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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How IT can Improve our Lives

We read in newspapers about fraudulent sale of a property to more than one person or sale of a property which is already mortgaged. Unscrupulous owners get certified copy of sale deed of their property from the office of sub-registrar after faking loss of original document. With this one property is sold to two buyers or mortgaged with two banks. Such an activity is possible because there is no mechanism in place to enable people to find details of ownership of properties from the government record quickly and reliably.
There is no system for maintenance of record of right in respect of urban properties in most of our cities and Delhi is no exception to the same. After a property is converted from lease hold to free hold, DDA stops recording change of ownership. Developers like DLF who developed colonies like Hauz Khas, Greater Kailash etc. were not mandated to keep record of change of ownership of properties developed by them. MCD does keep record of owners but it is for payment of property tax only. It is not the record of right. Thus all past sale transactions of a property are recorded in the sale deed. Also the prospective buyers and mortgaging banks have to spend lots of money in getting records of sub-registrar checked by revenue advocates before actual transaction gets conducted. Even after that, incidents of double sale do take place. These can be avoided if particulars of all properties, names of latest owners as per sale deed and the fact whether property is mortgaged or disputed, are put on Internet with simple search mechanism. The banks and Financial Institutions could also have access to such database on real time basis to record and update details of mortgage, etc.
This can be achieved by drawing lessons from the International award winning computerized land record system of Karnataka called ‘Bhoomi’, and the Computerized system for registration of sale deed of Delhi called ‘e-Dastavej’. These are not only the well known examples of use of Information Technology (IT) in Government but also ones to show way on how to achieve this task. Those who had to wait for days to get a patta from Tehsildar’s office or the original sale deed from the office of sub-registrar would vouch for the comfort IT has brought to the common man.
Computerization of records of agricultural land and registration of sale deed/ lease deed etc. are two projects out of dozen odd mission mode projects identified for implementation in all states in a time bound manner under National e-Governance Plan. In many states IT has enabled people to get copies of ‘patta’ (land record) of agricultural land across the counter or through a touch screen kiosk. In many states including Delhi, the entire record of agricultural land can be seen on the Internet by selecting village and khasra number. Use of computers has led to drastic reduction of turnaround time of registration of sale deed, lease deed and other such documents. It used to take few weeks or months to get back the original record after registration of such records. Now they are returned in an hour. Photographs of buyers and sellers are taken using digital camera and the documents are scanned and archived for quick retrieval. Quick search on property number or buyer or seller is possible today on this database. The entire data on registration is being made available on its website by South-West district in Delhi. Very soon it is expected to be made available for entire Delhi., which will enable people to check authenticity of sale deeds etc. online before they buy a property.

This way the first step towards creation of database on urban properties and their buyers has already been taken. This needs to be further augmented by adding to it all such transactions which have taken place in past. Going back in past upto 1950 or so will suffice. Simultaneously conversion of all records of properties developed by DDA and other properties developed during last 50 years or so into electronic database will be required. Both of them when merged, cleaned and further refined will provide the platform to start this service, which will go a long way in solving the problem of lack of record of right for urban properties in Delhi till a law is made to enable city government to determine records of right and issue ‘patta’ to owners after conducting settlement. Search from this database could be made a paid service to sustain the project in the long run.
Even in the exercise of preparation of records of rights IT can play a major role. Base digital map of Delhi city has already been prepared on which toponomic data (House Number and colony name etc) needs to be recorded and settlement done. Some cities in our country have already started this exercise. Preparation of records of right for urban properties, like the way it is done for agricultural land, will eliminate lots of property litigation and will also ensure that the properties can be used as collateral for raising capital from market. Lack of this facility has led to properties worth lakhs of crores being blocked; a phenomenon explained beautifully by Hernando de Soto in his book, "Mystery of Capital"