Good Governance Magazine

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‘e’ ‘a’

EDIT

When comes

comes before

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e all know of the structure of alphabets. But when it comes to policy we bend the rules. e-governance is currently the priority…huge sums are spent on individual projects. The letter e has suddenly got significance from being in a hierarchy. No one above in the hierarchy would like the setup in a normal government or corporate setup to change because it/he/she shows scope; that too in a functional and accepted administrative policy.

But today, for many reasons, e has jumped the appraisal system to rule the administrative hierarchy, even though it is not ready to assume the role. A close example of the current scenario would be a rudimentary comparison with the spending capacity of India in its current form. ‘We buy cars irrespective of the prices and irrespective of the infrastructure readiness and still blame the traffic.’

When India is not ready, infrastructurally, to have a one-car-per-home proposition, who is to blame? Same goes with e-readiness. The government is spending crores on several projects directed towards education, health, traffic, crime, land etc., but till the infrastructure is ready, we are high-jumping.

In this issue you will mainly find a change in the look and feel of the magazine, a basic idea to give an impression that we are also changing according to the ground level requisites of implementation of e-governance projects. Selected topics like tranfers of IAS officials as well as a roadmap to e-governance vision 2020 make this issue.

Of course, the spotlight is on Aadhaar, which has created a protagonist image for us in regards to assuring ourselves as being citizens of India while streamling multiple government service availability.

While we will need your inputs on the contents of future issue of the magazine, we would also request you to write to us in a broader aspect in terms of improving e-governance implementation in the country.

We need your inputs to make this magazine more interactive. Do try.

The coming issue will focus on Agriculture e-governance and any suggestion or input will of great value.

For me, if i comes before a, the difference would be profound. So send your ‘i-view’ to us and let’s make a difference.

Vipin Balakrishnan Publisher Email: editor@goodgov.in

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E-People of July 2011 This section identifies five people every month from the government, PSUs as well as the IT business world, who have played a significant role in taking governance in India to the next level. They are people who have strived hard, thought strategically for long term solutions, fought the ground realities and challenges faced by the country but yet devised ways to succeed.

Dr Ajay Kumar, Joint Secretary, DIT of the central Ministry of Telecom and IT

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An IIT Kanpur alumnus, Dr Ajay Kumar did his MS in Applied Economics and his PhD in Business Administration at the University of Minnesota in the US. An IAS officer, Dr Kumar’s remarkable contribution towards uplift of the society was evident during the three decades of service with the Kerala state government.

During this tenure, he guided the industrial and technological initiatives for three different departments. He has been the main force in restructuring of several state public undertakings under Asian Development Bank programmes; providing leadership to KELTRON during a critical period in the undertaking’s history and putting the state firmly on the path to e-governance, citizen e-mpowerment and full Net connectivity.

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Abhishek Singh, Director, e-governance at Department of Information Technology Abhishek Singh is an IIT Kanpur alumnus. He joined the IAS in 1995 and since then has worked in various capacities in Nagaland and Uttar Pradesh.

He has been extensively involved in policy formulation, implementation of developmental schemes at grass roots level, and implementation of several e-governance projects in Nagaland and UP. As Secretary IT, Government of Nagaland he was directly involved in conceptualizing and implementing e-governance Projects like SWAN, Common Service Centers for Single Point delivery of Government services, State Data Center and other projects under the National E-governance Plan. Currently, he is driving the e-governance programme at DIT as head of the Common Services Centers Scheme and the e District project.

Rajeev Chawla, Managing Director of Mysore Sales International Limited (MSIL) Rajeev Chawla, currently Managing Director of Mysore Sales International Limited (MSIL) is widely considered to be the brain behind ‘Bhoomi’, the computerised rural land record system which put Karnataka state at the top of e-governance achievers. A BTech in electrical engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1984, Chawla implemented Computerisation of Rural Land Records of 70 Lakh farmers of Karnataka in 2003, achieved for the first time in the Country. He has received numerous accolades including the Prime Minister’s Award for Public Service in 2007 and UN Public Service Award in 2006 for implementation. In addition to Bhoomi, he has also implemented fundamental reforms in Land records namely integration of Spatial Data and Textual Data relating to land records, use of modern technology in Spatial survey, bolstering the capacity of the land records department of Karnataka.

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For video interviews and coverage, visit http://egovreach.in/index.php/pages/aadhaar_conference

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Nandan Nilekani, Chairman, UIDAI “Aadhaar will open up a lot of opportunities and we are looking at a postAadhaar world where every Indian has an Aadhaar number, a mobile number and an account number, since applications will be developed around these elements.”

Shankar Aggarwal, Addl. Secretary, DIT “India is diverse and has today become the third fastest growing country in the world. With a growth rate of 8-8.5%, it surely is envy to the world, but if looked more closely we will see that the growth is neither sufficient nor sustainable. But with the help of ICT, we can not only achieve a growth rate of 11 percent but also achieve all inclusive sustainable growth.”

Satwant Singh, Executive Director, IOC “The LPG distribution in the country has many challenges in the process, but with Aadhaar we will ensure subsidized LPG to genuine customers. We are integrating our delivery software, IndSoft with Aadhaar for authentication and enrolment.”

L P Rai, DG, Rural Business, SBI “Aadhaar project will result in a large identifiable customers for opening of Adhaar enabled account, reduction in servicing costs for Banks – as Adhaar letter is acceptable KYC document for small value accounts and create an interoperable platform across the country”

S K Gupta, Chief Project Officer, NPCI Aadhaar will enable uniform standards for account opening, standardised mode of disbursements of EBT and other government schemes, enable transactions in any environment and acceptance devices deployed should be able to seamlessly migrate to online transaction environment whenever considered feasible.

NASSCOM-Aadhaar Conference Roundup

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he NASSCOM-Aadhaar two-day conference at Bangalore in June was an immensely successful event with a huge congregation of Developers and Architects from Software Products and Services Companies, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), Academia, Budding Architects and Solutions Developers from Engineering Colleges, In-house Developer and Architect teams from Government, Banks, Telecom Sector etc deeply involving themselves into every session. The two days saw the enthusiastic audience not leaving a single opportunity to ask their doubts or giving suggestions on Aadhaar. Among the many highlights, the foremost was the presence of Nandan Nilekani, Chairman, UIDAI and a contingent of about 50 Aadhaar technology team members.

The conference, ‘Next Generation Service Delivery-Enabled by Aadhaar’, organized by NASSCOM in partnership with UIDAI, took off on 22nd June 2011 with a deep-dive Aadhaar Developer Track.

Day 1 The morning session, ‘Aadhaar Under the Hood’ saw Srikanth Nadhamuni, Head of Technology, UIDAI leading the session with Sanjay Jain, Chief

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Product Manager, UIDAI speaking on APIs & Standards. Dr. Vivek Raghavan, Volunteer, UIDAI gave insights into Biometrics 101 for Developers.

Demystifying the Aadhaar platform, Dr. Pramod Varma, Chief Architect, UIDAI and Jagadish Babu, Volunteer, UIDAI had a ground level dialogue on authentication of APIs with an interactive demonstration.

The afternoon session involved the industry and its perspective of building on the applications of Aadhaar. Unlike the morning, the session which had the UIDAI technology team approaching together, the afternoon session was more independent in nature, rightly so, because it had industry specific speakers. Revolving on the theme ‘Integrate with and Innovate for Aadhaar’, the session began with a presentation on Multiplying Opportunities for Applications by Narendra Bhandari, Director, Intel Software and Services Group. The second speaker was Shashank Jain, Head R&D Unit, Nokia who spoke on Mobile Platform as an Enabler for Aadhaar. Instances of Possible Disruption by Aadhaar, was the topic on which Amitabh Nag, Head India – Central Government, Tata Consultancy Services, gave an insight into.

Pari Natrajan, CEO, Zinnov spoke on ‘Aadhaar as a Service (Technology Enablement)’.

v presented the vision of National e-Governance Plan while also stressing on electronic service delivery and the role of Aadhaar.

Speaking about the development potential of the country and the challenges faced by it, he said, “India is diverse and has today become the third fastest growing country in the world. With a growth rate of 8-8.5%, it surely is envy to the world, but if looked more closely we will see that the growth is neither sufficient nor sustainable. But with the help of ICT, we can not only achieve a growth rate of 11 percent but also achieve all inclusive sustainable growth.”

Rama Vedashree (center), Vice President: e-governance initiatives, NASSCOM & Abhishek Jee, Director (extreme left), NASSCOM with the UIDAI Technology team

Nandan Nilekani, Chairman, UIDAI addressed the audience at the end of the session. “Aadhaar will open up a lot of opportunities and we are looking at a post-Aadhaar world where every Indian has an Aadhaar number, a mobile number and an account number, since applications will be developed around these elements,” he said.

In the evening, Nandan Nilekani inaugurated an Expo showcasing some innovative solutions and services.

Day 2 The second day of the two-day conference began with a welcome address

by Som Mittal, President, NASSCOM. Addressing the audience including representatives from Central and state governments, leading banks, public and private sector companies, Telecom companies, Academia, IT and BPO companies, etc, Mittal said, “This is truly a place where all stakeholders have come together to share ideas on the largest project the world has witnessed in IT. Aadhaar is definitely a transformation agenda by the government using technology, which will serve each one of us.”

Nandan Nilekani delivered the keynote address in which he briefly took the audience back to the time when UID was initiated and then to the present and future implications of the project. “The design principle of Aadhaar is to create an ecosystem for various activities that we undertake and in these ecosystems, the application ecosystem is the most crucial since we are creating a national identity management platform,” he said. He also stressed on a future reality by stating that Aadhaar will become the automatic Know Your Customer (KYC) so that a stage will come when there is a streamlined KYC available for any service right from a bank account to PDS to LPG cylinders to proof of address, etc.

K. Ganga, DDG UIDAI then gave a presentation on Aadhaar Authentication Policy focusing on how the project ensures creation of a circle of trust and also touching upon the authentication process.

The morning then saw a session on the Technology Overview of Aadhaar presented by the technology team of Aadhaar. Srikanth Nadhamuni, Head of Technology, UIDAI gave an overview of the project; Dr. Pramod Varma, Chief Architect, UIDAI spoke on the System Architecture of Aadhaar; Dr. Vivek Raghavan, Volunteer, UIDAI and Mr. Frederic Renard, Technical Manager Sagem Morpho Security Pvt. Ltd. spoke on the integral aspect of the project - Biometrics; Sanjay Jain, Chief Product Manager, UIDAI spoke on Enrolment/APIs & Standards; and Jagadish Babu, Volunteer, UIDAI gave an authentication demo.

The second session of Day 2 focused on Next Generation Citizen Service Delivery and was moderated by Tanmoy Chakravarty from Tata Consultancy Services. Shankar Aggarwal, Add’l Secretary, DIT, Government of India

He also shared the growth of IT and ITeS industry in 2010-2011 in which he pointed that the Indian IT and ITeS industry churned revenues to the tune of US$88 billion and a contribution of 7 percent to the GDP. He also touched about Right based Policy frameworks being enacted by the government of India.

Commenting on covering the entire population under Aadhaar, he said, “I feel that we have to expedite the allocation of Aadhaar numbers to the population and involve the National Population Registrar also in the process, which I think will enable coverage of targeted population within 2-3 years.”

Ajoy Kumar Singh, Secretary Sports & Commissioner, MGNREGA, Government of Jharkhand spoke next on Aadhaar & MGNREGA in his state and touched upon financial inclusion, cash transfer, banking outlets, and integration of Aadhaar with MGNREGA. Public Distribution System was the focus of Ajit Kesari’s presentation. Representing the Department of Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Protection, Government of Madhya Pradesh, he said, “Madhya Pradesh is reforming PDS through various methodologies and Aadhaar platform is one among them. The objective of ePDS is to eliminate duplication, bogus and inaccurate ration cards using Aadhaar based biometric de-duplication, create a database with Aadhaar for use of all departments in the state and empower consumers to take control of their entitlements and its sale using personalized secured food coupons.

MPePDS is monitored by a project management software and application software.”

Madhya Pradesh is reforming PDS through various methodologies and Aadhaar platform is one among them. The objective of e-PDS is to eliminate duplication, bogus and inaccurate ration cards using Aadhaar based biometric de-duplication, create a database with Aadhaar for use of all departments so that consumers can take control of their entitlements and its sale using personalized secured food coupons.

Ajit Kesari, Department of Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Protection, Government of Madhya Pradesh

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v Giving an industry perspective Sandeep Raina, Director-Engineering, CISCO shed light on the unique aspects of a network and the importance of the right architectural approach for multiple networks. He opined that Aadhaar would play the role of a converged IP network integrating all services providing a human network for the government.

Satwant Singh, Executive Director, Indian Oil Corporation spoke about the role of Aadhaar in LPG Distribution. Giving an overview of the LPG distribution in the country and pointing out the challenges faced in the process, he shared the role of Aadhaar in ensuring subsidized LPG to genuine customers. “We are integrating our delivery software, IndSoft with Aadhaar for authentication and enrolment,” he said.

The third session of the day was on Making Financial Inclusion a Reality.

Moderated by Satya Sankar Mishra, Head of Business Solutions, Tata Consultancy Services, the session involved presentations from bankers, both national and private focusing on ways of financial inclusion utilizing the Aadhaar platform. L P Rai, DG, Rural Business, SBI gave a financial inclusion landscape of the country and few reasons for exclusion.

According to him, three mission critical ingredients have to be looked at for making the inclusion a reality; technology, economic viability and business correspondent network. He also outlined benefits of Aadhaar enabled financial inclusion.

S K Gupta, Chief Project Officer, NPCI pointed out the issues in financial

He further stated that as per a UN survey, 50 percent of teachers don’t exist in the schools but salary is promptly collected. “Aadhaar would become a backbone for all our ills including those of education and health,” Giri said.

Rajendra S Pawar, Chairman & Co-Founder, NIIT & Chairman, NASSCOM presided over the session and felt no one system can be a remedy for all problems, but an attempt can definitely be made to address the problems.

The Telecom track was moderated by Dr. Jai Menon, Director Global Innovation & IT, Bharti Airtel. The first speaker, A.K.Mittal, DDG, Department of Telecommunication gave a government perspective on the use of UID in telecom sector. He focused on UID’s role in negating fake POA and POI submitted for phone or mobile connections.

Dr Menon then spoke on the opportunities that the Telecom industry can leverage through the Aadhaar platform, which according to him is an important aspect of identity required for mobility. He touched upon the price, reach and ease of use & relevance of mobile devices to convey the innovation that can be built upon using the UID platform.

The next was a passionate presentation by Rajan S Mathews, Director General, COAI (Cellular Operators Association of India). He gave the mobile operators perspective on the significance of Aadhaar and the benefits of Aadhaar based verification for operators. The last speaker, Sriram Ratnam, Partner, Advisory services, TCE gave an independent perspective on

A Close-up shot of dignitaries

inclusion and how Aadhaar can address the challenges. He also spoke on NPCI’s UID based inter-operable financial inclusion and about RuPayNPCI’s domestic card scheme as well as its architecture of Aadhaar based payment system. T V Seshadri, General Manager, MasterCard Worldwide gave a presentation on the advantages of Aadhaar as an enabler in financial inclusion at marginal costs. Avijit Saha, GM, Rural & Inclusive Business, ICICI Bank gave a presentation on inclusive banking and how it is showing the way for growth. The final presentation was by Satya Sankar Mishra, who gave a presentation on TCS in financial inclusion.

Session four of the Day 2 had two parallel tracks – Track 1 was on the ole of Aadhaar in Education and Health Sectors and Track 2 was on the role of Aadhaar in Telecom Sector. The Education and Health track focused on the benefits of Aadhaar and hoped Aadhaar to be a major boost to both the sectors. Prof. V.N. Rajasekharan Pillai, Vice Chancellor, IGNOU stressed that just like financial inclusion and several other inclusions, inclusion of growth can only happen with inclusion of education. He also stressed the necessity of giving access and providing opportunities to that size of population which has been deprived of all facilities for education.

Krishna Giri, Managing Director of Accenture for Health and Public Service in Asia Pacific ridiculed the claim in some quarters of India becoming a super power. “Our fundamentals have to be fixed much before we start talking about becoming a super power and Aadhaar would be the right tool in fixing up the fundamentals,” he said.

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Aadhaar and telecom touching on accessibility offered by mobiles helping higher banking penetration with Aadhaar as an enabler. He also noted that Aadhaar has the potential to create a billion dollar opportunity for telecom operators.

The fifth and final session of the two-day conference was on Developer and Innovation Ecosystem of Aadhaar. The session was moderated by Sharad Sharma, Chair Product Forum NASSCOM. Prof. Arun Sundarajan, Associate Professor and NEC Faculty Fellow Leonard N.Stern School of Business, New York University called up on all players involved in UID project to strengthen the ecosystem to make Aadhaar a big success story.

“A sound social technical system seeding the ecosystem and sustaining the same are the vital requirements for the successful application of the UID feature,” he said.

Reflecting on pre-electronification days of the Indian Railways, Uttam Nayak, Group Country Manager - India & South Asia, Visa then highlighted the benefits of online reservation and advantages the citizens and railways are now able to enjoy. Dr. P.R.Subramanya, Vice President, Technology (GeoAmida), Geodesic Limited argued on having certain facilitation to convert the Aadhaar numbers for enabling big business. He also stressed for an ecosystem to be developed in coherence.

Rajendra S Pawar, Chairman & Co-Founder, NIIT & Chairman, NASSCOM gave his concluding remarks and Rama Vedashree, Vice-President, NASSCOM proposed a vote of thanks. n

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“There is no Delay”

Aadhaar is technologically intensive, but more than that it is the awareness level which will ensure that the project succeeds. How are you ensuring that awareness is being built in a proper channel?

Obviously, awareness of Aadhaar and its benefit is very important. At this point, we are in the midst of enrolment and have close to 1 crore people enrolled. We have launched communication programmes across states. I think we have been getting very good response to the programmes. We are easily enrolling at a rate of 2-3 lakhs per day. The next step is to look at applications using Aadhaar and that is the purpose of this event; awareness building on the application side of Aadhaar.

How have the states responded to the project?

States have been very proactive. We are already enrolling in 11 states. Many states have launched in all districts tying up with multi enrolment partners. In the next few months, I am sure many states would come online.

What is your take on the delay in achieving set targets?

I do not agree that there is any delay. We had said in the beginning, we would be on in 18 months, but we launched in 14 months! Secondly, we said that we will start enrolling atleast 1 million per day by October or November, and I am sure we are on the way to achieve the same. Thirdly, we will be enrolling 600 million people by 2014 and we hope that it will be achieved.

On hindsight, do you have any regrets regarding the project?

We have an excellent team, great ecosystem and overwhelming support from the community. So there are no regrets.

How supportive has the Government been in terms of budgetary allocation for the project?

We have got terrific support from the cabinet, the finance minister, the prime minister and every body concerned. We have excellent support in terms of finances and we are sure we will have no problem in securing the required finances for the future also.n

Nandan Nilekani, Chairman, UID

“the project has crossed all political boundaries” You have been able to create a platform for the developers, industry, UIDAI and the entire community with this two-day conference. What are your views on the significance of UID and the role of such platforms?

UID is a unique project, the largest international project in IT in the world. The world is watching ardently at the direction that the project is taking. It is innovative and the purpose is not just to give a card but to ensure that the benefits reach the common man. This is one project which will enable IT to touch all Indians.

From an industry perspective, it is an important project because something like this has not been attempted before. It has one of the largest database and authentication engine, which changes the way we work and most importantly, it creates a path for many applications. It enables many new ways for people to leverage. A large number of small and medium companies can utilize this platform. So in many ways, Aadhaar can be a launch platform for many companies.

The target is to achieve half of the population under the UID project. With the general elections stated to be held around that time, do you think it could be cause for hindrance in the flow of the project?

Som Mittal, President, NASSCOM

I think the project has crossed all political boundaries. All states have embraced the project and there is an overall national support. This project just cannot be opposed as it touches every life. The democratic system of the country has proved that the economic agenda is not compromised. n

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“Wave three is about the imagination and innovation of all the partners” What are your comments on awareness being built about Aadhaar?

As far as awareness is concerned, we have an IEC group within UIDAI, which is involved and concerned with information, education and communication.

This group has representation in the head quarters and regional offices as well. They take care of effective communication of all information. They also take the help of various governments and partners, using their channels of IEC and put up a combined awareness programme.

At the moment, the concentration has been on enrolment because it was our primary activity. Now we are going to commence the authentication services and the IEC group will start focusing on it.

Security of authentication is crucial and for this purpose the tool kit that we will give the IEC members will indicate the features that are in the system, so as to ensure that there is no compromise on security aspects.

This will be emphasized in the IEC material that will be used by them.

We are looking at all kinds of IEC– leaflets, audio-visual, conference, door-to-door – so all the typical activities that

The concentration has been on enrolment because it was our primary activity. Now we are going to commence the authentication services and the IEC group will start focusing on it. Security of authentication is crucial and for this purpose the tool kit that we will give the IEC members will indicate the features that are in the system, so as to ensure that there is no compromise on security aspects.

are used to promote social welfare schemes will be used. And it will not be IEC for residents, but also for the stakeholders.

UID is getting into the wave two of the whole project from wave one, which was enrolment and infrastructure creation. Could you elucidate on what the wave two holds for UID? The wave two will be those welfare programmes or government programmes where the touch-point with the beneficiaries is high and the kind of expenditure incurred by the government is huge.

So we expect those programmes to get the first attention along with banking and financial inclusion which are the most difficult.

K Ganga, DDG - Finance, UIDAI Once these are attended to, we move to wave three which mainly is about the imagination and innovation of all the partners. They could add as many applications, build touch-points with any kind of service and use Aadhaar for it. n

“our current systems are capable of having enrollment of 1-2 lakh every day” By now, people have come to know about the Unique Identity Card, but can you take us a couple of years back and rebuild the story as it went on to grow big?

Dr Pramod Varma, Chief Architect, UIDAI

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The system really developed and started only during the end of April or early May and it was simply challenging because when we started in May, the launch time frame was in April. And as you know no software gets developed in two months. So as an organization it was very important that we internally prioritize as to what needs to be launched and what can wait subsequently. So we created the initial pilot plan that was called as ‘Release One’ and then successfully released on August 15th starting with enrolling operators, support staff and so on.

We also planned for the official launch by the Prime Minister in September.

We are in the government system and the real big challenge was to create a complex system very rapidly. We started rolling out a new software aggressively every month in a rapid manner which allowed us to clearly move ahead without stopping the programme.

The next version of the software with a big upgrade came in about January 2011 which allowed us enrollment from 10,000 people a day to one lakh people a day.

So our current systems are capable of having enrollment of 1-2 lakh every day. Now we are coming out with a big release in the next few weeks which will take us to enrollment of half a million every day. Eventually going to one million is our stated goal by October.

How big is the team at UID? The core technology team itself is not very large; we have about a handful of people, literally less than ten people in the organization with expertise that are providing the architectural direction, training and monitoring etc. But the actual developer or software development is done by the Mindtree as an organization. We have about four core bodies: Enrollment, Authentication, Business intelligence and portal aspect of it as well as fraud detection. So these are the four big modules if you want to classify it that way. n

By Manohar Yadavatti

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“No system is 100 percent fool proof” Can you brief us on the structure of UIDAI and what technology means to UID? The idea of UID technology is to help deliver services to the residents of India through a identity platform which is basically to ensure that people can get enrolled using their biometric and demographic data which can later be used to authenticate themselves in order to get government services delivered to them. So that is the technology we are building.

We know of lapses in social security numbers in the United States and elsewhere. For UID, what is the learning in the process?

We actually studied a number of countries which have already done such identity cards or are building right now. None of them have done online identities. This is really very new and an advanced system. We have heard of many drawbacks of ID cards in some countries like the social security number of the US. It expects a lot of information about the resident in the number itself. So we learnt that a lot of privacy is lost. We have removed some of the problems which existed in the numbering system and implement them in random.

What’s the way out if the ID card is lost?

There will be support systems in case they lose their Aadhaar cards and as long as they are able to provide their Aadhaar number and be able to authenticate themselves, there will be support for them.

Is there any inherent device in the application to avoid duplication?

One of the USP of the UID Project is to ensure minimal duplicity. We ensure so by using biometrics and since our biometric points are finger prints which are unique by itself, we will be able to ensure that each individual has one identity characteristic.

Do you foresee misuse of Aadhaar cards in the future?

No system is hundred percent fool proof. So it is hard to make a blanket

statement that they are hundred percent secure. But with the kinds of technologies that are available today, you have a high degree of authentication. It will certainly help in improving the situation of misuse.

There is a section in the civil society which is protesting the idea of UID. What is your reaction for their concerns?

I think some of them are concerned about the data privacy so that information about the residents does not get used by companies or private companies to their advantage. I think that is a valid concern to be taken care of. In fact we have taken a lot of precaution to ensure that the data privacy of the citizen is maintained.

What are the probable number of services that can be enabled by using the UID card?

Srikanth Nadhamuni, Head of Technology, UIDAI

Application developers can build a lot of them depending upon the requirements of the government and the needs of the people. The obvious things people are thinking now are the PDS, NREGA, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan and so on. But there are several financial applications like banking wherein people can withdraw money from their village, transact in a kirana shop with a low cost micro device or send money to spouse at a far off place… The number of applications that can be built is left to our imagination.

By Manohar Yadavatti

“We are in a stage where we can roll out large number of Aadhaar packets” Could you elaborate on the role of Bangalore regional office of UIDAI?

number of enrollment packets and be able to cover a substantial part of the state population. The target is that by next year Karnataka should be able to come to near saturation.

Bangalore regional office covers Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Pondicherry and Lakshadweep.

The progress of the Aadhaar enrollment in the last one year has been satisfactory. Now we are in a stage where we can actually begin to ramp up and roll out large number of packets to Aadhaar.

Kerala: As far as Kerala is concerned there is a great refresh now to take up enrollment at a very fast speed. The enrollment agencies have been finalized in the Kerala and particularly in the last one month, there has been active interest. We hope to cover the state by the next year and a half.

Karnataka: Karnataka was one of the first states to have begun Dr Ashok Dalwai IAS, enrollment and they took up DDG Bangalore RO, UIDAI the pilot in Tumkur and Mysore districts and they have been able to cover around 85 percent of the total population. And meanwhile they have also been able to finalize their RFPs for the rest of the state and enrollment is beginning in other districts. This month they will be going live in Belgaum and Dharwad divisions followed by Bangalore and Mysore divisions, sometime in the month of July. By March 2012 they would be able to ramp up a large

Pondicherry: Enrollment is going very well in the UT and the entire state population being very small, they are targeting to cover it by December of 2011 itself. And the unique thing about Pondicherry is that they are integrating the Aadhaar number with the PDS. That way Pondicherry will be the first where the application of Aadhaar in terms of public distribution system is happening straight away.

Tamil Nadu: We are yet to start in Tamil Nadu in a big way. The central agencies like the Bankers have started involving themselves in Tamil Nadu but the state government has to begin. A decision is being taken as to whether they would like to go along with the RCI. Whatever the case, we are willing to support the state to begin enrollment in a short period of time.

The states that form the part of Bangalore region are doing well and 201112 will be an important year in terms of speed of enrollment. n

By Manohar Yadavatti

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SNAPSHOTS

UIDAI’s Technical Team during their session on the first day

Nandan Nilekani addresses the audience

Narendra Bhandari, Director, Intel Software and Services Group; Amitabh Nag, Head India – Central Government, Tata Consultancy Services; Shashank Jain, Head R&D Unit, Nokia; and Pari Natrajan, CEO, Zinnov

A Delegate asking his question to the UID Technical team

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Rama Vedashree, Vice President-e-governanace intiatives, NASSCOM

Apart from questions, there were several suggestions for the UID team

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Som Mittal, President, NASSCOM, Nandan Nilekani and Rajendra Pawar, Chairman, NASSCOM interacting on Day 2

Nandan Nilekani addressing the audience Day 2 also saw plenty of partcipation by the audience on Day 2

Ajit Kesari’s representing the Department of Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Protection, Government of Madhya Pradesh; Tanmoy Chakravarty-Tata Consultancy Services; Sandeep Raina, Director-Engineering, CISCO; Shankar Aggarwal, Add’l Secretary, DIT; Ajoy Kumar Singh, Secretary Sports & Commissioner, MGNREGA, Government of Jharkhand; and Satwant Singh, Executive Director, Indian Oil Corporation

The UID Technical team giving their presentation on Day 2

Som Mittal with Rajan S Mathews, DG, COAI; Sriram Ratnam, Ernst &Young; A.K.Mittal, DDG, DoT; and Dr. Jai Menon, Director Global Innovation & IT, Bharti Airtel

Avijit Saha, GM, Rural & Inclusive Business, ICICI Bank; S K Gupta, CPO, NPCI; L P Rai, DG, Rural Business, SBI; T V Seshadri, GM, MasterCard; and Satya Sankar Mishra, Head of Business Solutions, TCS

The sessions witnessed a very involved audience

Speakers of ‘Developer and Innovation Ecosystem of Aadhaar’, the last session of Day 2

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E-Governace Calendar

National & International Events of Interest Workshop on Research Skills for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) projects Date: 19th July-19th August, 2011 Starts: Tuesday July 19, 2011 at 08:00AM EAT Ends: Friday August 19, 2011 at 05:00PM EAT Event Type: Training/Seminar Location: The Institute of Finance Management P.O Box 3918, Dar es Salaam Dar Es Salaam, DAR ES SALAAM TZ Price: TZS 250,000 or $250 Industry: Information technology and services Intended For: Everyone

International Conference on Issues and Challenges in Networking,Intelligence and Computing Technologies (ICNICT, 2011) Starts: Friday September 02, 2011 at 09:00AM PDT Ends: Saturday September 03, 2011 at 05:00PM PDT Event Type: Conference Region: Jalpaiguri Area, India Location: Krishna Institute of Engineering & Technology, Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh Website: http://www.kiet.edu Industry: Higher education Intended For: Targeted audience of this Conference would be representatives from Academia, Industry and Government Organizations who are involved or have interest in Computing Technologies and its applications. Research scholars and students are also encouraged.

Organization: Krishna Institue of Engineering &Technology, Ghaziabad

Central Eastern European Smart Card Association Meeting

Starts: Wednesday September 21, 2011 at 11:00AM PDT Ends: Thursday September 22, 2011 at 01:00PM PDT Event Type: Conference Location: 56 Arsenija Carnojevica, New Belgrade, Central Serbia Price: www.ceesca.org Website: http://www.ceesca.org Industry: Information technology and services Intended For: Business managers, Directors and executives, Project managers, Identity assurance managers, Logistics managers, Warehousing managers, Supply chain managers, Compliance officers, Systems architects, Consultants, Systems integrators Organization: Dinocolor Company & CEESCA club

16 JULY 2011 GOOD GOVERNANCE

UAE Customer Services Week 2011

Starts: Monday October 03, 2011 at 08:00AM GST Ends: Thursday October 06, 2011 at 05:00PM GST Event Type: Conference Location: This is a virtual event.

Price: US$ 3,999 Website: http://customerservicesweekme.com Intended For: Customer Service,Customer Relationship Management, Customer Care,Customer Experience, Customer Satisfaction,Customer Loyalty, Customer Care, Guest / Client Relations,Contact / Call Center, Service Quality, Quality Assurance, Corporate Excellence, Human Res Organization: IQPC Middle East

IT For Government 2011 - Fleming Gulf Starts:Tuesday,October 11, 2011 at 08:00AM GST Ends: Wednesday October 12, 2011 at 05:00PM GST Event Type: Conference Location: Dubai, UAE Website: http://www.fleminggulf.com/telecom-and-it/middle-east/it-forgovernment-2011 Industry: Information technology and services Intended For: Director of IT, VP, CIO / CTO, CISO – Chief Information Security Officer, Technical Director,Director Infrastructure Delivery, Director of Cyber Security, Director Command and Control Systems, Head of IT

Webit Congress

Starts: Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 09:00AM EEST Ends: Thursday, October 27, 2011 at 05:30PM EEST Location: Inter Expo Center, Sofia Website: http://www.webitexpo.com Industry: Marketing and Advertising Intended For: marketing manager, brand manager, advertising manager, PR manager, developer, CEO, analyst, media planner, creative, IT specialist, administrator, business angel, entrepreneur Organization: e-Academy | Webit Ambassadors

FIG Commission 3 Workshop - The Empowerment of Local Authorities: Spatial Information and Spatial Planning Tools Starts: Tuesday October 25, 2011 at 08:00AM CEST Ends: Friday October 28, 2011 at 05:00PM CEST Event Type: Conference Region: Aix-En-Provence Area, France Location: Ordre des Géomètres, 40 Avenue Hoche, Paris Website: http://bit.ly/figcom3-paris2011 Industry: Civil engineering Organization: FIG - Int. Federation of Surveyors

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“The manufacturing sector in India suffers from confidence deficit” Dr Ajay Kumar, Joint Secretary, Department of Information Technology of the central Ministry of Telecom and IT who guided and paved way for an e-revolution in Kerala during his three year long stint in the state as Principal Secretary of IT department is now looking at upping the ante with his current portfolio. He is one among Good Governance magazine’s pick of the month, which features people with the government apparatus who have played a path-breaking role for better governance.

Here, Dr Kumar speaks about the dire need of strengthening the electronics manufacturing base of the country, an issue which he has been very vocal about, as well as on the learning from the past regarding government schemes on FAB facilities in the country.

You have been vociferous about the need for making India an electronics hardware manufacturing base. While India is already late to realize the importance of manufacturing, why do you think India stands a chance to become a global base?

India is a huge brand for Software and software services as well as Research & Development to a certain extent. While India has made a brand name for knowledge work, the country does not have a branding in terms of electronic system design and manufacturing. Efforts are on to make India as

We have to utilize our main strengths; we already have the knowledge industry in place, we just have to leverage on it to build our manufacturing capability. We have the right human resource for support, we have the required R&D centers and we can always use the ‘China plus one’ strategy by becoming their secondary manufacturing base.

The opportunity that exists today may not continue forever. Issues like technology lockout will further increase entry barriers for domestic production. We need to start immediately and make this decade the decade of electronics manufacturing in India.

The Fab industry has not yet caught the attention of investors and the government even though it holds a great potential. Has the government initiated any policy to develop this specialized field?

It is strategically important for the big Fabs to be here in the country, but not many are coming forward as it is investment intensive, it is the highest technology available today and is a perennial business. The government had devised a scheme in the year 2007 regarding the Fabs. A special incentive package was announced to attract investments in Fab facility and ecosystem unit.

As per an assessment by a task force constituted by Department of Information Technology in 2009, the demand for electronics hardware in the country was US$45 billion which would increase to US$400 billion by 2020. The global demand is expected to be a mind-boggling US$2400 billion by this time. At the current rate of growth, the domestic production can cater to a demand of US$104 billion by 2020 and the remaining will have to be met by imports. If you look at the average value addition in domestic production of electronic hardware, it is very low; about 5-10 percent which could translate to US$2-3 billion.

Dr Ajay Kumar, Joint Secretary, Department of Information Technology of the central Ministry of Telecom and IT

a base for electronic hardware especially considering the fact that it is one of the fastest growing electronics consumer today, driven by telecom, energy, IT, automobile, consumer electronics etc. But most of it is not produced in India.

As per an assessment by a task force constituted by Department of Information Technology in 2009, the demand for electronics hardware in the country was US$45 billion which would increase to US$400 billion by 2020.

The global demand is expected to be a mind-boggling US$2400 billion by this time. At the current rate of growth, the domestic production can cater to a demand of US$104 billion by 2020 and the remaining will have to be met by imports. If you look at the average value addition in domestic production of electronic hardware, it is very low; about 5-10 percent which could translate to US$2-3 billion.

This provides a huge economic opportunity for India besides developing domestic production capabilities in electronics; it is also of strategic interest for the country. It can increase self-reliance by creating our own products for our market and will be the key focus for India in the coming decade. The Indian design is proficient in designing application development. Capabilities in this core area can catapult the industry to greater innovation and development of products for local, regional and global markets. Electronics system design and manufacturing would stress on energy efficiency and inclusive growth can propel the country towards global leadership.

The main thrust of the scheme was to address the disability costs, manufacturing costs, high cost of logistics and transactions, etc. The scheme was open for 3 years and ended in March 2010. As a part of the scheme, the government had proposed to provide support to the tune of 20 percent of investment for units within an SEZ and 25 percent of investment for units outside of an SEZ. The investment estimated was Rs 2,500 crores for the Fab unit and Rs 1,000 crores for the ecosystem unit. The response to the scheme was lukewarm but the learning was profound.

Could you elaborate on the learning and is the government looking at any new scheme?

The most important learning being that rather than identifying large projects, electronic manufacturing capabilities can be sustained if the production capabilities are developed all around the value chain of electronic products. The investment required for setting up units manufacturing different components of the value chain in electronic manufacturing is different. Manufacturing of chips in a Fab may require high investments, however, discrete components many not have such high investments for production.

By setting up of a single threshold of Rs 1,000 crores for the ecosystem unit, the chip scheme prevented the unit’s manufacturing chip components or discrete components and other electro-magnetic parts and accessories

GOOD GOVERNANCE JULY 2011 17

v One of the recommendation of the task force is to setup an Electronics Development Fund to promote innovation, Intellectual Property and R&D and manufacturing in the electronic sector. We are in the process of conceptualizing the same. It is well recognized that a vibrant research and innovation cannot be achieved without the active involvement of the private sector, both the industry and the academic institutions.

Moreover, since electronics is used by all sectors of the economy as well as all ministries and departments of the government, the effort should involve the whole of the government and not just one or two departments.

to take advantage of the scheme. The other learning was that the scheme had been kept open for 3 years. The unit applying had to wait for 3 years to know whether they would be eligible for government support.

The research and innovation should be across the electronic value chain and should encompass chip, chip components, discrete components, electro-mechanical components, etc. We need to be involved in product specific R&D at the cutting edge of whichever product we select. This would require leapfrogging in our research capabilities.

It also failed to address some of the infrastructural and logistical issues. It would have been better if the production was based on clusters and parts – something which has been so successful for the software industries. This would have reduced the gestation period as well as the transaction costs.

I would like to urge upon the scientists, academia, technologists, industry and the government functionaries to drive this effort. To bring in the right research and innovation culture, we will need to look for ‘out of the box’ solutions.

Due to its large threshold, the scheme had practically excluded SMEs which play a big role in the manufacturing sector including electronic manufacturing. The scheme needed the involvement of SMEs.

For example, China has a ‘China 1000’ programme through which the top 1000 researchers of Chinese origin are being brought back to the country.

The Indian government will need to step up incentives to support such efforts to be replicated and it proposes to do so.

Accordingly, based on the suggestions of the task force and various discussions with important stakeholders, a High Level Empowered Committee has been constituted in April 2011.

The committee has recently held its meeting. It is devising the strategy for identifying technology and investors (both foreign and domestic) for setting up semiconductor fab on a commercial scale in India. A formal announcement would be made internationally very shortly. This Committee would also recommend to the Government the nature of incentives and support that the fab would need to be provided and the modalities for selecting the technology and investor.

The government recognizes the opportunity of converting India into a global destination for electronics hardware manufacturing and not merely for selected high investment projects, but along the whole value chain.

The government is in the process of developing various policy initiatives which will help realize the goal in close partnership with the industry, academia and other stakeholders. The attempt of the policy is to address the disability costs vis-à-vis other competing destinations like China and Korea.

While manufacturing picks up, research and innovation has to be two steps ahead of it? According to you, how robust is the research and innovation in India?

In a knowledge intensive sector like electronics, sustainable leadership position cannot be achieved without the support of a healthy and dynamic research and innovation ecosystem. Innovation cycle is becoming smaller and products are changing every six months. We need to move ahead from the screwdriver technology, but at the same time avoid expensive and complex solutions which make commercialization of products, difficult.

With our strength in the software space, it is possible to create market differentiation in electronic hardware products as most hardware has a large component of embedded and application software built into them.

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There is need for grant for basic research, venture capital funding support for subsequent prototyping and commercialization efforts. New degree courses need to be developed and popularized so that adequate human resource is available.

You have also expressed your concern over brand building for the manufacturing industry. Could you elaborate on the same?

An important factor which has lot of relevance today is that the manufacturing sector in India suffers from confidence deficit. A major change in electronics manufacturing sector cannot succeed without a suitable communications and brand building effort.

A part of the success of the software sector is also related to the brand that India has been able to build for the software and software services capabilities.

Such a brand development is mutually reinforcing for the investing industry as well as for the supportive government. We already have an advantage of a robust brand in the knowledge work. We need to leverage this brand to include our capabilities in electronics manufacturing. n

The government recognizes the opportunity of converting India

into a global destination for electronics hardware manufacturing and not merely for selected high investment projects, but along the whole value chain. The government is in the process of developing various policy initiatives which will help realize the goal in close partnership with the industry, academia and other stakeholders.

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“e-District pilots have fared well in Kerala, UP, MP, TN, Mizoram and Assam” e-District is a mission mode project under the National e-Governance Plan, which seeks to deliver high volume citizen centric services which are delivered at the district level and sub-district level, which are not part of any other Mission Mode Projects (MMPs) of the department. Abhishek Singh, Director, Department of Information Technology, Government of India sheds light on the future course of the project, timelines for e-District & e-governance as well as the challenge of m-governance.

What is the current status of the e-District project?

Presently the scheme is under implementation in 16 states across 41 districts as a pilot project and the scheme entails undertaking backend computerization by enabling last mile at the government office for electronic delivery of public services. The backend is totally computerized after doing the business process reengineering allowing the citizen to apply for a service through a common service center or through his home connection.

The service is then delivered electronically, either at the Common Service Center (CSC) or at his own computer.

capacity building and training.

What is the timeline set for completion of the project?

Our project timeline is four years, which includes two years of implementation and two years of operations and support. We hope that those 16 states in which the pilot projects were taken up will take about 1-2 years to implement and those where pilot projects were not taken up, will take 2-3years.

How are the pilot projects faring in the state? e-District pilots have fared well in Kerala, UP, MP, TN, Mizoram and Assam.

The pilot projects in Kerala, especially Palakkad and Cannanore, are doing exceptionally well. There were 1 lakh transactions in just two months of roll-out. Uttar Pradesh is also doing very well but the challenge is that they have not setup CSCs in all districts. CSCs are integral to the project, so in the first phase of e-District national rollout, we will take up the project only in districts where 70 percent CSCs have been rolled out.

After the study of the pilot projects, it was decided that we would ramp it up from 41 districts to all the 640 districts of the country including implementation at a cost of Rs 1663 crores. Though the services are delivered at the district level, the actual application and data is centralized at the SDC; it is the same software and application which all districts use. It also involves providing ICT infrastructure of all the field offices. Each district is likely to get a little less that Rs 3 crores under the project for providing ICT infrastructure. More importantly, it also involves capacity building and training.

Abhishek Singh, Director, Department of Information Technology, Government of India

The project has ten categories of services within its coverage. The kind of services taken up under this project primarily include the services which are delivered at the district level which include certificates, revenues cases, social welfare service like old age pension, widow pension, disability pension, or certificates like income certificate, birth certificate, domicile certificate, caste certificate, etc.

Ultimately the real objective is that the backend has to be monitored for quick delivery. Once a service request goes electronically for delivery, the village accountant needs to go for a field study, which cannot be done electronically. So the time taken has to be minimized in order to ensure that the citizen gets the best out the service.

What is the charge levied on the citizen for the service?

With the successful implementation of the pilot project, it was decided to take it up further since a lot of value was coming in as the citizen was not required to go to the public office or a collector’s office or a sub-collector’s office to avail their services. They could access their services in their village itself through the CSC, in line with the overall vision of the NeGP - to make all the public services available to the common man in his locality to meet all the basic needs, which will ultimately include transparency, reliability and efficiency of such services.

The charge varies from state to state. For some states there is no charge and in some the maximum is Rs 10 for a service.

e-District does this in a direct way and it delivers services which a common man needs on a day-to-day basis. After the study of the pilot projects, it was decided that we would ramp it up from 41 districts to all the 640 districts of the country including implementation at a cost of Rs 1663 crores.

to the electronic mode in 5 years; the ambit of NeGP will widen. So to that

Though the services are delivered at the district level, the actual application and data is centralized at the SDC; it is the same software and application which all districts use. It also involves providing ICT infrastructure of all the field offices. Each district is likely to get a little less that Rs 3 crores under the project for providing ICT infrastructure. More importantly, it also involves

With the enactment of the Electronic Service Delivery Act, all governments departments will have to bring in all their public services in extent the programme and the philosophy of the common goal infrastructure supported by services will continue for a long time to come. Lot of these services will become inter-operable within the government too.

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v getting the governmental system to adapt to changes over a period of time and it requires a huge change management effort and training. It is a very organized and well-thought of process.

Your views on the system that is prevalent in the country of changing t h e leader or champion of a project in the middle of implementation. Does it not harm the project per se?

It is a wish. Every department feels that the person who is handling a project should remain with the project till completion. That does not happen in our system. Some projects have been successful with the same champion at the helm but we should try to ensure that the project is not dependant on the champion and the project moves on as planned even if the champion moves out.

This needs involvement of the whole team in the implementation and the real success of the project will only be when the project sustains even after three years of the champion leaving. There are projects which are doing well in this regard. It should not happen that Mr Nandan Nilekani leaves and UID comes down! The system should be built in such way that it carries the project to its planned

Coming to e-Governance on the whole, is there a target time period for total completion?

result.

NeGP is a programme, not a project. NeGP envisages that there are several components to the programme and one is infrastructure projects, which is within the programme. These mainly include State Wide Area Network (SWAN), SDCs and CSCs.

The government is now actively looking at m-governance. Even though the penetration is high, the requirement is different since low cost mobile dominate usage. How are you planning to work out on this challenge?

Around 26 SWAN have been setup and the remaining are likely to be completed by December 2011. Similarly, SDCs have been setup in around 11-12 states and the remaining will be setup by next year. More than 95,000 CSCs are operational, but considering the challenge of remote districts, it is taking time. The real issue is with regard to making services available for which there are 27 mission mode projects, out of which most central mission modes are under implementation, whether it is UID, income tax, pensions, central excise, panchayat, government exchange, MCA 21, National State Governance Project (NSGP), etc.

We are trying to work out a proposition. Ultimately all the applications can work only if the government data is available in digitized format. We are also moving into an era of open data format, using which people can build applications. I am sure with eDistrict project there will be a birth certificate application which can be submitted through your mobile. Verification also becomes easier as your location is also known. The challenge is of course the low cost mobile usage where such applications will not work. Our requirement is that a labourer sitting in Delhi should be able to send money home to his hometown in say Kolkata, but he does not have a bank account.

So what we are proposing is, just like talk value on his Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card, we incorporate a money value on his SIM. Then he can transfer a required money value from his SIM card to the money value of his family’s SIM card and they can take the phone to a service provider near their place and get the money. We are working on these aspects but it will take time. n

The real challenge lies with few projects like e-procurement which we are trying to push so that they get operational at the earliest. But the next stage will be to add value to these projects. We are trying to bring m-governance into practice, so that all these projects can be accessed through mobile phones.

Considering this, the programme will continue. There is no timeline as such.

Now, other departments like health, education, PDS, rural development are coming into the NeGP platform and this will keep on growing.

With the enactment of the Electronic Service Delivery Act, all governments departments will have to bring in all their public services in to the electronic mode in 5 years; the ambit of NeGP will widen. So to that extent the programme and the philosophy of the common goal infrastructure supported by services will continue for a long time to come. Lot of these services will become inter-operable within the government too. We are also trying to build up a depository where all government documents, certificates, passports, driving licenses, etc will be held by the government in D-mat form. That is where we want to go over a period of time.

On hindsight, do you think India was late to get into the e-Governance mode?

I don’t think so. There is a process by which the whole plan could be worked out. It is not about buying a computer or writing software. It is about

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NeGP is a programme, not a project. NeGP envisages that there are several components to the programme and one is infrastructure projects, which is within the programme. These mainly include State Wide Area Network (SWAN), SDCs and CSCs. Around 26 SWAN have been setup and the remaining are likely to be completed by December 2011. Similarly, SDCs have been setup in around 11-12 states and the remaining will be setup by next year. More than 95,000 CSCs are operational, but considering the challenge of remote districts, it is taking time.

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Bhoomi-Kaveri Integration

State : Karnataka

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he government of Karnataka launched a computerized registration procedure by integrating Bhoomi and Kaveri, the two e-governance schemes of the state government. The new system is aimed at simplifying the registration procedure apart from putting an end to bogus registrations and corruption, which is widely prevalent in rural areas.

The improved version of the integrated pilot project will be initially introduced in 25 taluks in the state and be gradually extended across the state.

Under the new system, a person who wants to register a property will get periodical SMS alerts - both in English and Kannada - on the status of the registration till the process is complete. While the manual dispatch of documents under the old system caused a 45-day delay, the new system is expected to take not more than a month.

In the year 2006, Bhoomi (electronic facility for maintaining and updating record of rights of agricultural lands. The scheme is successfully running in 203 bhoomi centers through out Karnataka since, 2001.) was integrated with Kaveri

(software meant for registration of sale deeds and other deeds as per the central registration law, in the sub registrar’s office.) This integration facilitated Bhoomi centers to receive the index information of sale deeds in the electronic form through State Data Center for initiation of mutation process. This process gave a bit relief to the citizen when he was not expected to chase his J-slip for initiating the mutation process.

When Bhoomi was launched, while the accountability was ensured, there was still some problem of citizen registering the sale deeds in respect of such properties which were not there in the record of rights, seller name was not available or the seller has no or insufficient extent for transaction.

Also there was a possibility of citizen selling the same parcel of land to many in different sale deeds.

What is the improvement in the new version of Bhoomi and Kaveri integration * Sub Registrar will use bhoomi data base for registration of sale deed. * Sub Registrar will select the survey number and owner from the bhoomi data base. * Extent owned by the selected owner is shown to the sub registrar and the seller would be able to sell less than or equal to the extent available for transaction. * If, there were to be any restriction against sale such as a) Land granted to SC/ST (PTCL) b) Government restrictions against transaction of land for 15 years etc; the registration of sale deed is not possible. * The software will take care of deducting the extent already transacted by a owner to secure the interest of the earlier purchasers. * Immediately after the registration of the sale deed, the information would be sent to the respective bhoomi centers where, without the data entry work notice to the interested parties would be generated. “Now, after this integration, only such transactions which can be taken up for mutation process are only taken up for registration. We are able to achieve co-relation between encumbrance and record of rights,� says Rajeev Chawla who is considered to be the architect of Bhoomi. n

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A Roadmap to E-Governance Vision 2020

What should be India’s vision for e-governance? A number of competing ideas come to the fore. For example, vision could be good governance, an objective which has been eluding India’s policy makers since more than six decades when India became independent. Or it could be eradication of India’s chronic poverty (which, given sound policies, has no reason to exist). But these are only objectives, worthy of attainment as they are, which could follow, if we have a sound vision for e- governance. We present ‘A roadmap to e-Governance Vision 2020’ prepared by Late Dr D C Misra, IAS, e-Governance Consultant who was the Chairman, Task Force for ICT Policy for Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi.

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A

vision is a mental map of future. It is not necessarily a projection in future as it could be something entirely new. It is part dream, part reality. It is a dream because it is wishful thinking, but also it is a dream grounded in reality. It is essential for a country to have a vision, failing which it will not know where it is going. A vision should also be brief, sharp and should be able to capture the imagination of all the stakeholders. Then a roadmap has to be drawn for realizing the vision.

In India, a committee appointed by the Planning Commission came out with a Vision for 2020 (PC 2002). It devoted a full chapter, Chapter 8, to Governance. The report with regard to e-government, among other things noted: “E-government will improve responsiveness and reduce corruption in some areas. Computerisation of information systems coupled with downsizing, higher recruitment standards and stricter discipline will increase administrative efficiency.”

In the context of the above, a robust e-Governance Vision 2020 is proposed for which the following few measures would have to be taken :

Make India Internet Nation No. 1 in the world What is Internet Nation? It is the community of Internet users in a country. It represents a “critical mass” for ushering good governance through e-governance. This community, overwhelmingly young being in the age group of 18-35 years is full of ideas for making our world a better place.

Sweden has a vision to be a “prominent Internet nation in 2015.” The country proposes to realize this vision through a proposed programme called “Ambient Sweden”. The vision document suggests a number of measures under the programme. By taking these measures, for example, “Sweden can, by 2015, be a leader in mobile Internet, be best at e-administration and green IT, and also be regarded as a pioneer within digital media distribution”.

India is currently world’s “Internet Nation No. 4, with some 100 million Internet users. It registered a phenomenal growth during 20002010. However, it had an unsatisfactory Internet penetration of 8.5% (that is, number of Internet users as percentage of population). Also, its share as percentage of world Internet users was mere 5.9% which is not commensurate with its size of population. India can emerge as the Internet Nation No.1 in the world if appropriate policies are put in place to improve Internet penetration in India.

SMS Nation The growth of mobile phones in India has taken every one by surprise. The number of wireless subscribers in India stood at 826.93 million in April 2010 (as against wireline subscribers of 34.55 million, giving total number of 861.48 million subscribers) (TRAI).

“Cell Phone Nation” does not require Internet connectivity. This SMS Nation, independent of Internet, requires to be looked after by e-government by providing SMS-based e- government. In this mode e-government will reach citizens who have no Internet connectivity.

Make e-government Citizen-centric and Criteria-based e-government, as currently conceived and practiced in India, is not citizen-centric and criteria-based. This denies citizens the benefits of e-government. e-government thus loses its one of the basic premises of introduction of e-government, namely, helping citizens in his relationship with the state. Secondly, the lack of citizen-centricity in e-government acts as a spanner in the faster growth of Internet penetration in India.

GOOD GOVERNANCE JULY 2011 23

v Unless the citizen is brought to the centre stage in e- government, e-government is unlikely to make the desirable progress.

Make e-government Pro-Poor e-government helps the poor indirectly by making administrative processes transparent and thus minimizing the scope of corruption. It directly helps by direct service delivery to the poor. In the first category fall measures like computerization of land records which eliminates middle men. In the second category fall schemes like the employment guarantee scheme under NREGA.

Formulate National ICT Innovation Policy The relevant public policy space in India is currently occupied by a number of policies like - National Telecom Policy 1994, IT Policy 1998 (since implemented), Science and Technology (S&T) Policy 2003, Broadband Policy 2004, Policy on Open Standards for e-government 2008, and ICT Policy for Schools 2009 (under formulation). There is, however, no National ICT Innovation Policy.

Viewpoint Ashis Sanyal, Former Sr. Director, DIT At this stage, I would like to put entire emphasis on two aspects of e-governance implementation, which, in my opinion, should be addressed with all zeal for next 2-3 years, as a short term activity with long term outcome.

Capacity Building The first one is the Capacity Building at all levels in the government and student community and also at broad levels for the citizen at large, for embracing e-governance and broadly Information Society. While the government has a well-meaning Capacity Building (CB) Scheme in place for the State/UT governments with specific objectives, its implementation is wanting. The State e-Mission Team(SeMT) members are in position in States/UTs under this Scheme. However, in most of the places SEMT officials do not appreciate their job convincingly; remain out of focus; thereby failing to contribute substantially in a projectised mode.

The people on the other side of the table, i.e. the State/UT officials also lack in taking out appropriate works from them, presumably being deficient in Vision, Mission zeal and clear objectives in e-governance planning and implementation. Consequently, these resources ultimately engage themselves in rudimentary file noting work, even worse, preparing PPTs for ‘immediate presentation’ requirements!

In another facet of CB Scheme implementation, organizations like IIPANew Delhi, NISG-Hyderabad, iCISA-Noida, NIFM-Faridabad, coveted Academy LBSNAA-Mussoorie, IIM-Ahmedabad and some other Institutes, are imparting training to government officials in the Central and State level, to build the required capacity for ICT-isation of government. But due to many valid reasons the ‘supply’ is not adequate. Interestingly, the ‘demand’ is also not ‘felt’ and put forward by the beneficiary departments. And out of meager number of the officials, who could be given exposure in the process, to this new green field area, how many of them could in effect utilize their acquired knowledge on e-governance, after the training, cannot be quantified, due to non-availability of any impact assessment of the trainings conducted on State/UT officials under the Scheme. In my opinion,

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this above-mentioned situation warrants an objective evaluation on the CB Scheme implementation modalities, with a focus on the outcomebased impact assessment of the Scheme and to take recourse actions, as deemed necessary.

Comprehensive Content and Applications Policy The second issue I intend to emphasize is related to the comprehensive content and applications policy, with the simple assumption that some significant ground is covered in the core and support e-governance infrastructure. In the ICT-isation of the society, including the government paradigm, the role of the digital content and applications is perhaps more vital in terms of the fact that content and applications are characteristically more dynamic than the ICT infrastructure per se, on which the digital content applications would ride.

Keeping in mind the cultural and linguistic diversity of our country, which is largely an oral society, constituted of a significant portion of illiterate people, the utmost importance of an appropriate digital content eco-system, which can ride on all types of infrastructure cannot be over-emphasized.

We have long-entered into the paradigm of Governmental Informational Services to citizen, through thousands of Websites which are more or less updated also regularly. But at the same time we have to recall that about 5% people in this country speaks English while 2% of all the Websites are in local languages! This speaks of the volume of work still to be done in the content area.

In my opinion this is one area where we need to put adequate effort and resource. If we consider the paradigm of service delivery and current initiatives of Central and State governments to usher in ICT for overall drastic improvements in the regime, then one will recall that there are lot of talks now for mobiles also, as a potential channel of service delivery. Therefore there would be growing demand in future for mobile platform enabled content and applications as well. To address this scenario, it is imperative that government starts working on an appropriate Content and Application Policy which would be comprehensive to cover all diverse situations mentioned earlier. Content eco-system creation is need of the hour and it would keep the diverse developer community for content and applications motivated and provide appropriate innovative localized content. n

v Viewpoint M. Moni, Dy. Director General, NIC As of now, e-governance is segmented in G2C, G2B and G2G sectors. If we look at the G2C segment and relate it to a Vision 2020 for e-governance, then we have to ask a very pertinent question – Which government departments are supposed to offer online and integrated services, and if so, are they ready with it? The answer is not encouraging. According to the UN report on e-readiness 2010, India is at the 55th Rank (29%) along with other BRIC Nations viz., Brazil and China. If we have to look at a vision 2020 for e-governance, then we have to have answers for these queries and rectification. By 2017, India should be among top 5 countries, and also we should reverse the trend “India is connected. Indians are not connected” to achieve “India is connected. Indians are connected”.

According to me, for good governance to be a reality, then each department has to be endowed with databases of primary nature and workflow applications to strengthen their decision making process and transact Department of Science and Technology (DST) proposed a national innovation bill (DST 2008), but its focus is understandably not on ICT but on S&T. Its preamble states: “An Act to facilitate public, private or publicprivate partnership initiatives for building an Innovation support system to encourage Innovation, evolve a National Integrated Science and Technology Plan and codify and consolidate the law of confidentiality in aid of protecting confidential information, trade secrets and innovation.” Absence of a national ICT innovation policy hampers the growth of entrepreneurship among the youth in the ICT sector and deprives e-governance of innovativeness in serving the citizens.

business as per the “Business of Allocation”, which involves databases, decision support systems and workflow systems for strengthening their policy frameworks / guidelines, plans and programmes.

Another important aspect, which I would stress, is that, for the success of e-governance, there should be strong informatics research in every area, be it agriculture, industry, livestock, fisheries, rural development, education, health, social welfare, districts, block-levels, etc. When I was involved in drafting 10th and 11th Five-Year Plans, I proposed about 27 Centres of Excellence (COEs) for sectoral informatics Research and Training to make NIC as a think-tank in the e-Government/e-Governance process, and they are still in the Plan Document. It is a pity that NIC has been losing its role during the last decade. I wish to quote, when I had presented the NIC Vision Document 2005 to then IT Secretary, Shri Brijesh Kumar, who after having the presentation by me in his office, commented, “Moni, Are you planning to make NIC into an Infosys of Government?!”. It was a strong Vision Document but that was 2005. Nothing happened to it after that. Now I have proposed a National Centre for Agricultural Informatics and Communication to strengthen Agricultural Informatics and Statistical system in the country and submiited to National Statistical Commission, in April 2011. Another strong point towards success of proposed “e-Governance Vision 2020” is quiet basic – Government Portals to have the stamp of the Heads of the Departments to make them trust-worthy for G2C compliance. These are very necessary elements and not to be ignored. n

If e-government does not serve the poor, it fails in one of its basic promises. e-government helps the poor in two significant ways.

Firstly, indirectly, by making administrative processes transparent and thus minimizing the scope of corruption. Secondly, directly, by direct service delivery to the poor.

Formulate National ICT Policy for Schools There is an imminent need to formulate the national information and communication technology (ICT) policy for schools without further delay. Its importance is threefold.

First, schools are where the future of India is being developed. If children become IT literate, they will strengthen the concept of Indian ‘IT Nation’. Secondly, IT literacy has already become an essential educational requirement. As such entry of ICT in schools can no longer be delayed. Lastly, ICT offers a management tool for schools.

In India less than 10% of schools have Internet or broadband connectivity and less than 5% have IT labs. Time has come now to finalise this pending policy.

Do Not Repeat Failed e-government Projects One of characteristic, and very beneficial, feature of e-government is the experience gained in one state which is highly relevant to another state. This is primarily due to similarity in organizational structures under

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v which e-government is planned and implemented. Yet lessons learnt in one state are not being learnt by another. As a result precious resources, financial, physical and manpower, go waste. Take, for example, the case of making cities unwired. In 2006, Bangalore and Pune declared they would offer city-wide broadband access-on-the-move to their citizens through a public-private partnership model. After three years, the projects have been abandoned primarily because the projects were unviable, and the requisite services were increasingly being made available by private parties. There is thus no point in undertaking any unwiring projects in our cities without having sustainable business model.

Involve People in Developing Agenda for Good Governance through e-government e-government is a tool to secure good governance for the citizens. In India, citizens are not involved in development of the agenda for good governance.

The U.S. government has taken an innovative step in setting up a portal – recovery.gov- in the wake of the recession which hit them and the steps taken by it to rejuvenate the economy. The portal proclaims: “This is your money. You have right to know where it’s going and how it’s being spent.”

This is for the $787 billion bail-out money. Such a step directly involves citizens in governance and is thus worthy of emulation by others.

Nurture e-democracy E-democracy or democracy online is fast becoming a reality. More and more people are now interacting online with the state or fellow citizens on public issues. The U.S. President Barrack Obama made brilliant use of the Internet in his Presidential campaign. He also came out with an ambitious agenda for e- governance which he has been successfully implementing so far. For India’s Parliamentary election in May 2009, it was suggested that e-governance should be included in election manifesto.

Care for e-citizen The rise of e-citizen, a citizen who accesses the state online (that is, on the Internet), is now a reality. The state is now required to look after his interests. We can look at a 10-point agenda in this regard: • Constitution of India (Amend the Constitution to provide rights and duties of e-citizens), • Right to e-governance (Enact Right to e-governance Act on the lines of Right to Information Act), • Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000 (Delete Section 9 of the Act), • Right to Information (RTI) Act (Integrate Right to Information (RTI) Act with e-governance), • e-citizen Charter (Provide E-citizen Charter on the lines of Citizen Charter), • e-petitions (Provide for e-petitions in Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and Chief Minister’s Offices (CMOs), • e-engagement Tools (Provide e-engagement tools on official websites discussion groups, blogs, and wiki), • Call Centres (Set up call centres for public service delivery), • Grievance Redress Architecture (Integrate online public service delivery with the citizen grievance architecture). n

There is an imminent need to formulate the national information and communication technology (ICT) policy for schools without further delay.

ICT offers a management tool for schools. In India less than 10% of schools have Internet or broadband connectivity and less than 5% have IT labs. Time has come now to finalise this pending policy.

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Viewpoint Shankar Aggarwal, Additional Secretary, Department Government of India

of Information Technology,

Today everybody has accepted e-governance, but the question now is the pace of implementation. And pace will depend on lot of other factors, especially capacity building. You know that most of the decisions are being taken by the bureaucrats, and many are not very comfortable with technology which makes it difficult to take decisions. The feeling is ‘we don’t know whether Microsoft is taking us for a ride or is going to help us, etc’. And these are major decisions. Also, everything is in our cyber space, so you are not procuring brick and mortar, or cement.

You are buying some binary numbers and you are not very sure whether you are doing the right thing. Thus the affect is on the pace.

I personally feel that this is the time for the takeover, and you mark my words, in another two to three years time there will be paradigm shift the way things are today. But ultimately the decision has to be taken by the concerned line ministry or the state government and not by us.

We are not the owner. We are only a facilitator. We educate them; we appraise their projects, and once we appraise their projects give a go ahead; that gives them a lot of comfort.

Today, we also have to see whether it is possible for the commoner to go and seek information and services electronically; whether is possible for them to get the delivery of these services, electronically or not. Today, we have not come to that stage, because we require lot of infrastructure among other things.

We have set up about 85,000 centers, that means, the front ends are available. Some of the front ends are not working properly, because of lack of services, or because of lack of power or lack of connectivity, but those problems are now being taken care of. On the other hand, at the backend, we did not have many applications. Under e-district, we are going to take up this issue.

Few years back our focus was on 27 Mission Mode Projects, and these Mission Mode Projects were basically silos kind of an initiative, but now with e-district all services are being take care of. Secondly, few years back, we did not have the facility of SWAN; we did not have the facility of data centers, and unless you create a data center, it is not possible to have this unified and integrated kind of a system. And now, two datacenters are up- one in Tripura and one in Gujarat and we expect about ten datacenters to be up and operational by end of next calendar year.

Another important challenge is that most e-governance projects in the country suffer lack of power supply. Ultimately we had to go in for solar energy; there is no alternative, because in a short term you cannot create electricity and creation of electricity, and then its distribution is very complex and time consuming.

It is also an expensive proposition, so we had to go for the solar energy.

Now for the addition of 1,50,000 CSC’s we are going in for the solar energy and we are making it mandatory.

Solar energy will take care of the chaos that is currently prevailing in rural areas, but ultimately people would need a lot of power and we have to work out a mission or some solution to improve the availability of power. n

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e-governance takes on Corruption

T

wo major factors that contribute to the growth of corruption are the low probability of discovery, and perceived immunity against prosecution.

Secrecy in government, restrictions on access to information by citizens and the media, ill defined/complex and excessive rules, procedures and regulations can all lead to a low chance of discovery. A lack of transparency in the functioning of the government agencies can make it easy for the perpetrators to cover their tracks and unearthing corruption becomes very difficult. The weak character of institutions which are supposed to investigate charges of corruption and prosecute the guilty as well as an inefficient or corrupt judiciary further exacerbate the problem of corruption and facilitate immunity against prosecution.

Lately there has been much focus on the use of e-governance as one of the key tools to fight against corruption by opening up government processes and enabling greater public access to information.

According to Prof. K Subramanian, Director, Advanced center for Informatics & Innovative Learning (IGNOU); Hon. IT Adviser to CAG of India and Sr DDG(RETD), NIC, Ministry of Comm. & IT, Government of India,

“e-governance in its profound intention will play a definite and catalytic role in taking on corruption in any country. It allows automation of seamless workflow system which assures consistency, integrity and introduces adequate transparency in the system and no room and minimizes any biased decisions.”

E-governance has indeed revolutionised the lives of common people wherever it has been implemented. In Canada, people rarely visit the Government Offices and there are other countries too.

“In India, there are difficulties in ICT introduction the reasons being the inertia of existing options and habits, paper filing system for approval processing, concerns about security and confidentiality of information by the topmost section in the Government, obsolete regulations and laws and lack of understanding and computer skills among others,” says Dr Subir Roy, Principal Consultant & Head - State e-Governance Mission Team, Department of Information Technology, Government of West Bengal.

According to N R Narayana Murthy, mentor of Infosys, e-governance

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has a great potential to improve accountability and by making major public projects data available online, corruption can be curbed and accountability enhanced in the country. While on one hand “We need leadership who can take tough decisions and deal firmly with corrupt people”, on the other hand “The good thing is that our bureaucracy has already accepted IT for governance. Like in Karnataka, land records, property tax bills, water bills, the issuance of birth and death certificates, trade licenses, and filing of consumer complaints have been computerised. The project for providing unique identification to every Indian resident is perhaps the most important project, which is aimed at establishing citizenship, reducing identity- related frauds and addressing security issues” As per K. Ganga, Deputy Director General (Finance), Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), Planning Commission, New Delhi, “The most significant power of e-governance in fighting corruption is the transparency that it can bring about in all government activities. Access to information will enable the residents to ensure that they get their due entitlements in a timely manner; to civil society to highlight any deficiencies in the system and to all other stakeholders in the system to monitor and prevent unhealthy practices.”

National e-governance plan (NeGP) aims at providing easy access to public services by digitization of information. One of the important intended outcomes of e-governance is transparency and accountability. Says Guru Malladi, Partner - Government Services, Ernst & Young, “Transparency empowers to tackle corruption as it impacts at least two of the three causes of corruption. Primary motivation is greed which roots from moral values or lack of,”.

“The second is the existence of perception of opportunity. Digitalization would reduce public interaction with bureaucracy minimizing this perception of opportunity. Digitization will also mean direct access to information for residents hence helping by pass the middle man and minimizing the chances of corruption. Thirdly, lack of information and awareness of rights amongst the beneficiaries makes them susceptible to exploitation.

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Digitization of information not only makes information easily retrievable and accessible but also speeds up the process making implementation of right to information (RTI) much faster. Thus in effect beneficiaries are not only less exposed to exploitation but also more empowered to fight it. Fourthly, when realized, interoperability between departments/ministries can help weed out duplicated or fraudulent identities and entitlement related fraud hence reducing misuse of government resources and resulting corruption,” adds Malladi.

According to a paper, ‘A Model for Impact of E-Government on Corruption: Exploring Theoretical Foundations’, Amitabh Ojha, Shailendra Palvia and M. P. Gupta, Corruption has been studied by scholars from various streams of social sciences. The paper states, ‘Sociologists hold, that the roots of corruption are both social and cultural, and that corruption hinders public welfare and social development. According to political scientists, non-transparent institutions, low paid public servants, and a shortage of independent and well-functioning market mechanisms are antecedents of corruption. Legal scholars believe that the type of legal system and its enforcement impact corruption.’

The paper further adds that ‘On viewing corruption from an economics of crime perspective, it is seen that e-government has a lot to offer. In the traditional work environments, auditors’ and anti-corruption officials’ access to official records is cumbersome. Moreover, paper records are hard to archive, maintain, and retrieve. In contrast, electronic records can be maintained safely for a long time, and these are amenable to automated procedures, which includes data-mining. So, e-government helps by facilitating audits, preventive checks, and ongoing investigation of corrupt acts already detected. In terms of economics of crime, e-government should increase ‘probability of conviction per offence’ and thus reduce the corruption levels. It is lamented however, that those possibilities offered by egovernment have not been exploited in many countries. Greater interoperability and integration of egovernment across individual agencies can bring about dramatic improvement in the probability of a corrupt official being apprehended and punished.’

v Corruption is highest in the poorest countries across the world. India ranks 84th in the Transparency International’s Corruption Index which suggests India has a reducing rate of corruption over the last few years. “This has definitely been possible because of the e-Governance initiatives taken up by the Government of India through the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP). It has been observed that effective e-Governance implementation initiatives demands sound ICT infrastructure and sustained strategic commitment that is costly and for these reasons the potential of e-Governance in developing countries remains largely unexploited,” says Dr Roy. Corruption can be broadly defined as the abuse of public power for the benefit of private individuals (Rose-Ackerman, 1999). Corruption includes both monetary and non-monetary benefits. Common forms of corruption are bribery, extortion, influence peddling, nepotism, fraud, and opportunism.

Kaufmann, Kraay and Mastruzzi (2003, 2005) and Lambsdorff (2001) have identified the drivers of corruption as: (i) monopoly of power; (ii) discretion; and (iii) lack of accountability and transparency.

“It is useful to distinguish between types of corruption and to identify those which e-Governance can most readily fight. The first group of corrupt practices is petty bureaucratic corruption (i.e. low-level administrative

corruption). The second group of corrupt activities consists of strategies aimed at self-serving asset stripping by state officials (state capture).

The third group of corrupt activities consists of large political corruption (grand corruption) (Shah & Schacter, 2004). It is suggested that all types of petty bureaucratic corruption can be diminished through the increased transparency achieved by using modern electronic technologies,” says Dr Roy. There is a lot of good intention for implementation of e-Governance in the country. The National e-Governance Plan (NEGP) is getting more matured with the introduction of the Electronic Service Delivery Bill. “The National Service Delivery Gateway and the State Service Delivery Gateways have been envisaged to allow single point of contact for every service. The e-district project in all States are helping citizens without having any contact with Government officials. The computer-aided Registration of Documents(CORD) is one of the major success stories of e-government in West Bengal . About 241 registration offices have been completely computerized. Deeds are registered in one hour and other services like the issue of encumbrance certificates and valuation certificates are accomplished in 15 minutes.

There has also been a substantial increase in revenue to the Government.

Smar t Cards are other option for efficient services which can directly reduce corruption,” says Roy.

Challenges Prof. Subramanian states the following: * IT Breaks the departmental barriers, but business of allocation of rules introduces inter-intra departmental barriers. The web site is ONE, the Government is One, but no change is made in removing the barriers and introduction of unified integrated policies. Another important aspect is the dependence on precedents, which makes it dependency on persons who knows this knowledge. The decision support system should address the precedence and introduce transparency in DSS. * The convergence in technologies are happening, but processes and procedures and rules of business are not integrate and converged. * In e-governance, while ‘e’ is the enabler, the governance aspect has to be the responsibility of the government and government administrators. “e” cannot do miracle, unless processes and procedures are converged and unified and make full use of “e” transformation.

A transformed government is one where “e:” is integral part of the governance system.

An example will be the case of land records. In villages and it is true for semi-urban and urban too,, a farmer/land owner could go to a bank, pledge his ‘patta’ and get a loan. After sometime he files an FIR saying the ‘patta’ got lost. On the basis of the FIR, the land registration authority issues a duplicate ‘patta’ to him, not knowing that he has already pledged it. The farmer then transfers the ‘patta’! So, the important aspect that comes out of this example is that procedural aspects are not being synchronized while government services take place. Convergence of all department functions in a seamless fashion is necessary. Integration of Land Records, Land administration, Land revenue and Land use system to be integrated as it is at present handled by different functionaries of different

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v departments Another example is the IT Mission which has multiple mission mode projects – Take the example of 3 Mission mode projects executed by the department of IT of the Government of India. State Wide Area Network (SWAN), Common Services Center (CSC) and State Data Center (SDC). All the three have mission directors who do not talk to each other!, even though they belong to the e-Governance wing of the department of IT. Each mission director feels that he has accomplished the mission, but in reality, it does not fulfill the commitment of the stakeholder’s interest and citizen’s expectation of service quality and delivery and assurance.

According to Ganga, The availability of IT infrastructure and communication facilities access of the same by everyone in every nook and corner of the country would be biggest challenge.

The central government envisioned the National e-governance plan which is a well thought out plan with a transformative vision. “The plan’s success lies in not only realizing the individual 27 MMPs but also realizing the overall larger objective of interoperability between all the 27 MMPs. Turf-wars or non-cooperation between different ministries and departments is one of the biggest challenges faced in streamlining e-governance to fight corruption.

This also highlights the other challenge which roots from lack of structural enablers that are essential for bridging the gap between NeGP on paper and NeGP as an operational reality,” says Malladi.

Political will is prime in implementation of e-Governance particularly in the potential areas of corruption. “These include disbursements of financial benefits to the citizens. The challenges are many in the process. Firstly, it is the Process Transformation and the related Change management issues.

Legal frameworks have to be revamped with issue of relevant laws and Acts.

Necessary Office Orders have to be issued and responsibilities have to be clearly defined,” says Dr Roy. The plan requires coordination between ministries but there is no provision in place to empower DIT to ensure or demand this coordination. “USA’s FirstGov initiative for e-governance has been fairly successful. It was organized directly under the President’s office unlike its Indian counterpart that has the same profile as any other ministry. Presently the model of government services that exits is government and bureaucracy centric where the public servant or the bureaucracy is central to the system.

However a fundamental change would be required to be congruent with the objectives of e-governance. A new approach that is service oriented and that builds its services around the needs of the citizen would be required. This transformation is another challenge to streamlining e- governance. Lastly, lack of project management skills is a challenge to timely implementation of e-governance,” says Malladi.

According to the paper, ‘A Model for Impact of E-Government on Corruption: Exploring Theoretical Foundations’, Amitabh Ojha, Shailendra Palvia and M. P. Gupta, ‘In a developing country, the self service model of e-government can only reach out to a minority segment of the population.

In manual delivery of e-government services to the citizens, at service delivery counters or desks, the principal-agent problems could re-manifest.

E-government generated statements such as status of pending complaints, applications awaiting final disposal, hourly/daily computer logs in respect of transactional e-government services (delivered at counters/desks) can help the principal in aligning the functioning of the agent to her goals and to reduce her classical principal-agent information asymmetry disadvantage.

For instance, the principal could look for long pending complaints and applications, long outages and abnormally long time taken per transaction in transactional services, etc as possible symptoms of some malpractices. But it may be difficult to sift through volumes of computer generated management information reports. Identification of key monitoring parameters and their dissemination through timely, and readable reports can be very helpful in this regard. In addition, data mining tools can cull out interesting patters or outliers from voluminous data. But the principal has little prospect of making

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use of such efficient monitoring facilities offered by e-government, if she is lacking in the requisite know-how.’

Possbile solutions Ganga gives these points as solutions: * Ubiquitous mobile and IT facilities to every resident and increase in general awareness that they can access and demand these facilities and thereby their rightful entitlement without having to deal with rent seekers and others who deprive or eat into their entitlements. * Participation by public and private persons/agencies and civil society.

Malladi states that the challenges are identifying ‘who’ the government is dealing with and establishing ‘what is their entitlement’. With its unique identification project (UID) the government is on its way to identifying ‘who’.

“The second question of ‘what is the entitlement’ could be addressed by putting in place a ‘Resident Data Hub’ (RDH). The RDH would serve as a repository of resident profiles. These resident profiles would be linked to their entitlement. The functioning of the RDH would hence depend on the internal automation and interoperability between departments which the government must continue to develop. Every time a citizen would approach a government service department he/she would be requested to provide his/her UID. Entering the UID in the system would retrieve all the information linked to this profile from the RDH which can then be validated by the service department. Hence helping verify and establish what the entitlement is. Hence data collection using the UID and RDH, enabled by internal automation and interoperability can serve as check-posts for minimizing corruption,” he states.

According to Dr Roy, the roadmap for each and every Department has to be prepared towards e-Governance.

The implementation may start a little later but the Departments must be aware that some changes will happen in the method of work. The key mantra for success of e-Governance is the persistence that the

v highest authority displays over the implementation. The top person makes a difference. The Chief Secretary or the Department Secretary or the Minister or even the Chief Minister may lead. All major implementations have happened this way only.

“The entire lot of people in the Government need to be trained on computer handling. The problem is after these people are sent for such training; they do not have access to the computers when they resume Office. Computer Centres should be created in the Department where employees may use them for practice, Internet, e-mails, etc. This will help them to adopt e-Governance when this finally happens,” he adds.

The paper, A Model for Impact of E-Government on Corruption: Exploring Theoretical Foundations states that By publishing the rules, guidelines, forms, etc online, e-government helps to clarify to a citizen, her specific rights, responsibilities, and liabilities. ‘This is expected to result in reduced uncertainty in transactions with the government, whether online or offline.

Reduced uncertainty would ceteris paribus result in low opportunism and hence lower transaction costs (bribes). Thus, reduction in uncertainty is another mechanism by which e-government fights corruption. To take this further, government agencies can consider the following steps: ensure that information posted on the e-government site is comprehensive and current; provide efficient search engines; and ensure prompt email response to queries submitted by citizens. An efficiently functioning (365 days 24x7) e-government infrastructure, with pre-announced outages (if any), would also help to lower the uncertainty.’

Constraints in Combating Corruption through E-government According to a paper, ‘A Model for Impact of E-Government on Corruption: Exploring Theoretical Foundations’, Amitabh Ojha, Shailendra Palvia and M. P. Gupta there are some constraints in taking on corruption. The paper states: It may appear paradoxical that traditional store formats continue to flourish, despite the emergence of online channels. This is due to the fact, that on-line channels are suited to certain types of products/ services.

As in the case of the market, we classify government products and services into search and experience goods. In case of search goods, access to externally provided information or description about the good

is adequate. But experience goods require personal inspection. On-line channel is particularly suited to search goods (but not to experience goods), and more specifically, intangible or service related goods. Even in presence of a G2C online service, citizens may still prefer to use a traditional channel for either information search, or the final transaction, also referred to as the ‘research-shopper’ phenomenon. This tendency to use different channels in course of a purchase process (pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase phases) is more pronounced in case of complex products and services.

Not all transactions with the government would fit into the following descriptions, which are well suited to on-line delivery: search goods, simple transactions, or intangible or service related goods. Therefore, say if a government department, responsible for distributing industrial plots to citizen-entrepreneurs, offers its services additionally in G2B online mode, entrepreneurs who would conclude such a deal entirely through the online channel, would be very few. Reason is that the citizen-entrepreneur may want to visit the physical site, accompanied by the government inspector or clerk, and make sure that the particular industrial plot would best serve her needs. And thereafter, she could choose to pay for that plot online, or possibly offline. The foregoing theoretical explanation suggests that opportunity for civil servants to interact with and extract bribes from citizens and businesses will continue to exist.

Legal and administrative hurdles in disintermediation and offering services on-line Governments in many countries have not reviewed their laws, administrative manuals, and codes with a view to making them amenable to e-government. As a result, a number of government processes can’t be moved to e-government channels. In cases where the e-government service has been offered alongside antiquated laws and procedures, its utility to the citizen or business could be marginal. There are instances wherein a citizen or a business can file his/its application online, but the official process may still require the visit of a government inspector, whose style of operation may have undergone little reform. To illuminate this point, we reiterate the case of India’s passport services computerization project wherein both offline and online passport applicants, have to pay bribes to the police inspector, to get past the police verification stage. Offering a G2B or G2C service wherein rent-seeking government inspectors continue to have a central role, may confer some efficiency benefits on a government agency, but almost no relief to a citizen or a business.

The continuing role of intermediaries in service delivery In traditional settings, dealings between the government and a citizen are mediated by a front-desk civil servant, who is in a position to provide advice or tips that the citizen may require. If a citizen values such a service, he may prefer to get served at the government office, even if it entails payment of a petty amount as bribe to the dealing civil servant. In fact in market settings, manufacturers contemplating disintermediation by way of direct on-line selling, find that an efficient substitute for the useful customer services rendered by the intermediary i.e the retailer, may not exist. On the other hand, citizens who lack requisite skills and resources to use the self-use e-government services, have no option but to seek service in person, from (corrupt) civil servants.

Poorly functioning e-government infrastructure Poorly managed and failure prone e-government services can help corruption by bringing back to life an environment of uncertainty, which provides incentives to the civil servant to act opportunistically and extract bribes, even while serving the citizen from the computerized facility. Also, failure of e-government services may necessitate periodical resort to manual working, and a return to the old ways. n

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When Champions Don’t Last… or are not allowed to 32 JULY 2011 GOOD GOVERNANCE

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Keeping in view the enormous task of driving NeGP in line with the overall spirit of service orientation most states are inadequately equipped in terms of personnel and the skill-sets. But what is worse is that when the guiding force of a particular project is at the helm of activity, he is transferred, resulting in a fresh new wave of ideas by his successor and the initiative coming back to square one. The length of bureaucratic tenures has been shown to be an important determinant of long-term investments and the degree of professionalization of a bureaucracy.

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L

ike most countries, in India too, governance is the responsibility of both the elected politician and the appointed bureaucrat. Bureaucrats typically face low-powered incentives and politicians have limited constitutional power to hire or fire them. This is consistent with a desirable feature of the rule of law, which is that policy implementation not be politicized.

local politicians. Further, since local politicians and bureaucrats appear to be “substitutes” from the Chief Minister’s point of view, we should not expect outcomes to differ systematically across districts with and without bureaucrat transfers. Data on specific policy implementation outcomes such as road construction and immunization rates are consistent with this implication,” the research says.

A well researched paper by Laxmi Iyer and Anandi Mani, (‘Traveling Agents: Political Change and Bureaucratic Turnover in India’, November 2009- http:// www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/09-006.pdf), explores the phenomenon of the power of politicians to transfer the bureaucrats to retain control over them.

The Effect on e-governance

Politics versus Bureaucracy The paper suggests that given such constitutional constraints, how would politicians facing electoral pressures ensure that their preferred policies are implemented by such protected bureaucrats? One approach may be to simply reserve the top bureaucratic posts for political appointees, as is the case in the U.S. federal government. Politicians can also use a variety of other devices. They may offer non-monetary incentives, identify motivated agents who share their world view, be gate-keepers with respect to who enters the bureaucracy or be selective in the tasks they delegate to bureaucrats.

The research further states that Politicians do affect the process of bureaucrat assignment. It says, “A change in the identity of a state’s Chief Minister results in a significant increase in the probability of bureaucrat reassignments in that state. Second, we find that officers with higher initial ability face less frequent political transfers and lower variability in the importance of their posts. Third, over their entire career, we find that officers of high initial ability are no more likely to be assigned to important posts than other (loyal) officer. This confirms the model’s view that there are alternative routes to success - it is not expertise alone that politicians value. Further support for this view comes from the finding that officers are more likely to be appointed to important positions when they belong to the same caste as the Chief Minister’s party base. Fourth, consistent with the model’s prediction that not all junior bureaucrats will invest in developing a reputation for expertise, we find that it is officers with high initial ability (i.e. a comparative advantage in developing expertise) who spend significantly more time acquiring training during the course of their career. They are also more likely to be recommended for senior positions in the central government, suggesting that they have developed a greater reputation for expertise.”

The paper conducts a separate analysis of district level bureaucrat transfers. It finds these to be significantly less likely in places where the district-level politicians are from the Chief Minister’s party - suggesting that local politicians serve as an alternative channel through which the Chief Minister exercises political control over bureaucrats.

“Thus, unlike the case of a new CEO bringing in his own team, bureaucrat transfers are not driven by efficiency considerations about the personal “match” between the bureaucrats and the new Chief Minister; nor are they driven by a desire for experimentation and type revelation since we would not expect this motive to differ by the party identity of the

34 JULY 2011 GOOD GOVERNANCE

Looking at e-Governance and it current structure, this aspect of bureaucratic transfers is a vital policy concern. According to Ashis Sanyal, former Sr. Director, DIT, the present organizational structure does not go well with implementation requirements of e-Governance projects. “The government is primarily a “functional organization” not a “projectised organization”.

Therefore it supports a vertically silo-ed organisational structure.”

He states that e-Governance projects are objectively sensitive to ‘project implementation duration’. “If there is a ‘time over-run’ for an e-governance project, then, other than standard ‘cost over-run’, the total project itself may

There is a known tendency among Cadre Officers to send a message across the line that “my predecessor’s idea/method/procedures etc etc were faulty, or at best, were incomplete and I am here now to correct the situation”! Now it is for anyone’s guess what happens next with the project!! fail. There may be many consequences of time over-run in e-governance projects,” says Sanyal.

The consequences include the following: • “Doubting Thomases” will surface and may insist that traditional manual system was better and that should come back.

• Technology planned may become obsolete before actual deployment and the project may need to be redesigned.

• Many project domain design considerations may change over time and the GPR done once, may need to be re-looked at.

• Availability of important resources over a period of time may not be possible.

“It is therefore imperative that e-governance projects are implemented as per original planned schedule,” says Sanyal.

The research paper takes a look at Junior officers who enter the bureaucracy with an ideological leaning, and an initial ability that has a distribution.

“They can hold posts that are of two types, important or unimportant, where important posts are scarce. They derive positive utility from holding important positions (because they provide opportunities to make influential policy decisions, say), but nothing from unimportant ones. Hence officers define career success by the importance of their post assignments,” it states while looking indepth into the whole issue of bureaucratic transfer.

With e-governance, which is still a ‘green field activity’ for most part of the government, one does not get many officials experienced in implementation of e-governance.

According to Sanyal, for a routine case of deployment of an official with a mandate to implement e-governance project(s), there may be many situations: • he/she may be totally un-initiated and may think it as a “very much tenure” posting and he/she should get out of it asap, ( the type of importance Dept of IT gets in most of the State/UT government, barring a few, supports this situation – the junior most Cadre Officer is only made available for heading the IT Dept…and he/she is expected to bring reform in other departments occupied by his seniors…which is a far-fetched dream

v in the super hierarchical structure/attitude in the IAS system, if not ‘next to impossible’!)

• he/she may think that running the IT matters needs great technical knowledge which he/she does not posses…therefore takes a cautious indifferent position and buys time • he/she feels that implementing e-gov is a loser’s thankless job in current government structure and gets de-motivated as time passes, • he/she may be a consummate unscrupulous official and would take undesirable decisions with vested interests etc.

To make the situation worse, in some States/UTs, the IT Department is given as “Additional Charge” to the concerned officer. In effect he/she really cannot devote sufficient time for the IT-related matters which it may deserve, as the most transformational element in the governance paradigm.

“All these above mentioned facts mentioned above reflect the great importance of deployment of ‘right person for the right job’. And it is to be recalled that there is dearth of Champions of e-Gov in the government, says Sanyal.

Solutions According to K. Ganga, Deputy Director General (Finance), Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), Planning Commission, New Delhi, once a system is put in place as a part of the work flow and legacy systems are dismantled it would become difficult to undo it. “Successors will have no option except to improve upon what the predecessor put in place,” she stated.

Suggesting a solution to dealing with the situation, Sanyal says that a conscious all-round effort is required to convert many ‘common ordinary officials’ into ‘Champions/Leaders/Change Agents’. “The efforts have to ensure careful planning and deployment of a comprehensive Capacity Building Scheme covering all necessary aspects,” he proposes.

Creation of a conducive eco-system for the handful of currently available Champions, so that they remain motivated, can excel and become “role models “ for the budding Champions is another way to look at a solution, says Sanyal.

It follows that the ecosystem created for projects which have been initiated should be driven by robust Systems, Processes and by committed leadership. While the champions have done excellent project execution, it is not enough to make the transformation, until it is systemized, and sustained.

“The audit of the Government systems indicates a strong need to introduce graded maturity, strengthen the control and validation systems, an Integrated quality assurance framework overlaid on systems and processes and accountability, transparency,

It is proudly mentioned by most of the Cadre Officers that they

have been trained from day one not to get mentally ‘involved’ in any

particular project. But eventually, in the context of e-Governance, this ‘doctrine’ needs to be re-looked at.

consistency, and integrity is assured in the information life cycle management and systems/applications life cycle management, in a converged manner.

The ICT infrastructure has to be robotized. A strong need for Project Governance has to be introduced, underlying that technology will not solve all the problems and it only enables betterment. A strong need for multilayered assurance framework has to be implemented covering management, operations, technology, finance, legal, network and impact/feedback. This is the need of the hour,” says Prof. K Subramanian, Director, Advanced center for Informatics & Innovative Learning (IGNOU) and IT Adviser to CAG of India.

To address the problem the government could possibly explore some remedial changes, suggests Guru Malladi, Partner - Government Services, Ernst & Young. He says, “One, it could consider raising the profile of the e- governance departments which would change the prospects for those working there, hence making the posting more attractive. Secondly, a tenure system could be introduced to ensure a longer stay and help maintain continuity in the office.”

Building the Right Ecosystem Creating a conducive eco-system for the handful of currently available Champions, so that they can excel, remain motivated and become ‘role models’ for the budding Champions, is a challenge. Here we may observe lack of bold reform initiatives on the part of the government, for the essential requirement of Champions to stay ‘on course’ of the path of implementation.

If a survey is taken on the critical success factors for the successful e-governance projects in the country, one common attribute is seen in most of the cases ‘continuation of the Project Champion in the helm of affairs for a reasonable period’. This is unfortunately is not happening in most of the e-gov projects here.

“Decision-making authorities for e-governance projects normally do change their chair thick and fast. It is to be recalled here that this is in total contravention to the requirements of successful implementation of e-Gov projects. By their very nature, e-Governance projects warrant that the Project implementing officer should at least stay for a reasonable tenure of 3 years, of course without compromising his/her career prospects.

This aspect of career advancement needs to be addressed by the government. The government needs to take action, make rules and procedures accordingly. However, as on date, specific administrative reform required to enable this is not in sight,” notes Sanyal.

Conclusion Considering the intense over-arching impact of ICT in all aspects of human life, society, economy, governance, culture, and so on, ICT deployment in all walks of governance is expected to bring a ‘New Order’ in governance. In a stricter sense, compulsively deploying ICT in all walks of governance, would effectively become a part of Nation-Building. And for Nation Building, it is not only the Politicians and Representatives of the People who need to be passionate, but also the Executives. Implementation of e-Governance in India compulsorily warrants passionate involvement of Executive Project Champions. Let the dispassionate, indifferent, efficient decision-makers crowd in other spheres of governance. e-Governance arena anyway needs passionate Champions, who are forgetful about the so called “doctrine” and having head and mind filled with innovative agenda. n

GOOD GOVERNANCE JULY 2011 35

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“government deals are larger in size, integrated and have a longer lead time compared to other verticals” With e-governance being the big mantra for India in the coming few years, the role of companies like EMC has become very profound in governance. The government is looking at companies like EMC to assist them in their ambitious venture to connect entire India using technology. With EMC’s deep industry and technical expertise, the government is on the path of a transformation for the next generation of public service delivery. Manoj Chugh, President, EMC

India & SAARC speaks about the role of the company in this transformation, solutions provided and the challenges faced.

To transform operations and deliver Information Technology as a service, the fundamental mechanism used is Cloud Computing. But it is widely acknowledged that although cloud computing is transforming traditional IT, it is still immature. Lack of clarity, risk management, and questionable long-term return on investment are creating consumer trepidation and obstructing cloud acceptance. On the other hand, if the targeted transformation business is the Indian government, which itself is a hotchpotch of political tardiness and other negatives contrary to a perfect working environment, how is EMC able to create a balance and get results?

Even though the government sector is slowed by a traditional public sector way of functioning, things are changing. A big catalyst to the government’s thought process in investing better in IT today is their responsiveness to citizen demands and need of better ‘citizen services’. Governments are under tremendous pressure today to enable better livelihood for India’s citizens, and technology is that key factor in making that happen. They have to be more and more responsive – while the demand existed before, we are seeing that the central government has the task of maintaining India’s image as a progressive nation, and that state governments compete with one another in development. The public expects faster decision-making and more effective use of budgets – with technology being able to transform and improve livelihood in several areas, governments are keen on leveraging the power of Information Technologies much better; and for that they need to be equipped with IT systems and information infrastructure processes that enable them to work much more efficiently.

The public sector is responding to this challenge by transforming government through connected government – connecting to citizens, connecting inter-agency processes, and connecting social services and security agencies. As a part of the e-Governance plan, a lot of government departments including treasury, land records, tax, police and education are opting for automation. One example seen is that automating and integrating municipal councils across the country is a focus area across state governments.

Our perspective is that any new technology goes through the cycle of hype, concerns around ROI, security etc and then adoption. The “cloud dividend” in terms of cost-savings, better IT and ultimate business agility is now exceedingly difficult to deny. Exceptions do exist, but they are

36 JULY 2011 GOOD GOVERNANCE

v getting harder to find these days. There are two primary drivers for cloud computing in the enterprise - First, enterprises have responsibility for the storage, protection and management of 80 percent of the Digital Universe’s data, and this liability will only increase as social networking and Web 2.0 technologies continue to impact the enterprise and accelerate the need for storage, secure access to information, and what we term “information governance” – strategies that help companies adhere to increasing rules and regulations for compliance and policies governing information retention.

Second, while digital information will grow 60-fold, enterprise investments in IT and staffing will grow only in single digits. The cumulative effect is driving CIOs to transform traditional infrastructures into private cloud data centres that offer internal and external customers IT as a service.

Governments are facing the same challenges as enterprises, but with a twist. They are mandated not to maximize profits, but to service their populations. Globally, EMC is seeing governments evaluate and implement cloud computing strategies to deliver better services to their citizens. This is because once public sector organisations realise the dramatic return on investment (ROI) benefits of cloud computing, they will have the time and resources to develop new ways to leverage information to deliver new and improved citizen services. We see this dramatic possibility here in India as well as public sector technology planners and buyers begin designing new solutions and services to make life easier for our people.

Regarding EMC India’s strategy for the Government sector - we realized the opportunity that the public sector offers, and how our products and services can contribute to improving how government works. We created a special team to go after the opportunity in late 2009, as a part of business reorganization. In 2009, Government contribution to our business was only in single digits which has now grown to double digit contribution. We are seeing huge potential in this sector, and are aggressively pursuing all opportunities.

the information infrastructure portfolio. Our end-to-end range includes data storage technologies, archiving, data back-up and recovery technologies, information security and management solutions, and so on.

Since customer needs with regard to these products only vary in size, our product and services team tune the offerings to the government vertical accordingly. Some of our marquee products include the Symmetrix – recognised as the world’s leader in high-end storage for mission critical applications, VNX Series – unified storage platforms, Data Domain for deduplication and EMC Networker for backup, among others. One particular

Some of the government projects are one of the largest transformational projects in the world. As a world technology leader, EMC is committed to enable Central and State governments transform the way citizen services are delivered by leveraging next-gen Information Infrastructure and cloud technologies. solution which is addressing unique requirements of the government vertical is in information management. Currently, government processes are paper based and ad hoc, which creates many inefficiencies and delays. Using EMC Documentum, our market leading information management product, we have created an eGov file automation solution that accelerates the government file review process.

All government departments utilize a file management workflow to conduct business. Whether to make a law, process citizen services (such as driver’s license, income tax, land records, etc) or even just to approve a purchase order for office supplies, all perform similar function: they initiate, review and approve case files. This being a specific need, EMC and our partners have developed an easy-to-use and quick-to-deploy case management automation solution for government departments and agencies.

Change management is an essential aspect of e-governance. It is the biggest challenge to e-governance. Given the success that EMC has experienced in the government space, what are the strategies adopted by EMC to deal with the change management aspect in the government?

Using such a digital file processing solution, government’s case management workflow becomes more efficient, less cumbersome, and more reliable. There is a huge need for such automation solutions at every level of government to increase efficiency, enhance security, and prevent fraud.

Despite being one of the last big IT MNCs to enter India, we were still able to make an impact because we quickly adapted to the needs of the government sector. We were able to identify the opportunity at the right time and acted swiftly by creating a focused team. We focused on engaging with the government and understanding the local nuances better. That has helped us become the first specialist company in information storage category to be registered under the DGS&D rate contact.

According to you, what is the current size of e-governance business for organizations like you in the country and how much growth do you see in the coming few years? What is the current size of government business for EMC India vis-à-vis other businesses?

In comparison to other businesses, what are the main challenges faced by EMC when it comes to government and the public sector?

Typically, government deals are larger in size, integrated and have a longer lead time compared to other verticals. Other key verticals like telecom, BFSI and IT/ITeS are mature in terms of their private sector background; with greater sense of answerability and accountability to end stakeholders such as the Board, management, customers and share holders. They are also perhaps more mature because they have historically invested much before and even ahead of the curve sometimes when it comes to Information Technologies.

Please provide details on the main solutions provided by EMC for the government? How have they been designed to overcome the many challenges?

Governments gather a lot of intelligence from national information centres, infrastructures, citizens and inter-connected public services. As with any other vertical, the government vertical too wants to derive great value out of information. Our role is to enable this aspect. Like for other verticals, we offer the government vertical our full range of products and solutions in

The total IT spend in Government is projected at INR30,000 crore (about US$6.5 billion by 2012) according to Gartner, and information infrastructure is going to be a considerable amount of that. For example – State Data Centres (SDC) have been identified as an important element of the core infrastructure to support e-Governance initiatives under the NeGP. As said in the SDC scheme, a SDC would constitute Central Repository of the State, Secure Data Storage, Online Delivery of Services, Citizen Information, Services Portal, Disaster Recovery, among others. The Central government plans to roll out 1,100 e-Governance services by 2014, and initiatives like the UIDAI or the national database of maintaining health records of patients, or telemedicine digitization will require significant overhaul of existing systems and information storage systems.

Digital information exchange in the government sector will form a considerable part of India’s share of digital information, which is expected to grow 60-fold by 2020, as per the EMC-IDC study on the digital universe.

Which are the key government projects that EMC is invovled?

Some key government projects EMC is involved in are State Data Centre (SDC) projects of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Gujarat and Maharashtra; CDAC, UIDAI, NICSI, CWG and the Census of India project. n

GOOD GOVERNANCE JULY 2011 37

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newsbytes

new e-governance projects to work on open source OS: Draft

Postal Dept. to Launch Smooth Online Transactions Service

MP Govt. Introduces e-Registration System for Contractors

Computer hardware and peripherals used by all new e-governance projects must work with Linux and other open source operating systems, says a draft policy.

In a major exercise to boost its profitability, the Department of Posts (DoP) plans to introduce core banking solution besides setting up India Post ATMs and debit cards for its customers. It will ensure smooth online transactions.

The work for setting up 1,000 India Post ATMs was in advanced stage and DoP had already held parleys with vendors on this front. The DoP is tying up with banks so that customers can use their India Post debit card at any ATM machine pan-India. With a network reach of over 1.44 lakh post offices, DoP hopes to transform itself into a post bank.

The Madhya Pradesh government has launched an integrated e-Registration facility for contactors in the state. With the launch of this system, the contractors can now get themselves registered with the state government online. Under the system, if any contractor is blacklisted by one government department, he will remain blacklisted for all other government departments. A contractor will get himself registered on the government website by securing a user ID and password.

Besides, he will have to upload scanned copies of necessary documents with the application.

The lack of modern banking facilities in rural areas and dependence of villagers on informal sector for their credit requirements prompted government to establish a post bank.

The scrutiny of the online application will be made at three levels and if the application is found eligible, the applicant will be intimated online as well as through SMS.

Vehicles in Haryana to Have e-Tracking System

Haryana Govt.

Introduces Online Child Tracking System

UP Government to Increase G2C services Through CSCs

The Haryana government has decided to install a specialised tracking system in all its vehicles to keep a tab on drivers misusing official cars and other vehicles of the state.

The Haryana Health Department has developed a ‘Mother and Child Tracking’ software to curb the menace of female foeticide and ensure timely health checkups of mothers and children. The Health Department spokesperson said that the software has already been uploaded in the computers installed in all Community Health Centres (CHCs).

Uttar Pradesh Information Technology department has planned to add more government to citizen services (G2C) in the existing bouquet of services being offered though common services centres (CSCs) in the state.

The rules for device drivers - software that make devices such as printers and servers talk to computers - have been put in the public domain by DIT, which will take into account views of hardware makers and other stakeholders before finalising the policy.

The proposed policy is expected to save government money as open source systems come cheap.

Many states are keen to adopt cheaper systems but shy away due to non-compatibility with latest hardware. The draft rules out use of closed systems like Apple Macs and iPads.

All the official vehicles of the state government like cars, jeeps, buses and minitrucks will get these special tracking system devices. Each device will cost around Rs 20000.

These tracking systems will be maintained by a private company and a control room will be set up at Municipal Corporation’s office in each district to monitor them.

Every vehicle will be fitted with a specific SIM card, which is not interchangeable. On the webpage, the speed, location and direction of the vehicles can be tracked.

38 JULY 2011 GOOD GOVERNANCE

Health workers have been roped in for the registration of mothers and children through this software. Information collected by the health workers would be fed in the computers of health centres and information would be made available online. Officers of the department would regularly monitor the information and take effective steps to check the menace of female foeticide in the state.

The State Government would be completing the state service delivery gateway (SSDG) project in a month’s time and hence would then be able to offer bunch of 25-30 services from these CSCs. Under the SSDG project, a standard electronic form (eForm) is used for the two-way-end-to-end transaction between government and citizens.

The state has already completed digitization of record of rights (RoR) and is delivering RoR in an electronic format.

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newsbytes

Indian Railways Launches New e-Ticketing Service

NAI & CDAC Joined to Preserve Electronic Public Records

Filing Returns and Tax Payments Services made Online

Indian Railways is all set to roll out its own e-ticketing service, which will have no room for travel agents and will be reserved for individual users.

Aiming at preserving electronic public records generated through e-governance initiatives of the Central government, the citybased Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), has signed a MoU with the National Archives of India (NAI), New Delhi, for development of applicable software.

As part of its e-governance initiatives, the commercial taxes department has rolled out e-payment of taxes. This would enable dealers to file returns and make payments with a click of the mouse from any location.

Unlike the e-ticketing service of IRCTC, the new service by Indian Railway will have no role of travel agents and commercial organisations.

Only individual users will be allowed to book.

Under the new railway e-ticketing service, individual customers would need to register themselves for the first time for availing the services. The registration will be free of charge.

A maximum of eight transaction per user ID per month will be allowed in the beginning.

The service charges levied will be Rs 5 per ticket for sleeper class and Rs 10 per ticket for all other classes.

This MoU has been signed as part of the project of ‘Centre of Excellence for Digital Preservation’ sanctioned by the DIT, MCIT, Government of India. This project will be handled

by Human-Centred Design and Computing (HCDC) Group of C-DAC, which specialises in digital preservation and archival. As part of the project, funded by DIT, C-DAC and NAI have jointly set up a Centre for excellence for digital preservation (CEDP) to create a machinery to archive the electronic public records.

The department’s monthly collections had increased from Rs 50 crore to Rs 59 crore, following the introduction of online filing of returns and online issue of forms. The e-payment module has been developed with the help of National Informatics Centre (NIC), Puducherry.

The facility is beneficial for both the dealer and the commercial taxes department -- it saves time for the dealer by allowing making payments online and the department benefits as the amount reaches the exchequer instantly.

HRD Ministry Working on New Technology for parents

Tamil Nadu Govt.

Launches Electronic Chalaan System

Maharashtra uses e-Governance to speed up development projects

Human Resource Minister, Kapil Sibal announced that the Union Government is working on a 3D technology that will allow parents to have online access to any educational institution for admission of their wards. He said a combination of a host of technologies like geospatial, videography and aerial photography would be put into use to develop the new technology.

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa launched the electronic chalaan system of Chennai City Traffic Police for spot fining traffic violators. The 300 e-chalaan system units worth Rs 2.83 crore would be issued to Inspectors and Sub Inspectors who regulate traffic in the city.

The Maharashtra government is looking to speed up approval process for all real estate development projects and make it transparent by taking e-governance route. The state government is contemplating usage of satellite technology and global positioning system for faster and transparent approvals.

With this e-chalaan system, traffic violators can be spot fined and be monitored. We will co ordinate with banks soon to make way for credit card payments in this system. This mobile unit can be placed when the regular traffic signal system fails due to power cut or can be placed during visits of VIPs to a place.

The Maharashtra Housing & Area Development Authority (MHADA) will undertake all government supported housing projects, while Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) will focus on infrastructure building activities. The projects to be handled by MHADA will also include all future rental housing developments, which were so far being undertaken by MMRDA. The government will soon take a policy decision on the issue.

“The mapping exercise (of schools) is going on but most of it is on 2D and we want it in 3D,” he said.

The ministry was working on connecting each college in the country with National Knowledge Network, whereby students would be able to have access to lectures from professors of other universities or colleges free of cost.

These units also have rechargeable batteries.

Chennai City Traffic Police has purchased 20 such mobile signal units at a cost of Rs 26 lakh.

GOOD GOVERNANCE JULY 2011 39

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newsbytes

Punjab Government to Place GIS System in Six Cities

Himachal Pradesh Govt Launchs e-Procurement System

Haryana Police to Launch e-Chargesheet by 2012

Punjab government is all set to place six cities under the technologically-advanced Geographical Information System (GIS) to facilitate its future planning, expansion and maintenance of civic infrastructure.

Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal launched the e-tendering process for procurement of different commodities through the department of Information Technology in association with the National Informatics Centre.

The Haryana Police will soon have a computerised system to generate chargesheets automatically. Once the system is rolled out, all manually filled investigation forms, case files, will be digitised and chargesheets will be generated through computers.

Under this project of National Urban Information System, a total of 137 cities have been chosen from across the country for initiating GIS, including six from Punjab.

The Chief Minister said that the e-procurement would not only bring about efficiency but also reduce paperwork through automated bid evaluation system. He said that the system would be error free and promote transparency. The e-tendering process had been estimated at about Rs 86,937 crore through NIC, while Himachal Pradesh would also be carrying e-tendering/biding through the major departments of Public Works, Irrigation and Public Health and Controller of Stores.

For the purpose, the government has shortlisted four IT giants, HCL Technologies, NIIT, Wipro and Hewlett Packard. Even the investigation is going to go hi-tech, with the use of tools like crime mapping, crime pattern analysis, etc. The entire force will be on information technology platform by 2012. These efforts are part of the Crime and Criminal Tracking Networking System (CCTNS) project, which is being implemented in all 35 states and Union Territories of the country.

Jharkhand Govt.

Moots E-Monitoring of Cases

Tripura Govt. Provides Rural info Through Mobile SMS

Haryana Govt. to Enhance Computer Education in Schools

Monitoring the steps of prosecution with regard to criminal cases will go hi-tech in Jharkhand. The Jharkhand government is seriously contemplating overhauling the system of monitoring by doing away with the manual monitoring of cases.

For swift communication of government decisions and announcement relating to rural affairs, the Tripura government will use the Short Messaging System (SMS). Government decisions relating to rural affairs would first be communicated to panchayat heads and officials of all ranks through mobile SMS followed by normal government circulars.

Haryana government has prepared a roadmap to increase the computer literacy in over 2,500 senior secondary government schools in the state. A comprehensive roadmap has been prepared to increase the computer literacy in over 2,500 senior secondary schools in the state. The State government will spend around Rs 100 crore in this project to make students more computer savvy.

Databases received with the aid of GIS would prove beneficial during the preparation of ‘Master Plans’ of these cities.

GIS would be started in Amritsar, Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Patiala, Bathinda and Pathankot

by October 31, which would be further implemented in remaining districts of the state.

The government had mooted a proposal to develop computer software through which progress of all cases could be monitored and required instruction could be sent to the concerned police officials.

The Crime Control and Tracking Network System (CCTNS), which intends to link all the police stations with the state police headquarter via high-speed Internet facility, will also stand in good stead of the officials’ attempt to boost the conviction rate.

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Tripura secured the top position in the country by providing on an average 67 mandays to the people under the MGNREGA against the national average of 46.56 mandays. However, 77,990 families got 100 mandays of works last year of the total 585,185 job card holders.

To overcome the problem of delay in allocation of funds under the MGNREGA, Tripura is the first state in India to introduce the Fund Flow Management System (FFMS).

So far the state government has spent Rs 300 crore for providing better computer education in these government schools, during the past few months.

Modernized computer labs have been set up in most of the schools and these labs are well equipped so that the students do not have to encounter any problem.

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E-Governance Models of Excellence Aarogyam: Citizen - Centric Service Delivery Aarogyam is country’s unique end to end community based digital health mapping and pregnancy tracking system which aims to provide healthcare services to citizens at their doorsteps, with special focus on mother and child health care. Aarogyam caters to both Safe Motherhood and Child Survival Components of Reproductive and Child Health (RCH). For the former, it focuses on Ante Natal Care (ANC), Post Natal Care (PNC) and emphasizes on 100% immunization for ensuring the latter.

A complete health database with respect to the target group i.e. pregnant/lactating mothers and children is prepared, uploaded on central server, and linked to IVR solution, which generates family specific automated calls and Hindi SMS on all aspects of child immunization, ANC, PNC, safe delivery, pulse-polio campaign etc, on telephone. The project also has an interactive platform wherein a citizen can enquire about various health parameters, and can lodge a complaint too on a given helpline number. Aarogyam therefore ensures that the government is reaching out to the people for providing responsive health care delivery. “The project is running in seven districts and around 3.5 lakh families have been covered, and more than One lakh calls and SMS have been sent to the users under

ICEGATE: A model Government portal The ICEGATE (Indian Customs EDI Gateway) - http://www.icegate.gov. in is the single point of contact of Indian Customs EDI Application (ICES) with the external world. It is real-time electronic interface of ICES, with its 15 major trading partners concerned with customs clearance of cargo i.e. Importers, Exporters, Carriers, Ports, Custodians, Banks as well as government regulatory and facilitating agencies. It offers 24x7 end to end e-commerce/ EDI services free of cost making the Customs clearance transparent and efficient. About 92% of customs clearance documents in ICES are filed by the registered users through ICEGATE using either of the three available mode viz. email, web upload and FTP. The remaining 8% documents filed at Service Centres of the Customs locations, also move into ICES through ICEGATE. ICEGATE services in the G2B, B2G, G2G and G2C domain include: • e-filing, amendment, query replies and eacknowledgement of Customs documents • e-payment of Customs duties • Message exchange with various stakeholders ( including banks) in customs clearance • Message exchange with DGFT, Ministry of Commerce for export incentive disbursal • Real time Web based document status tracking facility • Data exchange with about 10 regulatory and licensing agencies to prevent import /export fraud.

this scheme. Pregnancy Tracking, an integral component of the project, has now been adopted in the entire state of Uttar Pradesh,” said Ritu Maheshwari, Additional Commissioner, Meerut, who was Collector of District, J P Nagar.

Talking about the investment, Mayur Maheshwari, Collector-Dehat, Kanpur said, “When we started the project, we spent about Rs 6-7 lakhs but now the State Government has taken up, so it has included other expenses also like the infrastructure and the recurring expenses. The government has allocated around Rs 20 lakhs per district for this project.”

Now to further expand the scope the project, Mayur says, “We have a database of around three and a half lakh families, which is a target group. We can now use this target group as a medium of community broadcasting to induce behavior change, because in any healthcare system for that matter, any social change, we need to induce behavior change first. So we are targeting a series of preprogrammed instructions, we will be providing them interventions as and when needed in suppose sanitation, healthcare, other services of healthcare, then we will link it to family planning as well. Further we will also expand our scope in terms of natural calamity or disaster.”

import and export. All transactions with Customs happen through ICEGATE and this portal not only caters for the importers, exporters and their agents but also takes care of all the transactions which happen between the Customs Department and various other stake holders, Ministries, the Custodians, the Ports, DDFT, airlines, shipping lines, the port community, etc.,” said Atul Dixit, Additional Director General, ICESGATE Project. This project costs about Rs 8 crores in a year. M/s Wipro has been awarded the contact and they are managing the backend applications.

“The filing on the ICESGATE website is free of charge. The advantage is that no user charges anyone. The option to file the documents for the person is through the service center located at the Customs location also, but if they file there, then they have to pay Rs 60-80 per document.

Whereas if they file through ICEGATE, it is absolutely free. So in effect we save almost Rs 100 crore as the transaction cost for the importers and exporters. So that way we contribute, instead of earning,” said Dheeraj Rastogi, Additional Director, Directorate of Systems of Customs and Excise.

ICEGATE services are available across the world. It caters to all Customs locations in India. “At present we have a Customs Application running in more than 90 locations of the country. All the land Customs location (LCD) or the air cargo destinations or the sea ports, everywhere ICEGATE application is the front-end through which all Customs documentation takes place,” said Rastogi.

The plan now is to introduce more web services, certain additional features in the tracking services that are provided currently.

“This project is basically meant for e-filing of all Customs documents,

GOOD GOVERNANCE JULY 2011 41

v e-Disaster Management Cell: Innovative use of technology in e-Governance Gadchiroli, the most forested district in Maharashtra, is geographically located at the conflux of three perennial rivers namely Godavari, Indravati and Pranhita. While the challenge remains the Naxal threat, the biggest threat of natural disasters is from the recurring floods.

The techniques evolved to conduct successful elections in Gadchiroli during the year 2009 were further perfected into full fledged disaster management module in the form of SMS based flood alert system, SMS based Blood donor information & registration system and the VHF based GPS equipped ambulance and other vehicle tracking system. The project made history by saving the lives of the inhabitants of 42 villages during the floods in 2010 in over more than a decade. “We have taken so many innovative measures in the field of Government out of which one is this installation of the flood monitoring system which saved thousands of lives this year. The flood monitoring system has been installed at 21 places in Gatchiroli district,” said Rajendra Kanfade, Additional Collector, Gatchiroli.

GSIEP: The perfect repository GSI Enterprise Portal (GSIEP), http://www.portal.gsi.gov.in, has made possible the building of a central geo-information repository thus achieving the prime objective of managing the vast knowledge gathered by Geological Survey of India (GSI) over more than 159 years. The portal acts as a single gateway providing reliable and authentic geoscientific information to the government, industry and general public as well as broad geoscientific community thus contributing to the sustainable development of the nation. It has also established a virtual environment of active sharing and collaboration within and outside the organization.

The back-office transactional applications claims and scientific applications have brought a considerable improvement in internal processes and services through faster and transparent decision making aided by readily available relevant information. It has also fulfilled GSI’s responsibility towards the changes in business environment, the demands of public and private sectors involving the mineral, infrastructure, power, steel, fertilizer, cement and other industries. This Portal is experiencing a steady increase in its visitor ship thus also signifying the relevance, growth and efficacy of the Portal. “In 2003 we conceived the idea of having our own portal and the whole idea was that for 159 years GSI has been accumulating lot of data on mineral resources, Indian Geology, different aspects of Geology and Geotectonics and so many domains. The whole idea was to put this whole data in such a form that academicians, scholars and the decision makers in the government and private entrepreneurs, get know as to what is available in which part of the country and which form,” said A K Malvia, Head Mission Three, which is managing this portal and the project of GSI. The project started in 2007 and today it has got more than one terabyte of data stored on its portal. All the metadata of reports are available in the public domain. “We have our applications available in 37 centers across India. Total project cost only Rs 8 crores, which we have invested in the development of the portal, but if you take WAN and LAN, it is total project of Rs 25 crores, spreading over a period of about four years,” said Malvia.

42 JULY 2011 GOOD GOVERNANCE

B-Trac Project: Streamlining Traffic in Bengaluru The challenge before Bengaluru Traffic Police was to manage four million vehicles, limited police force, rampant violations and bad road user behavior. Bengaluru Traffic Police then adopted a technology based solution, B-Trac. Officers above the level of ASI are equipped with handheld Blackberry and Bluetooth enabled printers that are connected to centralised server system using GPRS network. Violations recorded into central database enable violation history of every commuter and help in catching repeat offenders with enhanced penalties.

Simultaneously, constables record the violations and feed them into central database which procures the address from ownership database with RTO in real time and sends violation notices through post.

These violation notices can be paid at any of the Police Stations, Customer Facilitation Centres and Internet. The new system is objective, transparent and has plugged the revenue leakages. Thus Bangalore became the first city in the country to have complete paperless traffic enforcement culture. An extensive MIS obviated the need for many registers maintained in the police stations and provided extra time to the policemen for better performance.

More tangible benefits were seen in sharp reduction in accident cases from 6591 in 2007 to 5343 in 2010 and fatalities from 981 in 2007 to 761 in 2009, as a result of stricter enforcement and better discipline among road users. Another feature of the project is connecting all the 330 traffic signals and 185 surveillance cameras through 4MB connectivity to Traffic Management Center. “This is for the first time such a thrust is being given to traffic management. The state government has spent Rs 120 crores during a period of three years on this project,” said Shankar Bidari, former City Police Commissioner who had overseen the project.

Tele Samadhan: An example of ideal Citizen-centric service delivery Tele Samadhan is a facility available for citizens through a single toll free help line number 158343 for any public service rendered by the State Government or its entities across the State. Once the grievance is registered there is a robust system of monitoring the redressal and a system of escalation if the complaint is not redressed in the given time limit. At present 17 departments are connected with the facility. The departments connected with the systems can access the database through the website http://www.telesamadhan. mp.gov.in. A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is integrated with the database. Till date the system has received around 9.2 lakhs calls and 92% of the grievances have been redressed. The departments have also got an opportunity to see a dashboard view of the activities of the department and the perception of the citizen about their services. The application has brought higher level of transparency and accountability to the functioning of all departments.

“To deliver the citizen centric services, there is a toll free number on which any citizen can call. He doesn’t have to pay anything. When he calls, he can get information on the government schemes, or he can register a complaint.

If he registers a complaint, that complaint is sent to the departments and levels are defined.

In case if it’s not solved within a particular stipulated period of time, then it goes to the higher level and when the government officials report that the complaint has been solved, the call center calls back the complainant to find out whether he is satisfied with the solution or not. And all these calls are recorded,” said L.K.Tewari, Chief General Manager of Madhya Pradesh State Electronic Corporation (MPSEC).

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