Today, information and knowledge are essential for development. Moreover, access, sharing and dissemination of information are critical for the empowerment of every individual. In this context, information and communication technology (ICT) is an important tool and enabler for this process. ICT can serve to flatten the world, to reach out to every individual, to create an information-rich society and thereby transform people and society.
Rural Rollout – Key e-governance initiatives
However, several challenges remain.With a population of over 1.2 billion and 22 major languages, there is a need for content-rich portals in local languages.There is a huge imbalance in the way information is being made available to the rural population. While only about 5 per cent of the population can speak English, more than 95 per cent of the Indian websites are in English. As a result, hardly any content reaches the rural masses.
Providing financial services in rural areas is also a challenge. This is because 59 per cent of rural households do not have a deposit account and 71 per cent access credit from formal sources.
To overcome these hurdles and to ensure flow of information to the rural masses, the Department of Information Technology launched an $8 billion National eGovernance Plan in 2006. The objective of the plan was to make all government services accessible to the masses in their locality. This was to be achieved through common service delivery outlets and by ensuring efficiency, transparency and reliability of such services at affordable costs.
The core and support infrastructure for this plan included: common service centres (CSCs), state wide area networks (SWANs), state data centres (SDCs) and capacity building schemes (CBSs). The CSCs entailed setting up more than 100,000 telecentres in 600,000 villages and ensuring availability of broadband internet connectivity. Similarly, SWANs were secured networks meant for government-related activities. These served to connect state, district and block headquarters and utilised a minimum of 2 Mbps broadband connectivity.
The SDCs had been set up in each state and union territory, and facilitated edelivery of government-to-government, government-to-consumer and government-to-business services. Lastly, over 400 professionals were recruited for the CBSs to constitute state e-mission teams.
The projected investment as of June 2009 for each stands as follows: the overall planned investment for the National eGovernance Plan stands at Rs 425 billion; investment in the CSCs stands at Rs 100 billion; for SWANs at Rs 33.34 billion; and for SDCs at Rs 16.23 billion.
The mission mode projects (MMPs) were divided into three levels: central, state and integrated. The central level entailed nine projects relating to income tax, central excise, passports/visa, immigration, MCA 21, national ID/UID, pensions, e-office, banking and insurance. The state level covered 11 modules including agriculture, land records, transport, treasury, commercial taxes and gram panchayats. The integrated level entailed seven areas, including e-biz, EDI, CSC and e-courts.
The key learnings from the national e-governance project were: the set of processes involved required transforming, not just translating into activity; capacity needed to be built up at the policy, management and operational levels; and e-governance should be treated as an evolutionary concept to facilitate positive changes.
A road map for the years 2009-10 and 2010-11 has been formulated. In 2009-10, in terms of infrastructure deployment, SWANs, CSCs and SDCs are to be focused upon, state service delivery gateways and state portals are to be commissioned and a blueprint for the preparation, design, development and implementation of state MMPs is to be formulated. In 2010-11, application deployment will take place, along with the rollout of e-services and integration of MMPs.
However, there are a few issues. For instance, managing a large number of elements is cumbersome. To illustrate, 11 state MMPs are present in each of the 35 states. Going forward, the numbers are only likely to increase. Also, given the variety of services involved, the possibility of multiple contracts is an issue. The gamut of activities includes management and implementation of data centre operations; application development; physical infrastructure provisioning; hardware provisioning; networking; etc. Finally, deciding the guiding principles driving aggregation and deciding the number of private partners is a cumbersome process. The ideal numbers depend upon a variety of factors, including required competition, nature of the solution, technology feasibility, etc.
Net, net, public-private partnership is the preferred mode of implementation of core infrastructure projects. It is expected to give a boost to further such projects which are in the pipeline.
Abhishek Singh, Director, e-Governance, Department of Information Technology, Government of India.
