India’s e-Gov man, R Chandrashekhar talks about the misconceptions around NEGP, the possibilities of ICT interventions in meeting the MDG objectives and the challenges, while rating DIT 7/10.
He could have been researcher, or a top honcho with any of the IT giants. Instead this double Masters in chemistry from IIT Mumbai and Computer Science from Pennsylvania State University decided to opt for India’s top civil services job—the Indian Administrative Service (IAS).
The man who joined India’s bureaucracy in 1975, is not only credited with setting up the first Department of Information Technology (DIT) in the country for his home cadre Andhra Pradesh, he was also the key force behind the concept of public private partnership in IT and the government space.
Today, India’s Department of Information Technology Additional Secretary (e-Governance) R Chandrashekhar is not only the face of ICT intervention for good governance in the country, he is the driving force behind formulation of national polices, agendas, strategies and action plans for e-Governace in the country.
In a free wheeling discussion with Shubhendu Parth of iGovernment, Chandrashekhar chose to dispel many a misconceptions around the National e-Governance Plan (NEGP), the possibilities of ICT interventions in meeting the Millennium Development Goals and challenges. Excerpts:
From NEGAP in 2003 to NeGP in 2006, technology intervention for good governance in India has covered a long road. However, it is still far away from the initial objectives that were set out to be achieved by year 2007. What caused the delay?
There is a common misconception that the program outlined in 2003 was expected to be completed by 2007. In fact, at that point of time, the vision, strategy, fund requirements, individual project objectives and timelines were not finalised. The various stakeholders, particularly the ‘owner departments’ of the various projects were hardly aware of the service paradigm that was sought to be brought in by NeGP. So areas of work were identified to crystallise all these aspects to the extent feasible within the Xth Plan period.
The next step was to make people inside and outside the government aware of the aims and then enable and facilitate departments to realign ongoing efforts and achieve these objectives. Moreover, since this is a complex program that spans the entire government at all levels, an appropriate empowered management structure was an imperative. The whole aim was to create a unifying framework and infrastructure and equip departments to execute their projects in a time-bound manner within this overall framework.
Today, the vision and strategy are clear, each department has a time-bound plan of action with clear service outcomes and deliverables, the common infrastructure is fast nearing completion in most states and work is in progress on a unifying set of standards aimed at integrating the entire effort in a technological and process sense.
In terms of the deadlines, when do we see the entire NeGP getting completed? Can we get a phase wise plan?
NeGP is a programme and it encompasses not only several ministries and department, but also several states. It also envisages new projects coming in from time to time. In exceptional cases, some projects might get dropped also because they may not be the priority. It is, therefore, in that sense a “live” programme. NeGP, as such, does not have a completion date, but every single project under the NeGP would have a completion date and a duration in which it would be completed.
Most of the infrastructure project that DIT is involved in, which involves setting up basic platform for digital service delivery—the State Wide Area Network, the CSCs and the State Data Centres—would be largely ready in most of the states by April 2009.
What do you mean by most of the states in this case?
When I say most of the states would be largely ready, I mean that it would be ready in 15 to 20 states. Of course, in some of the states things are moving little slower; may be a few months behind the others because they have taken a little more time either for getting prepared or for the bid process. Besides, certain special condition in states like Jammu and Kashmir that mandates certain special decisions, have also delayed their implementations in some of the “delayed” states.
How would you describe the journey of the state governments so far?
I would say that the journey of the state governments has been a mixed experience. Some of them have already achieved impressive results. Many more have realised the potential of ‘e’ to change the way people perceive and interact with the government and are attempting to seriously and systematically implement e-Governance. A few, however, are yet to begin the journey in any meaningful way.
What could be possible reason for the disparities amongst the states? Is it lack of motivation for the bureaucrats and champions to drive e-Governance in these states or is it because the political will is missing?
There is a very large number of enabling or retarding factors and if you look at states where not much has happened, it is because of any or some or all of these factors. While I would not like to mention a particular state, but the factors in general which have a huge impact on the pace of adaption as well as on the effectiveness of implementation, starting from the top are: a high degree of political awareness and support, sufficient number of officials who have the awareness and the commitment and the capabilities to carry out and oversee the implementation processes.
Besides, there should be an enabling environment in the state, in terms of high prevalence of IT in the society at large. Also, it’s a question of the kind of manpower that is available in a particular state. Certainly, there is a certain skeletal government technical manpower available in the form of NIC, but that is not enough to carry on transformation at such a large scale. Definitely, it requires to be supplemented with skilled resources from the market on a project to project basis.
Most importantly, it’s the question of the “awareness” of the state as a whole on the impact of any IT intervention. Today, many a states think ten times before they allocate any amount for e-Governance.
Basically, you mean that they are thinking from the ROI perspective…
They are thinking from the expenditure perspective, not even from the ROI perspective. They are thinking from the point of view that how will I find Rs 50 crore when I need to spend money on drinking water or some other very important areas. The fact of the matter is that the improvement in government processes itself brings in more resources to facilitate the other areas. Both from the point of view of improving revenues—whether through taxes or through better management of tax collections or better transparency—or optimising expenditures by plugging leakages, it supplements the government revenues.
The second thing is that even in terms of providing better services, where there is no revenue or expenditure optimisation concerns, the expected social ROI and the levels of appreciations is different in each state. This is a huge awareness problem.
What about the other projects that are being driven by, say Ministry of Panchayati Raj, or the Ministry of Rural Development? With DIT being at the centre of e-Governance, how is the department pushing or speeding up these projects?
See…What has to be understood is that this is really a programme that aims at fundamentally changing the way that governance is done in different departments. When you look at it from that perspective, it is not the programme of the DIT, but a programme that is facilitated, supported and anchored by the DIT. But, while the DIT is responsible at the programme level, the implementation in independent areas does fall within the purview of the line ministries. In fact, the Cabinet decision on the whole programme very clearly lays down the principles that the ownership of each project lies with those departments.
In fact, it is a very basic principle because it recognises that in “e-Governance”, it’s the “governance” which is more important and IT is just an enabler. While all central MMPs have very clear timeline, the situation is slightly more complicated in case of state MMPS because the role of the central government in these projects is to set a framework, lay down a set of common standards and to fund the states in some suitable pattern. These things have to be decided in consultation with the states. However, in case of the central MMPs, it is much more direct and faster because the process does not include long consultations. Hence, in the case of state MMPs, it has taken a comparatively longer time to roll out a project.
Of course there are states which have gone ahead with the various projects on their own. For example, in the case of registration project, there are more than a dozen states that have gone ahead with the roll out without a central scheme in place. But what is being done at NeGP is to give a more holistic approach so that there is a certain degree of uniformity both in terms of objectives as well as in terms of the timelines.
Considering that the citizen has to be at the centre of any good governance initiative, how will the massive investments by the country on technology help in meeting the citizen charter?
NeGP squarely places the citizen at the centre of the programme. In each project, clear identification of services, service levels and timelines are mandatory. In the implementation methodology, the effort is to ensure incorporation of an automatic service request and fulfillment logging so that measurement of service delivery time is automatic. This would enable the citizens and the departments to evaluate actual service delivery levels against benchmarks set by the departments concerned.
Has the respective departments and Ministries created these benchmarks for citizen service delivery?
In fact, that is exactly what is being done in as part of the scheme formulation. If you take those schemes that have already been formulated, like in the case of municipalities or land records and agriculture, there are set a certain minimum number and level of services that needs to be achieved under these programmes. And… most of the states have fully accepted these norms and are fully supportive of it. In some of the other sectors like police, or in the case of employment exchanges, similar processes are underway, though they are still in a very early stage.
Talking about the good governance agenda, where does NeGP fit in terms of helping India achieve the Millennium Development Goals?
Achievement of MDGs requires both scale and quality in delivery of social sector services like education, health, agriculture and so on. Experience of the past has shown that while increasing scale is possible through increased budgetary allocations, improving quality and ensuring appropriate targeting are much more elusive goals. In fact, we often find that quality and quantity goals place conflicting demands on implementers.
However, modern technology enables both goals to be achieved simultaneously to a far greater extent than was ever possible before. Private sector has demonstrated this in many areas. We are still at the early stages of the effort by government to leverage technology to help achieve the MDGs.
The major contribution of NeGP is the creation of a shared digital service delivery platform, including CSCs, which can be leveraged by the social sector departments and agencies to significantly improve programme delivery. However, induction of technology alone will not help. Many things need to be done simultaneously to reap the benefits. There is a learning curve that each department needs to go through and there are no short cuts.
On the CSC front, while the momentum has been picking up, not many states are actually ready with the required level of automation at the backend for G-2-G transactions. Will that not effect the G-2-C transactions?
G2C transactional capability will be built progressively and would not happen overnight. What is envisaged is a series of steps covering information services that provide access to digitised data like exam results, land records, government forms, etc. The second step is communication services including facility to file applications electronically with reliable, secure date and time stamping and assured delivery to the destination office. The third step is to provide end-to-end transactional services that would be enabled through implementation of MMPs, and last but not the least, integrated services covering multiple departments.
Each step would happen at different points of time for different services of different departments depending on the timelines fixed by the departments concerned which in turn would depend on the nature, spread and complexity of the services covered by them. However, all services would ride on the same common e-service delivery infrastructure of CSCs, SWANs and SDCs. Initially only some of these services would be available and others would be added progressively. The CSC program has been designed keeping this aspect in mind and in fact, envisages a build up over a period of 3-4 years time.
With most of the NeGP projects dependent on SWAN, what steps are you taking to ensure timely and proper implementation of the project?
SWAN projects have been completed in five states. Most of the remaining states would also be completing their projects by March, 2009. There were some delays initially in initiating the bid process in some states, but thereafter, implementation has been quite streamlined.
In that case how would you describe India’s performance on the UN e-Governance Survey 2008, where the country slipped 26 positions from #87 in 2005 to #113?
It is paradoxical that while adoption of e-Governance has substantially accelerated in the country, our national rating in the UN survey has slipped as you have indicated. Much of the answer, as to why this is so, lies in the parameters that are used to measure progress in the UN survey. These include some macro factors like connectivity and human resource indices linked to general educational metrics which do not form part of NeGP at all.
Actual e-Governance related parameters carry a weightage of 1/3 in the methodology adopted and even this is evaluated by assessing precisely six websites of GOI. Out of these, the Indian national portal has been appreciated, but we have not been able to improve as much as other countries in respect of the other five websites. However, a large part of our effort is directed elsewhere and this is neither measured nor captured in their methodology.
Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, had recently said that his state is not just looking at transforming from the traditional government to e-Governance, but further to becoming i-Government, where ‘I’ stands for integrated services to citizens. Do you think the time has come for India to adopt the ‘i-Government’ approach?
As I had mentioned earlier, i-Governance or integrated services is the logical culmination of e-Governance. Each state would need to assess how ready they are and when they can make the transition to i-governance. The trajectory would largely be similar for most states, but the pace and spread would vary from state to state.
While technology is certainly an important tool to improve G-2-G transactions and delivery of citizen services, there is also a need for administrative reforms to bring in remarkable change in “citizen experience”. How is the Department of IT coordinating with the Department of Administrative Reforms for bringing about the change?
Most services to citizens cannot be delivered electronically without significant process changes. Most changes are needed at the departmental level. DAR&PG would need to address areas that have generic applicability across departments. We have been coordinating closely with them on these aspects.
The Government has sanctioned an amount of Rs 313 crore for capacity building for e-Gov implementation in the country. How does the DIT propose to take it forward?
We are proposing to provide core teams to state governments—termed State e-Mission Teams or SeMTs—consisting of professionals covering multiple skill areas including project management, process reengineering, change management, financial structuring, and technology. Personnel will be sourced from three streams, namely, from within government and PSUs, from the open market on long and medium-term contract and from the private sector on short term basis without severance of their current employment.
These professionals will assist states to plan, strategize, manage and monitor implementation. Actual project execution will be carried out by government agencies like NIC or private sector companies, while organisations like the National Institute of Smart Government (NISG) will assist in project conceptualization and bid process management, where needed.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the e-Gov initiatives taken up by the Government of India, particularly the role of DIT so far?
Keeping the above backdrop in view, I would say that we have covered tremendous ground in this period. I would rate our performance so far at 6-7 on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best. I would also say that areas of deficiency are known; we know broadly what’s missing and are doing our best to address these issues.
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