E-Governance for Rural Development

India is a land of diversity. This diversity spans across culture, tradition, language,
geography and the economic condition of the people. It is a nation that has a
significant number of people who are below the minimal socio-economic benchmarks.
This includes rural and urban poor, women in rural areas, street children, people
belonging to historically disadvantaged castes and people living in less developed
areas. The vulnerability of these sections of society has increased with globalization
and this section is prone to become even more marginalized - economically and
socially.

Successive governments have committed themselves to addressing these divides,

but effective implementation of various economic development programmes aimed
at individuals belonging to these sections of society has proved an elusive goal.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, initial attempts towards e-Governance were made
with a focus on networking government departments and developing in-house
government applications in the areas of defence, economic monitoring, planning and
the deployment of IT to manage data-intensive functions related to elections,
census, tax administration etc.80 These applications focused on automation of
internal government functions rather than on improving service delivery to citizens.

Over the past decade or so, there have been islands of e-Governance initiatives in
the country at the national, state, district and even block-level. Some of them have
been highly successful and are suitable for replication. A need was therefore felt for
taking a holistic view of the several e-Governance initiatives implemented across the
country. It was increasingly perceived that if e-Governance was to be speeded up
across the various arms and levels of Government a programme approach would
need to be adopted, which must be guided by a common vision, strategy and
approach. This would have the added advantage of enabling huge savings in costs, in
terms of sharing the core and support infrastructure, enable interoperability through
standards etc, which would result in the citizen having a seamless view of
Government.

eGovernance- the term

The term eGovernance has different connotations:

* E-administration—The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT's)

to modernize the state; the creation of data repositories for MIS, computerisation of
records.

* E-services—The emphasis here is to bring the state closer to the citizens. Examples
include provision of online services. E-administration and e-services together
constitute what is generally termed e-government.

* eGovernance—The use of IT to improve the ability of government to address the

needs of society. It includes the publishing of policy and programme related
information to transact with citizens. It extends beyond provision of on-line services
and covers the use of IT for strategic planning and reaching development goals of
the government.
* E-democracy—The use of IT to facilitate the ability of all sections of society to
participate in the governance of the state. The remit is much broader here with a
stated emphasis on transparency, accountability and participation. Examples could
include online disclosure policies, online grievance redress forums and e-
referendums.

E-Governance is now mainly seen as a key element of the country's governance and
administrative reform agenda. The Government of India aspires to provide:

Governance that is easily understood by and accountable to the citizens, open to

democratic involvement and scrutiny (an open and transparent government)

Citizen-centric governance that will cover all of its services and respect everyone
as individuals by providing personalized services.

An effective government that delivers maximum value for taxpayers' money

(quick and efficient services)

Hence the Government of India views e-Governance as a vehicle to initiate and

sustain reforms by focusing on three broad areas:

* Governance

Transparency
People's participation
Promotion of a democratic society

* Public services

Efficient, cost-effective and responsive governance

Convenient services to citizens and businesses
Greater citizen access to public information
Accountability in delivery of services to citizens

* Management

Simplicity, efficiency and accountability

Managing voluminous information and data effectively
Information services
Swift and secure communication

Implementation

Implementation of e-Governance is a highly complex process requiring provisioning

of hardware & software, networking, process re-engineering and change
management. Based on successful e-Governance applications, the approach and
methodology adopted for National eGovernance Plan (NeGP) contains the following
elements:

i. Common Support Infrastructure: NeGP implementation involves setting up of

common and support IT infrastructure such as: State Wide Area Networks (SWANs),
State Data Centres (SDCs), Common Services Centres (CSCs) and Electronic Service
Delivery Gateways.

ii. Governance: Suitable arrangements for monitoring and coordinating the

implementation of NeGP under the direction of the competent authorities have also
been substantially put in place. The programme also involves evolving/ laying down
standards and policy guidelines, providing technical support, undertaking capacity
building, R&D, etc. DIT is required to adequately strengthen itself and various
institutions like NIC, STQC, CDAC, NISG, etc., to play these roles effectively.

iii. Centralized Initiative, Decentralized Implementation: e-Governance is

being promoted through a centralised initiative to the extent necessary to ensure
citizen-centric orientation, to realise the objective of inter-operability of various e-
Governance applications and to ensure optimal utilisation of ICT infrastructure and
resources while allowing for a decentralised implementation model. It also aims at
identifying successful projects and replicating them with required customisation
wherever needed.

iv. Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) model is to be adopted wherever feasible to

enlarge the resource pool without compromising on the security aspects.

v. Integrative Elements: Adoption of unique identification codes for citizens,

businesses and property is to be promoted to facilitate integration and avoid
ambiguity.

vi. Programme Approach at the National and State levels: For implementation
of the NeGP, various Union Ministries/Departments and State Governments are
involved. Considering the multiplicity of agencies involved and the need for overall
aggregation and integration at the national level, NeGP is being implemented as a
programme, with well defined roles and responsibilities of each agency involved. For
facilitating this, appropriate programme management structures have also been put
in place.

vii. Facilitatory role of Department of Information Technology (DIT): DIT is

the facilitator and catalyst for the implementation of NeGP by various Ministries and
State Governments and also provides technical assistance. It serves as a secretariat
to the Apex Committee and assists it in managing the programme. In addition, DIT is
also implementing pilot/ infrastructure/ technical/ special projects and support
components . Department of Administrative Reforms & Public Grievances (DAR&PG)'s
responsibility is towards Government Process Re-engineering and Change
Management, which are desired to be realised across all government departments.
Planning Commission and Ministry of Finance allocate funds for NeGP through Plan
and Non-plan budgetary provisions and lay down appropriate procedures in this
regard.

viii. Ownership of Ministries: Under the NeGP, various Mission Mode Projects
(MMPs) are owned and spearheaded by the concerned line Ministries. In case
there are any ongoing projects which fall in the MMP category, they would be
suitably enhanced to align them with the objectives of NeGP. For major projects like
Bharat Nirman, Rural Employment Guarantee Schemes etc., the line ministries
concerned are advised to make use of e-Governance as also automation techniques
from the inception stage. States have been given the flexibility to identify a few
additional state-specific projects, which are relevant for the economic development
of the State.

Agriculture, power and education are fields where the government makes use of IT
to provide services to citizens. The revenue collection department is in the process of
using information technology for applications such as income tax.

Some notable examples:

* A Kolkata-based hospital leverages e-governance for tropical medicine. The

hospital employs tele-medicine to assist doctors in rural areas as they analyse and
treat panchayat residents. This method does away with patients having to travel all
the way to Kolkata for treatment. Patients feel better being examined in their own
village. Using tele-medicine, the hospital is able to dispense its expertise to far-flung
districts. The patient goes for an examination to the local doctor in the panchayat.
This doctor is in contact via a voice & data connection with a doctor at the hospital
for tropical medicine. Thus, the panchayat resident gets the benefit of being treated
by both a local doctor and a hospital specialist.

* The Karnataka government's 'Bhoomi' project has led to the computerisation of the
centuries-old system of handwritten rural land records. Through it, the revenue
department has done away with the corruption-ridden system that involved bribing
village accountants to procure land records; records of right, tenancy and cultivation
certificates (RTCs). The project is expected to benefit seventy lakh villagers in
30,000 villages.

* A farmer can walk into the nearest taluk office and ask for a computer printout of
his land record certificate for Rs 15. He can also check details of land records on a
touch-screen kiosk by inserting a two-rupee coin. These kiosks, installed at the taluk
office, will provide the public with a convenient interface to the land records centre.

* In Gujarat there are websites where citizens log on and get access to the
concerned government department on issues such as land, water and taxes.

* In Hyderabad, through e-Seva, citizens can view and pay bills for water, electricity
and telephones, besides municipal taxes. They can also avail of birth / death
registration certificates, passport applications, permits / licences, transport
department services, reservations, Internet and B2C services, among other things.

* eChoupal, ITC's unique web-based initiative, offers farmers the information,

products and services they need to enhance productivity, improve farm-gate price
realisation, and cut transaction costs. Farmers can access the latest local and global
information on weather, scientific farming practices, as well as market prices at the
village itself through this web portal-all in Hindi. eChoupal also facilitates the supply
of high quality farm inputs as well as the purchase of commodities at the farm.

Given the literacy and infrastructure constraints at the village level, this model is
designed to provide physical service support through a choupal sanchalak-himself a
lead farmer-who acts as the interface between the system and the farmers. The
contents of this site in their entirety are made available only to the registered
sanchalaks.
Government initiatives

The national e-governance plan reflects the strategic intent of the central
government in the right perspective. Many projects are earmarked under this plan,
and it is trying to address the digital divide or the e-gap.

From a political perspective, after watching the performance of some IT-savvy states
in the previous elections, the system has woke up to the need to focus more on rural
development. The political systems were keen to use IT to disseminate information
faster to farmers, disburse loans, improve education and the health systems in
villages, etc. The clear-cut incentive to do it as 60 percent of the vote-bank still lives
in rural India.

E-governance has to be supported by the will and resources of those who are in
governance, be it at the central or state level. The central government has created a
separate e-governance department headed by a secretary to trigger e-governance in
India. The World Bank, ADB and UN are generously funding e-governance projects.

In future, education, agriculture, state wide area networks (SWANs) and Community
Information Centre projects will be rolled out backed by a strong public private
participation model (PPP) to achieve long-term sustainability.Projects with PPP
models in these segments can revolutionise the governance experience.

Relationship between citizens and public servants

The emergence of e-governance has significantly changed the nature of the

relationship between citizens and public servants. The e-governance movement not
only promises higher quality and better delivery of services and a greater realization
of entitlements, it also claims to offer stronger bonds between public servants and
citizens based on transparency and accountability. This new mode of relationship, e-
governance provides equal access to government and speedy and transparent
responses from public servants. Public agencies now have to justify their decisions
based on feedback from the people and conduct their business in public. However,
for the critics, instead of a citizen–administration relationship based on equality and
accountability e-governance also strengthens a top-down bureaucratic process by
posting information about the structures and functions of public agencies and
reinforcing the existing mode of interaction through documents and reports .In the
case of India, it is mostly the favorable view of e-governance that is echoed in
various print and electronic media, especially government websites. In line with the
common optimist picture of e-governance, it is pointed out that in India, compared
to the previous citizen–administration relations characterized by bureaucratic rigidity,
long delays, unnecessary complexity and public suffering, this relationship under e-
governance is now characterized by higher speed, greater access, less cost and less
public harassment.

The potential of e-governance to realize transparency and accountability has to be

strongly emphasized.

Relationship between politicians and Public servants

As far as the linkages between politicians and public servants are concerned,there is
a growing tendency in India toward a blurred or fused relationship between them,
especially due to their common mission of e-governance that stresses connection
rather than separation. In fact, there has emerged in India a new breed of politicians
possessing skills in it and behaving like bureaucratic experts. This is often the case at
state-level governance. The recent speeches of Chief Ministers invariably include
technical languages related to it understood and shared by technical bureaucratic
experts rather than ordinary citizens. In fact, the elected Chief Ministers of such
states as Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Meghalaya and
Punjab, are themselves in charge of adopting it in governance. In the case of other
states other elected ministers are assigned with this task. There is no serious
problem with the elected politicians managing the whole range of activities related to
the use of it in governance, but it implies an increasing tendency of these politicians
to play the role of technical experts and thus means a certain degree of
bureaucratization of the political sphere.

Conversely, there is a new generation of public servants in India who are well trained
in ICT to generate, maintain and disseminate information. Despite the greater level
of technical skills possessed by current political leaders, they are often dependent on
these bureaucratic information experts. In the past, it was widely known that the
power of a bureaucracy based on information and technical expertise always posed a
challenge to its accountability to the non-expert political leaders in developing
countries like India. The current addition of a more sophisticated form of information
power to the bureaucracy under e-governance brings back the question regarding
the accountability of such an information expert public bureaucracy to elected
politicians who are much less skilled in this new game of it. In addition, e-
governance provides a wider opportunity for public servants to interact directly with
the public in the process of receiving feedback from citizens and responding to their
queries and complaints through electronic means.

By entering into this domain of shaping public opinion, ICT-skilled public servants
may have assumed a certain political role. Thus, e governance may not only increase
the power of bureaucratic experts in relation to elected political leaders, it may also
lead to the politicization of the overall bureaucracy.

Conclusion

In the case of India, beyond the issue of public access and participation,
egovernance has not shown any promising results even in terms of service delivery.
In fact, the critics identify quite a number of failures of e-governance in India.
Examples of total or partial failure include such cases as the creation of district-level
information centres by the National Informatics Centre; the computerization of the
Income Tax Department's tax system; the use of the executive information system
in the management of adult literacy programmes; the adoption of a computerized
decision support system in the Narmada Irrigation Project Authority; and the
implementation of the Rural Information Systems Project. Similarly, the e-
governance scheme undertaken by the state government of Rajasthan has failed due
to its centralized planning, its insensitivity toward local infrastructure and lack of
motivation among villagers. It has been concluded that apart from some
improvement made in the railway services (e.g. a faster reservation service and less
corruption) by computerizing the Passenger Reservation System, there seems to be
no other significant cases in India to demonstrate any noticeable positive outcomes
made from the use of it in governance.

One of the most critical reasons for e-governance being less effective is the problem
of citizens' access to the available information sources such as the internet. Globally,
it is observed that the richest 20 percent of the world population represents 93.3
percent of internet users and the poorest 20 percent accounts for 0.2 percent . In
the case of India, according to The Economist, only 0.1 percent of the population has
internet access at home in 2000.

There are various factors constraining access to electronic communication, although

such access is an essential precondition for the effectiveness of egovernance.

First, internet access is too expensive for the poor in developing countries like India.
Installing the necessary telephone lines needed for internet or email access is equally
unaffordable in most poor countries.

Second, there is a very low rate of literacy in countries like India, although the
correlation between education level and use of the internet is quite significant.

In the case of Andhra Pradesh, one of the Indian states most aggressively pursuing
e-governance, even the basic literacy rate is only 44 percent (PC World, 2000).
Therefore, one may become sceptical about the effectiveness of e-governance in
such a context where the majority cannot even read and write.

Third, there are infrastructural limits such as the availability of computers, electricity
and telephone connections.. Although electricity and telecommunications are critical
for it and the internet, globally, over 33 percent of the world population is without
electricity and 80 percent without reliable telecommunications. In the case of India,
the power supply in villages is so irregular and poor that it is hardly possible to run
computers. Similarly, the lack of telephone connections is a serious obstacle to
internet access.

Fourth, the dominance of English on the internet constrains the access of non-
English-speaking population. It is found that of all the web pages in the world, about
84 percent are in English followed by 4.5 percent in German, 3.1 percent in
Japanese, 1.8 percent in French, 1.2 percent in Spanish, 1.1 percent in Swedish, 1
percent in Italian and less than 1 percent in all other languages (Norris, 2001). In
the case of India, 95 percent of the population does not speak English. Due to such
overwhelming dominance of English over these communication channels, computers
and the internet are quite useless in Indian villages, and the use of local languages
does little to alleviate the problem due to the poor literacy level mentioned earlier.

Finally, there are some adverse implications of e-governance, including inequality in

gaining access to public sector services between various sections of citizens,
especially between urban and rural communities, between the educated and
illiterate, and between the rich and poor.

In this regard, Bangalore, often known as the pride of Karnataka and the 'silicon
valley' of South Asia, is a classic case where serious divisions among citizens have
emerged. This indeed represents a disturbing scenario of how the digital divide may
have reinforced the socioeconomic divide in India. In fact, the worsening economic
inequality associated with it is quite serious. Although India as a nation takes pride in
its achievements in it, the fact remains that within the country, the production of
software exports is an extremely unequal game.The fact is that in India, the top 20
firms are responsible for 70 percent of all exports . Geographically, most of Indian
software company headquarters are located only in few large cities like in
Bangalore,Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Calcutta, Pune etc. These unequal
structures of it resulting from policies pursued under e-governance, thus, imply
greater economic and geographical divides in India.

Furthermore, this overemphasis on it in India may have displaced the whole idea of
'appropriate technology' and marginalized the significance of traditional technological
devices still used by the majority poor for their livelihood in this country. One
adverse outcome of inappropriate technology —such as the adoption of ICT and the
development of required human skills in poor countries — is often the loss of human
resources associated with such technology to foreign countries. It is mainly because
these human skills in it are more appropriate in advanced industrial nations than in
predominantly agricultural economies like India. In fact, heavy investment in it in
India has worsened the problem of the brain drain: each year, India has lost a
considerable number of its software workers, mostly to the USA.

It raises the question regarding the very rationale for investing so much public
money in creating a huge pool of it experts who are more likely to migrate to other
countries.

In conclusion, one needs to understand that after two decades of e-commerce, e-

governance and e-citizen, India one of the poorest countries in the world with 66
percent adult literacy rate, 25 percent people without health services, 71 percent
without access to sanitation, 26 percent living below the poverty line in 2008 ,
$230.85 billion external debt (2008) and 128th rank in the Human Development
Index (2007-2008).

E-governance must show more than this dismal scenario of human conditions in
India. After all, the poor citizens need the basic material preconditions of living —
including food, health, education and employment — before they become interested
in non-material concerns like information and knowledge provided by e-governance.
There is no doubt that e-governance has been useful for certain services enjoyed by
citizens, especially the affluent high-income families and foreign investors. But it is
yet to be seen whether e-governance can eradicate poverty, reduce inequality and
satisfy basic human needs in a poor country like India.