Citizens are now participating in governance through social networking etc. Globally too, this has been a trend with people focusing on e-participation, e-service usage etc.
“The majority of mission mode projects have moved from the drawing board to the deployment stage. There have been numerous success stories like that of e-panchayat etc,” said Narendra.
We have also succeeded in developing centralized application systems like that for the public distribution system (PDS), CCTNS etc. In all of this, mobile governance has been the biggest enabler.
However, India has slipped to the 125th position in the nations surveyed in the UN e-government survey, losing six places since 2010. Secondly, the pace of initiatives has to be improved.
Some major challenges that the country faces are in terms of lack of access to ICT, inadequate education infrastructure, low per capita income and the fact that other countries have progressed faster than us.
Moreover, the availability of funds has been a problem and, when they are available, they come attached with too many strings. Further, the absence of a holistic institutional mechanism to build and sustain ICT for development has been an issue. Lastly, there exist fragmented structures with inadequate capacity and technical know-how to manage IT.
To solve all of these problems, we need to move from a project approach to a product approach and create off-the-shelf solutions for the government’s needs. “Focus on improving the quality of service and service enrichment and step back and ask questions like ‘are citizens satisfied with the kind of services that we are offering?’,” explained Narendra.
It is also important to leverage virtualization, Cloud computing and allied technologies for the government while at the same time enforcing uniform cyber security regime for all government projects.