NeGP was rolled out in 2006 and has now entered its fifth
year. According to you, what have been some of the most
transformational e-governance projects implemented in the last five
years?
There have been some extremely transformational projects in the
area of delivering public services by the electronic mode. One of
the big areas has been with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs,
where every company needs to be registered electronically and all
the returns need to be filed electronically. It is a huge
transformation and a very big service to the citizens of this
country. Another big area is that of income tax. As we know, a
large number of people are filing their returns electronically
today.
E-passport Seva is another transformational e-governance project.
Though e-passport seva has been rolled out slowly, it is now on a
national roll out, and is no longer a pilot. It has been achieved
in Bengaluru and is being implemented in Chandigarh. This means
that people will not have to go to passport offices, as they can go
to facilitation centers to file their requests.
In addition to this, there are a large number of other projects,
which are being implemented by the state government. In many parts
of the country and in most of the states, the land records have
been digitized. Earlier whenever one wanted a copy of a land
record, one had to go to the patwari, who used to demand a lot of
money and citizens had to face a lot of harassment. Today, wherever
the land records have been digitized in India, the copy of land
records is available within few hours.
Another transformational project has been in the area of obtaining
a driving license. I still remember when I came to Delhi for the
first time, getting a driving license used to be a herculean task.
Today, a driving license can be obtained very quickly and one can
get it delivered at his residence. No doubt, corruption has reduced
substantially and there is greater transparency and efficiency.
So, there has been a huge transformation in these areas. Rather, I
would say most of the Mission Mode Projects have done wonderfully
well.
Please tell us about the e-infrastructure that has been
created to successfully deliver various e-governance
projects?
To deliver services electronically in a transparent manner, we had
to create an e-infrastructure. That platform is up and operational
today. We have got the front ends that are the Common Service
Centers (CSC). Currently 97,000 CSCs have been set up, though out
of them 15,000- 20,000 may be a little dormant. But almost 80,000
CSCs are fully operational and working very well.
We have created SWANs (State Wide Area Networks) — almost
27-28 SWANs are up and operational and two SWANs will get
operational this month. These networks are providing connectivity
to government officials. Also, the State Data Centers (SDCs) are
getting up and operational. Once the entire infrastructure becomes
operational along with the middleware, successful delivery of
public services electronically will become much easier.
When we say, delivering of services electronically, it does not
mean some kind of digitization. It does not mean that whatever is
being done in the manual form would be digitized and delivered.
That is not the idea. The idea is to go for reformation and
transformation. For that what is required is, business process
reengineering and sharing of data — wherein all the
information sits at one place and everybody shares it. Also, if
there is need for any kind of integration of information, it can be
achieved without creating two sets of the same information.
For example, if you have one set of land records in the district,
then there is no real need for keeping a set of the same record at
the state headquarters. Rather, a single set of the entire data can
be kept at the state headquarters and whosoever wants it, can
access this data.
Department of Information Technology (DIT) has recently
released a draft framework and guidelines for the use of social
media by government organizations. Can you please discuss
this?
Social media is a very powerful medium and it allows two-way
communication. That means through this channel, you can communicate
with the public and also get a feedback from the public on a
real-time basis, thus entering into a meaningful dialogue. In a
democracy it is very important to enter into these kinds of
dialogues.
However, at the same time, people can misuse the powerful medium
and create a lot of disinformation. You must have seen this in the
case of the UK riots. How to avoid such situations? How to
encourage the government officials to adopt this powerful medium?
That’s when we thought it will be a good idea to create a
framework, because in the absence of a framework, government
officials were very reluctant and hesitant to use social media and
they had no clarity on how they should be using the medium and to
what extent. We created this framework so that we are able to use
the medium effectively and in a meaningful manner to propagate our
policies, to get public feedback and to bring transparency.
Under RTI, there is an institutional mechanism within every
department under the ministry. Similarly, for the government bodies
to use social media and respond quickly, there was a need of a
formal institutional mechanism, so that we are able to respond in a
definite time frame, without any chaos.
DIT has been strongly pushing the Electronic Service Delivery Bill.
Can you discuss about the bill and the way it will transform the
government to citizen relationship?
It is going to transform the way we deliver services. We started
the journey of e-governance in 2006 and thought that all the state
governments will take necessary steps to deliver services in the
electronic mode. However, the pace is a bit slow and is not as per
the expectation of people.
Then, we found that if we give it a force of law and if we make it
mandatory for all government departments to deliver all public
services in electronic mode, then every department would be forced
to deliver these services electronically.
Also, this would be a time-bound activity — in the next five
years all the public services should be delivered electronically.
Because of the time frame and the force of law, everybody would
have to work together and take necessary steps in this
direction.
Is the government planning to utilize cloud computing for
e-governance projects?
All the departments would not be able to take this agenda forward,
as they would have to create their own infrastructure and their own
modules. If everybody has to invent the wheel again and again, then
it will take time. On the other hand, if the wheel has been
invented somewhere, then why don’t we put that wheel on a
common platform, and whosoever wants to use this wheel can do
so.
What we are thinking now is that once the entire infrastructure is
created, we can put this infrastructure on the cloud so that it is
available for everyone to use and deliver services in the
electronic mode. Also, for a lot of applications, instead of
creating software again and again, these can be customized and
hosted on the cloud.
For example, services like payment gateways, authentication
services, etc. We are also working in this direction and we hope
that by the middle of the next year, we will be able to create some
kind of a private cloud for the government for limited
operation.
With various e-governance projects being implemented at the
centre and state level, what are government’s initiatives in
the direction of capacity building?
Firstly, we are creating general awareness, so that we can generate
demand from the public. We are sensitizing policy makers. Secondly,
we are imparting technical knowledge to people like tehsildars and
executive engineers, who are at the cutting edge.
We are recruiting professionals from the market at the state level.
They will not be involved in the implementation of a particular
project, but will be overseeing the implementation of the project.
So they will be the eyes and ears of the state government at the
program level, and not at the project level.