“Individuals can attempt to achieve the impossible at any cost, but governments, as monopolist-trustees of public moneys, must remain focused at achieving reasonable results at reasonable costs”

— Anonymous

Even as Indian state governments fall over themselves to hop on to the e-governance bandwagon, Sandeep Verma explains why the right e-governance projects require a careful approach

Much has been written about the urgent need for governments to computerise and to professionalise their activities. E-governance has become a widely accepted priority for any government today. It is seen as not only being directly beneficial to citizens, but is also used as a USP by state governments to attract industrial and commercial investments. Progress is continuously being made by various states towards initiating the right-to-information by the setting up of websites, committing expenditure to IT implementation, or by sponsoring various pilot and full-fledged projects. Examples being computerisation of land records and municipal office records.

A national consensus seems to have been built around earmarking 3 percent or so of plan funds towards computerisation, although the actual plan outlay has varied depending upon the kind of priority various states have been able to give to this sector. But in some cases, e-governance seems to have become more about purchasing computers and software, rather than focusing on planning and execution of projects. This article intends to highlight the absolute necessity of proper database design and management, technology selection and planning in e-governance projects.

Database design and management
Pre-implementation planning, especially of database design, is an area that requires careful study before implementing an IT project. The reason being that there is typically a huge amount of database creation, management and mining involved in government projects. For instance, if one is to talk about computerisation of the registration process relating to transfer of immovable property, this would involve daily creation of databases relating to at least 50 different kinds of sale deeds, across hundreds of offices located in various parts of a state.

The database would also have to be planned in such a manner that not only would it be able to integrate with the formats laid down in property records in rural and urban areas, but also be able to integrate future changes in the law or the registration process itself. Planning database management details is therefore of critical importance.

Another success parameter for an e-governance project is its acceptability and usability by various parties involved in the initiative. Also, since the project would have to be executed ultimately by government personnel, and would affect millions of citizens, the technology and the processes must be widely circulated, examined and accepted by end-consumers (citizens), government staff and so on. The collective wisdom of such bodies is an important asset that must be fully utilised in the planning stages of such projects. Citizens’ right to information and the democratic right to influence decision-making must therefore begin with public sharing of the project concept, modalities and costs.

Technology selection
Technology is always a difficult parameter in project design. This becomes even more difficult in the case of government projects, where funds availability is always a constraint, and efficient utilisation thereof an important commitment. Costly technologies abound in the IT industry, which have the potential of limiting the choices available for future expansions and make modifications even more expensive.

Open source software is an upcoming trend in the industry, and has been found to be economically inexpensive and technologically competitive. This is an area that should receive utmost attention, funding and support in developing countries. There are presently some shortages in the availability of software developers for open-source ventures, but long-term government commitments to such software should help in sharply reducing, if not overcoming, these gaps.

Further, if e-governance projects are to be aggressively used by citizens, then the technology that is chosen must be as simple to use as possible. Any project, which involves specialised hardware or software at the users’ end, will pose installation and long-term support problems. And since most government projects, typically, involve reaching out to millions of not very tech-savvy users, the technology option for delivery must remain at its simplest best. To this end, the Web is today one of the most powerful, cheapest and simplest tools for interaction between the government and citizens, notwithstanding the present limited reach of the Internet in rural areas.

The advantages of the Web are is that it is almost free-to-use, any citizen with the simplest of computers and browsers can access services, and a Web-based project is almost infinitely scalable. What this means is that, should the government implement a successful pilot project using the Web, then any large-scale addition in the number of users would require much less expenditure in upgradation.

In contrast, any project involving complex hardware and software installation at the consumers’ end would require support and investments that increase almost proportionately with the increase in the number of users. Of course, security would be an important concern in this Web-based strategy, and solutions like firewalls, VPNs and intrusion detection systems will therefore have to be incorporated in the project plan right from the inception stage itself.
There have also been paradigm shifts regarding the concept of a computer. With increasing use and adaptability of Palm PDAs and other devices like the Simputer, handheld PCs and Internet data-ready mobile phones, the divide between a computing device and a telecom device has diminished.

Citizen services also typically require low computing power at the users’ end, and their needs can be adequately addressed by the use of such sub-computer devices. A time has therefore come to plan for ensuring the operability of e-governance software (be it a website or a service delivery system) with thin clients and mobile computing and telecom devices, right from the stages of conceptualisation of these projects.

Planning e-governance projects
E-governance projects are an important tool for IT proliferation. At the same time, we must also exploit the potential of indirect methods for achieving similar results. Government actions in developing countries substantively affect the flow of investments. If computer-literate manpower is the desired result, then government funding on training activities/institutions may not be required if the government were to merely make a certain minimum IT qualification a prerequisite for employment.

This step may disadvantage rural candidates for a while, but the economies of the marketplace would quickly ensure that IT institutes proliferate on their own in rural India. Again, choosing a mode like e-procurement for tendering, even in a limited manner, would not only lead to costs-savings for the government, but also lead to a situation where tens of thousands of government suppliers, located all over rural and urban India, would quickly switch to usage of computers and the Internet.

E-procurement could thus also be used as an effective tool for creating the right pressures on the telecom infrastructure companies for quickening the pace of inter-connecting India.

In conclusion
The critical parameters for success therefore clearly are choosing the right mix of projects, careful and detailed planning in close co-operation with the target user groups, and choice of appropriate and least-expensive technologies for creation of scalable and flexible systems for delivery of citizen services. The resources with people and governments are scarce, and proper conceptualisation must therefore take precedence over kick starting of IT projects.

The author is a member of the Indian Administrative Service. These are purely his personal views. He can be reached at sverma@rajasthan.net