E-Governance Issues and Challenges

Introduction
E-Governance is an ambitious project of the central Government of India (GOI) for
nationwide deployment of e-governance application to bring about radical change in
service delivery to the citizens. The e-governance projects have been a major
component of tenth five year plan of Government of India, extended to sixth five year
plan as well. The e-governance projects has been hailed successful in several states
and changed the way the government functions, reducing corruption and allowing free
flow of information.

E-Government is the transformation of public sector internal and external relationship

through Internet-enabled operations, information and communication technology in
order to optimize government service delivery and governance. E-Governance is a
distinct contribution of the private sector. One of the reasons for this development has
been the emergence of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the last
two decade and the emergence of Internet and the Information highway.

Business corporations have discovered over the last two decades that information
technology can make the value chain more efficient and lead to quality increase and
cost savings. Similarly Government, have discovered that information technology can
make the provision of the services to the citizen more efficient, transparent, can save
costs and lead to a higher level of efficiency. This application of information
technology enabled processes and system is called e-Governance.

Emergence of E-Governance
Government has been the principal user of knowledge since times immemorial.
Primary function of government is decision-making and e-government provides unique
support to decision-making. Government also has largest repositories of information
and databases and e-government helps in their efficient management. Government
always had access to the best available technology of the day to manage its affairs
and e-government provides some of the latest and best available technology. There
has also been information explosion in recent years and e-government provides an
important tool to cope up with it. Office documents lead in storage on paper (Table 1),

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 E-Governance Issues and Challenges

which highlights the need for paperless office, and which is an important promise of e-
government.

S.N. Type of Content Terabytes

1 Books 39
2 Newspapers 138.4
3 Office Documents 1,397.5
4 Mass market periodicals 52
5 Journals 6
6 Newsletters 0.9
7 Total 1,633.8
Source: How much information 2003 (SIMS 2003)
Table 1 Worldwide production of printed original content: Storage content: Paper

India’s National E-Governance Plan (NEGP)

India’s National E-Governance Plan (NEGP) is a major program component of the
Tenth National Plan and has been endorsed by the Prime Minister’s Office since 2003.
Aiming to bring in a drastic change and improvement in the Government of India
approach towards providing services to its citizens, NeGP involves the entire central
and state levels of governments and encompasses 7 central Mission Mode Projects
(MMPs), 13 state MMPs and 7 integrated MMPs, plus 8 program component activities
(such as capacity building, core infrastructure and program management).

Successful E-Governance Projects

Some of the successful e-governance projects have been e-Seva, Bhoomi, Gramdoot,
Gyandoot etc among others. The e-governance projects generally cover all modes of
service delivery from the Government to citizens. Some of the applications are listed
below:
1. Transport-Registration of Motor Vehicles, issuing driving licenses etc.
2. Health Care- Linking various Hospitals Tele-Medicine etc.
3. Education-Linking various educational Institutions, distance learning etc.
4. Employment-Online Registration for unemployed, computerization of day
to day activities of employment exchange etc.
5. Municipal- Bill deposition, Issue of Certificates - Birth / Death / Land
records etc.
6. Food and Civil Supply- Issue and Renewal of Ration Cards
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 E-Governance Issues and Challenges

7. Revenue-Registration of Property, Land records computerization &

Transfer of Properties, Stamp Duty Payments
The e-governance projects have been appreciated and awarded by different
organizations and agencies.

Levels of E-Governance
The E-governance projects can be categorized in to 3 types. These are:
Level1: Information (availability and dissemination)
Level 2: Interaction (Citizen to department and vice versa)
Level 3: Transaction (Citizen to department and vice versa)
The first level of the project is where the application can provide an interface to citizen
for information access and the user can access and download information. The second
level of the project is where the application can provide interactivity with the user and
allows the user to communicate with the department and answer queries of the user
examples is e-choupal, where the citizens can get information about the weather, type
of crops to be grown and current rate on the yields and crop. The third level of the
application is where the citizens and the government department can carry out
transactions. The examples of successful third level projects are e-Seva, Railway
ticketing System etc.

Stages of E-Governance
The e-governance project to be developed and deployed can be divided into four broad
phases. These are:
1. Phase 1: Information Technology framework
2. Phase 2: Digitization
3. Phase 3: Citizen Access
4. Phase 4: Content Development

In the first phase, the IT framework need to be identified and the project should be rolled
out only after evaluating the feasibility of the project in terms of capacity building,
readiness and financial sustainability. It has been found that several e-governance

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 E-Governance Issues and Challenges

projects were deployed without carrying out the financial feasibility of the project. The
prime example is e-Seva. The project was started without formal budget provision and
without conducting feasibility study. (Source: Information Technology Audit of eSeva –
an e-Governance initiative by Government www.icisa.cag.gov.in). The projects though
successful lead to delays and increased cost of the project.

In the second phase, the digitization is important to the success of the project. Large
amount of data leads to chaos and redundancy of the project. Before the digitization is
initiated the data should be filtered. i.e. The obsolete data should be identified and
discarded. The data cleansing should be done periodically and only by the departments.
The outsourced agency which is generally entrusted with this task is not the correct
approach, since this leads to corruption, stealing and dilution of data. Many departments
generally outsource this activity, which compromises the security of confidential data. In
many cases the digitization is also carried out by scanning the documents, which do not
allow indexing or search on the data. Hence the digitization phase is very crucial and
delicate work.

In the third phase - Citizen Access: To make the information available, the infrastructure
plays a very vital role. The infrastructure includes telecommunication network,
Electricity, Kiosks etc. Although the SWAN network has connected almost all corners of
the country, the electrification and PC penetration or Kiosk centers are limited. The
different source of access media like Mobiles telephony, Radios, and Television etc
should be promoted.

In the Fourth phase - Content Development: This phase is not limited to content
updating, but the transactions must be reconciled, scrutinized and updated. The
transactional data must be converted into historical data and separate data mart may be
created. For example: The transactions in eSeva were not reconciled with the data in
the respective departments and scrutiny revealed many irregularities, inadequacies and
inconsistencies in the data. (Source: Information Technology Audit of eSeva – an e-
Governance initiative by Government www.icisa.cag.gov.in).

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 E-Governance Issues and Challenges

Challenges in implementation of E-Governance Applications

A number of issues, some old and some new have arisen in e-governance
Application, for example:
(i) The project implementation is generally vendor driven.
(ii) Lack of standardization ( For example, similar projects are carried out by
different state agencies using incompatible file formats and application
standards)
(iii) Reverse compatibility of application with legacy systems are missing in several
projects.
(iv) The IT Infrastructures are procured before building the application or digitizing
the data.
(v) Physical security is emphasized, whereas the Logical and application security
is left to vendors in many cases.
(vi) Lack of understanding by the departments, for the components of e-
governance applications, which can be outsourced or can be carried out in-
house.

Conclusion
Despite the success of the project, the e-governance initiative face several hindrances
like delay in project implementation, spiraling cost, financial feasibility and financial
sustainability along with technical bottlenecks and Integration with Government
departments and states.

To conclude, the current e-government practice in India is project-specific and

implementation and integration differs from state to state and are not nation-wide.

Source:
Information Technology Audit of eSeva – an e-Governance initiative by Government
www.icisa.cag.gov.in

5 Compiled by: Mr.Avadh Narayan Yadav,Bos,ICAI,Noida.