Several State Governments have been pursuing various projects under
E-Governance. Particularly the Governments of Andhra, Karnataka and Maharashtra
seem to have made some notable progress with Madhya Pradesh trying to catch
up silently. The political changes in Tamil Nadu had put the issue on the
back burner for some time and with the formation of the new IT Committee
announced a few days back there may be some activity in Tamil Nadu too.
However most of the current activities of the State Governments seem
to stop at buying Computers at various departments. Without an adequate
computerization of the work content, most of the Computers either end up
as mere status symbols on the desk top.
The under utilization of the Computer resources at present is likely
to affect future investments since soon the financial controllers of the
State are going to tighten their purse strings in the light of un economic
usage.
If the existing Computers are to be better used, there is an urgent
need to develop some useful applications for day to day needs of the Government
departments. One of the key areas of E-Governance would be to manage remote
information on a real time basis to improve the productivity of assets.
This could be an intra city collation of data from various points or from
small towns and villages.
One of the key problems in the area of such "Information Management"
is the "Connectivity" factor. Many are waiting for the optical fiber network
to be completed for this purpose as if that is the panacea for all the
E-Governance Connectivity problems.
However, even if broad band optical fiber connectivity becomes available,
it may still not be the appropriate connectivity solution for most customers
who have small inter-mittent connectivity requirements. It is here that
the low cost last mile connectivity becomes important for E-Governance
projects. If the initial investment is low and most of the costs
are borne on usage basis, the users would be encouraged to gradually adopt
to E-Communication and thereby access E-Governance.
Take for example, the Utility Payment Solutions. There is a Company
in Chennai which offers a zero investment, "Pay as you use" connectivity
which can come in handy for Electricity Billings or PDS Stock Management
or other kinds of information gathering mechanisms where the data has to
be collected from a large number of points. If the system can say increase
the frequency of electrical billing from two months to one month, the electricity
department can reap substantial benefits. If this can happen at a reduced
cost as well, it would bring substantial benefits to the Government or
its departments.
It is time that E-Govenance projects of such nature are identified and
implemented first so that the officials and the public start experiencing
the benefits of technology. On the other hand if the emphasis is more on
"Huge Investments" because this is attractive for sanctioning authorities,
then the E-Governance projects just become "E-Purchase" projects.
Naavi
July 31 2001
Related
Article in ZDNet India:
