eINDIA2008: Towards Joined-Up Government

Proceedings:

The egov India conference comprised three days of key note sessions and panel discussion sessions.

Session: IT Innovations in Municipalities

Vivek Bharadwaj, Special Secretary, Department of Urban Development, Government of West Bengal, chaired this session. He pointed out that it was now mandatory for corporate entities in India to file their tax returns through electronic-filing system, a mechanism developed as part of government's efforts to foster 'friendlier' relations between tax authorities and assessees. In the US, the option of manual filing was still available, he remarked, adding that this said a lot about India.

Sanjay Jaju, Vice Chairman and Managing Director, Infrastructure Corporation of Andhra Pradesh, expressed the opinion that one should view ICT not as a technology but as a system, an information system, which can form the base for all well-managed municipalities.

Chetan Vaidya, Director, National Institute of Urban Affairs felt that in the conduct of governance and running of government, huge amounts of information needs to be processed every day and since the numbers are huge in municipalities, e-Governance is the way to go.

On the other hand, Joe Dignan, Business, Development Manager, Microsoft, Research India, felt that ICT can be useful to curtail the huge amount of expenditure the municipalities incur for the purpose of manual data management. However, he emphasised, it can only be a facilitator and cannot replace the role of the government. In this context, he talked about the Citizen Service Platform (CSP) platform of Microsoft, aimed to support governments as they develop sustainable, flexible and extendable IT infrastructures and Internet-based services with citizen services in mind. The platform includes a suite of online services that will be available for customisation and integration into existing government solutions for the citizens. Srikant Nadhamuni, Managing Trustee, e-Governance Foundation, Bangalore, informed that e-Governments Foundation aims to improve governance in India through the effective use of technologies and government process re-engineering and to this effect has developed a family of software products and solutions that will enable the efficient working of cities and towns and hence the smoother delivery of services to its citizens.

Session: e-Governance Good Practices

The last session of egov India conference sought to discuss factors that facilitate the success of the e-Governance projects, change management and other challenges, benefits accrued and lessons learned. It was chaired by Prakash Kumar, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences.

Sanjay Aggarwal, General Manager (Operations), Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), Ministry of Railways, talked about the online railways ticketing project of the IRCTC. It has currently the largest e-Commerce website in Asia-Pacific, selling daily more than 1,00,000 tickets. The online railways ticketing system has resulted in saving of time, money and is a convenient way to buy tickets. This, apart from the adoption of cafe approach, close monitoring of the project and adoptation to challenges, are the several success factors for this project.

Barun Kumar Sahu, Director (Personnel), Ministry of Home Affairs, shared the learnings of e-Governance initiatives in the Ministry of Home Affairs. He informed about the SELO initiative of Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), which is the first IT-enabled para-military force, which could be deployed for counter-insurgency operations all over the country, at a short notice (hours) and at far away places from battalion head quarters. Similarly, he mentioned about the 'Prahari' initiative of Border Security Force (BSF), has robust security features and can be made fully web-enabled. Among other such initiatives taken by the Home Ministry, he talked about the cyber forensic initiatives, making use of ICT tools for speaker identification: phone tapping, video authentication: morphing etc,, digital firearms signature: to identify gun license holder from used cartridge, email tracing, search of deleted files, laptops etc. and password cracking.

eINDIA2008, the India's largest information communication technologies event, was held from July 29-July 31, 2008, at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi. The conference-cum-exhibition, attended by more than 6000 participants, provided a collaborative forum to share knowledge and ideas enabling the participants to develop multinational and cross-industry contacts and partnerships as well as to enhance their knowledge, expertise arid abilities. The eINDIA2008 conference had six seminal tracks - e-Governance, Digital Learning, Telecentre Forum, eHealth, MobileServe and e-Agriculture. The event was organised by the Centre for Science Development and Media Studies (CSDMS), with active support from the Ministry of Communications and IT, Government of India, UN (Gobal Alliance of ICT for Development) GAID, Department of Agriculture and Cooperation and the Ministries of Human Resource Development, Urban Development and Panchayati Raj. The different state partners for the event included the governments of Jharkhand, Manipur, West Bengal, Directorate of Higher Education, Government of National Capital Territory and Kerala State Information Technology Mission. There was also an active participation of the private sector in the conference and exhibition.

Ankit Mittal from Programme Management Unit, Department of IT, told about the National e-Governance Service Delivery Gateway (NSDG), one of the mission mode projects (MMPs), being implemented under the NeGP, for seamless exchange of data with any number of departments and front ends. The project is one of its kind, which can be successfully integrated with other MMPs and other projects. He, thus, described NSDG as a strong middleware that can potentially be integrated into other projects nationwide.

Dr. Ajay Kumar, Secretary, IT, Government of Kerala, informed that Kerala state has the highest Internet, telephone, mobile, computers penetration per capita, broadband coverage which reaches 80% villages and mobile coverage which reaches 95% villages. Kerala is going ahead with the plan of making the state 100% broadband enabled. Dr. Kumar mentioned about the successful Akshaya project, which was aimed to make the state 100% e-Literate. It was felt that as long as the computer literacy is in English, people's involvement with IT will be low. To address this issue, Kerala government has initiated the programme, 'My Language for My Computer', which enables technology in Malayalam language. In this regard, local content is also being generated. Also, the government has migrated 200 government portals from HTML to content management framework, based on open source. Regarding assessing value of the e-Government projects, Dr. Kumar stressed on developing an objective criteria for assessing any e-Governance project.

Lekha Kumar, Director, (e-Governance), Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG), Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, told about the e-Office project, aimed at improving the operational efficiency of the government, by transitioning to a less-paper-office within next five years. Change management (convincing the officials of the benefits of the new system), is most crucial. Interoperability (seamless data exchange) is also another important issue to be dealt with in implementing e-Office in government. The e-Manual will be tested as a pilot by DARPG and then the final standard framework of e-Office implementation procedure would be available for other ministries to take it up for implementation in their respective ministries.

Ajay Ahuja, IT Architect, Sun Microsystems Ltd. talked about the field study conducted to find the status of Indian citizen's readiness and awareness towards various e-Governance initiatives and services, amongst a sample of citizens from the Delhi state. He gave certain recommendations to spread awareness about use of IT. He suggested that media - TV, radio, newspapers- can play a significant role. IT could be promoted by making computers/ terminals available at low cost just like phones and making available the broadband, as in the case of telephone lines.