A:  style="text-align: justify;">That is the whole idea of e-Governance, and duly acknowledged in the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) vision statement.
E-governance is more about governance than running a government electronically. It is the process of transformation of the relationship between the government with its constituents - the citizens, the businesses, and between its organs, through the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools. E-governance focuses on citizens and not computers. It involves a component of process re-engineering that makes government procedures leaner, more efficient, and helps reduce costs.

With regard to the objective of eliminating corruption, though it may not be stated very explicitly, it has been observed that most e-governance projects have directly benefitted the people. We conducted impact assessment study of three e-government state projects involving land records, property registration and transport across 13 states and four Central projects namely MCA 21, e-procurement, passport and Income Tax with IIM Ahmedabad as our knowledge partner. The study revealed that in all these e-governance projects, there was a reduction in corruption, waiting time, and also in the cost of availing services by the people.

The speed, transparency and accountability brought into government agencies, coupled with the simplification and rationalisation of procedures as a part of e-government creates an environment that discourages corrupt practices or in the least makes it easier to detect them and punish the culprit. This impact will be particularly visible in areas involving exercise of discretion and/or manual intervention in granting permissions, license, certificates and registrations.

Therefore, e-governance not only aims at transparency, accountability, low cost and easier delivery of services to the citizens, but it also decreases human interaction. Thus, the foundation of corruption gets addressed at the very first step of e-governance.

A:  style="text-align: justify;">E-readiness is a multi-dimensional concept. It measures the ability of the nation to participate in an increasingly networked world. It can be viewed as the ability to pursue value creation opportunities, facilitated by ICT. The report we make while assessing the e-readiness of various states and Union Territories employs the use of composite indicators. It uses multi-stage Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to derive the composite indicator. PCA is a way of defining patterns in data, and expressing the data in such a way as to highlight similarities and differences.

Feedback based on interactions and discussions with the various stakeholders reveal that the methodology and use of composite indicators is acceptable to the stakeholders. The e-readiness reports prepared so far have are based on this model and analytical framework.

A:  style="text-align: justify;">The near absence of self-sufficiency in rural areas has created an encompassing dependency of rural residents on elected officials and bureaucrats. Poor infrastructure, high deployment and maintenance costs of the ICT infrastructure and inadequate content for e-governance still remain matters of huge concern in implementation of such projects in rural areas.

One of the projects that we are implementing involves setting up of 1,00,000 Common Services Centres (CSCs) across the country. It is envisaged to have one centre for every cluster of six villages. These CSCs will be front end for delivery of services to the citizens. These centres are being established on a public-private partnership (PPP) basis, with government providing viability gap funding for the centres. We have already established more than 40,000 such centres. However, it has been observed that connectivity and availability of power are challenges that need to be addressed. We have undertaken an initiative with BSNL to ensure Wired or WiMax-based broadband connectivity in all these 1,00,000 locations. Still infrastructure bottlenecks remain a huge challenge in the rural areas.

Another challenge is to get various government departments take necessary steps to launch G2C services in electronic mode. Efforts and resources are required for back office computerisation as also in building inherent capacities to undertake and implement e-governance projects. The issue of change management is very critical as the transformation from manual mode to electronic mode is much more than providing for just hardware and software. It requires a new thinking paradigm, whereby we need to creatively and constructively address both the infrastructure and the human issues.

A:  style="text-align: justify;">To identify the information items and the e-services (computerised), it is desirable to have a “bottom-up” approach.

Just like the urban population, the rural population is also stratified with respect to requirement of services. In rural India, the guiding factor is the “economic conditions” of the rural family concerned, which dictates the needs for the family.

For example, for the high-income upper caste, large-land holding rural families with adequate literacy, health provisions and housing, the needs are associated with market prices, land records, better health services and daily news.

For families with a lower income, small land holding, small trading, poor literacy, health and housing, their concerns are primary education and health services, government loan and market prices.

For very low income families with no fixed employment, poor literacy, health and no land holding and who belonging to backward class, the need may be to simply get `eligibility certificates’ for anti-poverty schemes, subsidised primary health and education services of the government.

The strategy adopted in e-governance projects such as the e-district project has been to identify and deliver the high volume services for which citizens approach the districts and tehsils.

A:  style="text-align: justify;">The key attributes for any e-governance solution are that it has to be robust, scalable, and based on interoperable standards and architecture. To ensure interoperability among e-governance applications, the Government of India has setup an institutional mechanism. This helps in formulation of standards through collaborative efforts of stakeholders such as Department of Information Technology (DIT), National Informatics Centre (NIC) and other such departments. It also has a provision for web publishing of draft documents for review comments by the closed user group and the public at large. I would urge all implementers of e-governance projects to not only have a look at these standards and use them, but also contribute to further improve the standards being formulated.

A:  style="text-align: justify;">Technology refresh in e-governance infrastructure should be done in a phased manner, and only when the need arises. Changes should be done in a manner that the technologies/up-gradation does not affect daily operations. The mantra is to focus on the goal and objective of the e-governance project which remains focus on citizens and delivery of services. Any need to change or upgrade technology should be incorporated in the design stage of the project so that it does not become outdated soon after implementation. Technology adoption in e-governance projects should be with a clear view and focus on the impact on improving service delivery. We must have a process of technology audit which gives us a fair idea of the need for a technological change. Another issue that needs to be addressed is the ability of users to adapt to the new technology.

There is a need to factor in the concept of Return on Investment (RoI) into the existing e-governance approach.

One aspect that I would like to emphasis is the need to adopt green technologies. ICT applications and projects are one of the major consumers of energy that contribute to carbon emissions. If we are conscious of this facet at the design stage of the project, especially in datacentre set-up, we can greatly reduce our energy consumption. Similarly, in projects that involve delivery of services in a centralised architecture, there will be a lesser need to have power hungry high-end processors at service delivery levels.

A:  style="text-align: justify;">Open source software would help in implementation of cost-effective, scalable solutions given the easy availability of source code. Further, as e-governance solutions are normally spread across locations, one could think of centralised core implementation of software and deploy the same with requisite customisation across locations thereby reducing cost and eliminating any vendor-locking.

E-governance projects in India are based on a policy that promotes open standards. Our policy provides a set of guidelines for uniform and reliable implementation of e-governance solutions. It has been designed to ensure interoperability of various solutions developed by multiple agencies. It also aims to improve the technology choices available and avoids vendor lock-in.

All new e-government infrastructure systems (including all inter-department and intra- department systems) and government to public (including businesses) systems need to conform to these standards based on the open standards policy. Even for legacy systems, it has been mandated that data archival and interface with other systems must conform to these standards.