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COVER
STORY: CHINESE GOODS
Is
e-Governance for Real?
IT-enabled
governance is not just a Pentium-powered fantasy. There are urban Indians
who pay power bills to a computer and village folk who register land deals
instantly. If only India's old-style rulers were as convinced.
By Ashok
Malik, Uday Mahurkar and Ramesh Vinayaka
Few
journeys are as mysterious as the travels of a file through a government
office. Two years ago, the Department of Administrative Reforms charted
the route map of a particular Union government file. The hangdog sheets,
kept in place by a metallic strip of recent provenance but stuck together,
really, by generations of red tape, found their way to a full 48 tables
from initiation to final clearance.
It's an
interesting piece of trivia for you and me. For an applicant who seeks
some monetary compensation that is his due, it can be a living hell. Tracking
a government file doesn't take luck; it takes a miracle.
Maybe that's
another name for the Internet. Earlier this year http://punjabgovt.org
was set up as the official site of what is one of India's less acclaimed
state governments. A facility called "File Monitoring" was introduced
on an experimental basis. If you clicked on the icon and typed the necessary
query, it told you what the "status" of a file was, whether
it had reached the chief minister's office, which functionary had taken
a look at it, which department he had sent it to and when.
The dry
run over, the state administration set up a new official site, www.punjab.gov.in.
For a variety of "technical reasons", the "File Monitoring"
mechanism has not been activated. R.K. Verma, additional secretary, e-governance,
reckons an all-encompassing file-tracking system will be ready in a year.
That day Weberian bureaucracy will give away an extra inch to web-based
bureaucracy.
The example
from Punjab is a small, minuscule, microscopic instance of e-governance.
E-governance itself is a small, minuscule, microscopic tissue of the mastodon
that is the Indian governing structure. What is e-governance? Very obviously
definitions vary from one society to the next.
In the United
States, where one in about every two households has a Net connection,
they're talking, wisely, of voting for the next president at the click
of a mouse. In Portugal, motorists crossing a bridge can pay the toll
using their cell phones. In India, where no more than a quarter of 1 per
cent of the people have Net access, e-governance is a far more down-to-earth
proposition.
Simply put,
e-governance implies a smoother interface between government and citizen.
While e-governance can't entirely replace manual governance, even its
limited applications are good enough to affect day to day living. It can
fulfil, roughly speaking, the four purposes for which Indians generally
interact with the government.
Paying bills,
taxes, user fees and so on.
Registration
formalities, whether of a child's birth or a house purchase or a driving
licence. (In Tamil Nadu, you can download 72 application forms from www.tn.gov.in).
Seeking
information. What do you need, for instance, to apply for a passport?
(You could actually find out at www.meadev.gov.in/info/passport/Passport.htm).
Lodging
complaints.
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Enron
symbolises everything that's wrong with the way reforms were handled by
M/s Rao & Manmohan, says INDIA TODAY Associate Editor
