Capacity and Skills
·         Creation of unified ICT infrastructure for Government entities from existing fragmented ICT infra to accelerate e-service delivery right down to the village level and to facilitate optimal utilization and economy in expenditure
·         Common standards, and
·         Holistic strategic control over ICT infra of the government

International Experience

 Countries like UK, Canada etc. have also faced similar challenges on their eGovernance journey and they have revised their eGovernance strategy in last two-three years. It would be worthwhile to have a look at what has been their experience as they have been ahead of India on the eGov path. In March 2011, the UK Government came up with an updated ICT strategy with the following objectives:

·         Reducing waste and project failure, and stimulating economic growth

·         Creating a common ICT infrastructure
·         Using ICT to enable and deliver change
·         Strengthening governance

 The Canadian government formed Shared Services Canada (SSC) in August 2011 to consolidate and streamline the delivery of IT infrastructure services, specifically email, data centre and network services to 43 Government of Canada institutions representing 95% of the federal IT infrastructure spending. The raison d’être of this program is reduction of costs and improvement of security while maximizing efficiencies and minimizing risks. The guiding principles for transformation under SSC are:

·         Innovation

·         Cost Efficiency

·         Security

·         Quality
·         Rationalization

·         Standardization
·         Sustainability

Recently the Government of India came out with its Cloud Policy and application delivery thru the same. Similarly policy on ‘Standards’ and ‘Cyber Security’ has been announced. The Expert Committee under Nandan Nilekani has submitted its report on HR Policy for eGovernance. All these have come up one by one without having a bigger picture in view. Keeping in view the change in landscape, both on technological front as well as on implementation of NeGP, it would be advisable to look beyond ICT provisioning, especially the following while developing the next generation of eGov strategy:

·         ICT governance, organization, capability and skills inside the government
·         Common standards
·         Reference architecture
·         Procurement and
·         Service management

Putting all these together in a framework with defined business architecture can be the new eGovernance Strategy which we may call as NeGP 2.0. Thus the NeGP 2.0 should be looked at as a change programme driven by a need to save money, integrate and join up ICT across the government to help accelerate delivery of services electronically to citizens and businesses. The joined up ICT would enable joined up services wherever required/appropriate. It will lead to creation of a new marketplace for procurement of ICT services delivered over network for central as well as state/local government departments/agencies. It will also lead to development of the required ICT capability and skills in the government; common standards and reference architecture; security and identity assurance; and service management. The suggested business architecture for enabling better public services with greater citizen satisfaction, increased efficiency and increased number of transactions is shown below.

Policy in Place

Policy in Place

Policy in Place