E-governance initiatives in India: Transforming India through technology

Abstract

Numerous E-governance initiatives have been taken at various district, town and state levels in India. The paper starts with definition of governance and ‘e-governance’ and its various levels as specified by UN in its e-government survey of 2008. Based on the social welfare objectives of the projects implemented by the government a few parameters are identified for evaluating these types of projects. The report then discusses three e-governance projects which have been implemented namely, Lokmitra project in Himachal Pradesh, Janmitra in Madhya Pradesh and Saukaryam in Vishakhapatnam. Based on the discussion and evaluation based on the proposed parameters the learnings from the projects are discussed. Currently, the Government of India has come out with a National E-governance Program with a vision to provide government services at the doorstep of all the citizens in urban and rural areas in a co-ordinated and systematic manner. As part of it twenty seven mission mode projects have been identified and are being implemented on a priority basis. An institutional setup has been framed for realizing this mammoth task. The Department of Information and Technology is playing a pivotal role in this, as it has been given the responsibility of setting up the infrastructure comprising of Wide Area Network (project SWAN), State Data Centers (SDC) and Common Service Center kiosks (CSC). It is also providing technical inputs like the architecture to be adopted, security features and common standards to ensure interoperability amongst the systems. On evaluating the program against the proposed parameters it is found that the program appears to fulfil all the requisite parameters. In the final part of the project, the current state of the Indian Public Distribution System is discussed. And finally the application of e-governance in the Public Distribution System to solve its existing problems is proposed.