“Democracy can be dislodged in a jiffy if the public gets
disillusioned with the quality of governance and corruption” – Dr. S Y Quraishi
Does the very mention of stepping into a government office
to get work done irk you to no end? Do you find it annoying that it takes days
for a government file stuck under bundles of other files be searched and
searched again to find the required file? Then here is good news for you. Read
on:
Prevailing scenario:
The current scenario of a typical Government office in India has the following features:
Multiple levels of File processing which delays the decision making process.
Volume of records- Multiple records bring
problems of indexing and searching of relevant records.
File Tracking- Herculean task of traversing
through several sheets of paper among countless files.
Lack of Transparency
Duplicity issues
Inter-departmental conflict
 |
| Piles of files |
Thus, there is a dire need to redesign the archaic processes
to align them with contemporary practices and technology and prepare a robust
infrastructure to smoothen the process of automation. Providing desktops,
networks, servers etc shall form the ‘hygienic’ part of the digital adoption by
the Government departments.
Thus, Digital adoption shall provide the much-needed impetus
for transparent governance with adequate mobility in the system while reducing
administrative burdens.
There are a few important aspects of Digital Adoption
process:
Flexible and User friendly design
Legally compliant following all the rules and
regulations
Ease of creation and tracking of files
Ease of uploading documents online
Consulting giant, PwC evaluates various softwares that can be used in the Digital Adoption process, in its Smart Governance and Technology report as follows:
|
Parameters/Factors
|
Considerations
|
|
Cost
|
Cost of
Product
Annual
Maintenance cost
Implementation
cost
|
|
Flexibility
|
Availability
of the source code
Ability to
change the source code
Source
code redistribution and derived license
|
|
Reliability
|
High
availability support
|
|
Performance
|
Peak user
load
Duration
of Peak user load
Concurrent
user load
Published
performance benchmark
|
|
Security
|
Authentication
mechanism
Adherence
to open standard cryptography
|
In an article written by Mr. Prakash Kumar for Hindustan Times, ex IAS officer, now National Technology Officer at Microsoft, stressed that if the details of a user are available in one department, then the same user details should be made available in other departments in a seamless manner. Thus, the process would provide convenience to the citizens, reduce the process turnaround time and reduce the administrative burden.
Digital India Programme
Digital India Programme envisaged by the Department of
Electronics and Information Technology (Deity) and approved by the current
cabinet on 20th August 2014 is the first step in the direction. The programme aims at providing digital
infrastructure as a utility to every citizen as well as high-speed Internet as
a core utility in all gram panchayats. It is heartening to note that in the
same vein, the current government has taken concrete steps to promote digital
adoption across India. About a month back, the cabinet approved Rs. 1 lakh crore
for the project that aims to provide thrust to nine pillars identified as
growth areas:
Broadband highways
Mobile connectivity
Public Internet Access Programme
e-Governance
e-Kranti (which aims to give electronic delivery
of services)
Information for all
Electronics manufacturing
IT for Jobs
Early harvest programmes
The programme aims to seamlessly integrate departments to
provide easy and a single window access to all persons. It also aims at making
available government services in real time from online and mobile platforms.
Role of Google:
Search engine giant, Google has decided to participate in
the Digital India programme to accelerate the process by improving internet
access. Google has a two-pronged approach for the same:
Google plans to empower the Indian women by making sure that
hundreds of millions of Indian women get online and by being online they get
empowered, are able improve their livelihoods.
 |
| Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Google India |
Initiative to build the non-English internet user base. "Only
150 million Indians are proficient in English. Almost 1.1 billion people are
not proficient in English. We are very focussed on improving access, so we
launched speech in Hindi," Rajan Anandan, MD- Google India, said. "We
have launched nine open source fonts in Hindi. We will do many things around
Hindi as well as other major Indian languages to build the non-English internet
so that internet becomes very helpful,".
Role of Facebook:
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who was recently in the capital
applauded the Digital India campaign and thought that it could spread the
innovation of Indian people and thus pledged his support to the bridge the
digital divide. In fact he apprised the Prime Minister about www.internet.org which is a global
partnership between technology leaders, non profits, local communities and
experts to bring internet to the two thirds of the world’s population that
doesn’t have internet.
 |
| Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg with Indian PM Narendra Modi |
He was so impressed with the Clean India
campaign that he promised help to make an app dedicated to the Clean India
campaign.
Mark Zuckerberg also readily agreed to partner the National
Optical Fibre Network that is designed to connect 250,000 village panchayats
through high-speed broadband by 2017 in a phase wise manner. He considered
Drones and satellite communications an important part of the project.
If I can correctly recollect, back in 1970’s, my
contemporary in IIT, Sugata Mitra, initiated ‘Hole in the Wall’ concept by
installing computers in the wall to raise awareness about the computers amongst
poor children in Delhi.
Role of Digital in
the Indian Election 2014
The General Election earlier this year was the biggest the
world has ever seen. As many as 554 million of the 834 million eligible voters
exercised their franchise at 930,000 polling booths, nearly 118 million more
than were registered to vote in 2009.
 |
| Voter turnout in Indian Elections 2014 |
The voter turnout was 66.4 per cent, the highest in
democratic India, though it needs to increase further.
There were 149 million first-time voters between 18 and 23
years of age and they were the primary target of the social media campaign. The
Internet and Mobile Association of India estimates that a well-executed social
media campaign can swing 3-4 per cent votes, which can be decisive in a multi-cornered
contest.
Thus, as we can see that digital adoption is slowly finding
its way into the government departments. Let us hope the transition takes place
sooner than later.
Source:
