Can reduce distances to nothing, linking remote villages to government offices in cities.

E-governance can reduce staff, cut costs, check leaks in the governing system.

Can make the citizen-government interaction smooth, without queues and the tyranny of clerks.

By 2003 every government employee will have to be it literate. Key states want e-governance.

But this is hardly possible when merely only 0.25 per cent of Indians are Net enabled.

The fact remains that capital costs are very high. To buy and upgrade machines and software isn't cheap.

E-governance is only a tool for good governance. It can't succeed independent of responsive officers.

It's only a fad and may die. States like Bihar haven't heard of governance, let alone e-governance.

By 2001, each Union ministry will IT-enable at least one facility citizens use.

By 2003, Delhiites will be able to register births and deaths at the click of a mouse.

By 2008, 300 million Indians will have Net access and be able to pay bills online.

What the Indian computer service can do-if the Indian civil service will allow it to.

When brothers Kartar Singh and Naib Singh (right), residents of Fatehgarh Sahib, Punjab's e-governance model district, decided to apply for a loan of Rs 50,000 to buy new farm equipment, they knew it would take at least a week of legwork to get a mortgage deed registered. Amazingly, the revenue official at the district HQ told them to deposit Rs 10 and instantly gave them a copy of the zamabandi (record of rights). It then took less than 10 minutes for the tehsildar office to verify the brothers' ownership, put the fraud-proof computer-generated photographs of them and the two witnesses on stamp paper and hand over the signed deed. "It's a miracle," says Kartar, staring incredulously at the mortgage deed. In Andhra Pradesh they tell similar stories.

Old style governance would typically have taken the Singh brothers a few days of pleading and bribing to get the zamabandi out of the patwari. If property had to be registered the owner could forget about the documents once he handed them to the registration office. In Bihar the backlog goes back to 1993; in Fathegarh it's absent.

When he was brought in as deputy election commissioner five years ago, Subhas Pani (below), an English literature graduate bitten by the technology bug, was given the brief of making the Election Commission (EC) it-enabled. With his team, he has ended up creating "the world's largest wide area network". At Rs 2 crore, the EC's it outlay is 20 per cent of its secretariat's annual budget. It is money well spent. The EC's website (www.eci.gov.in) is a goldmine for election and politics buffs, and on Lok Sabha verdict day in 1999 refreshed 2,000 pages every five minutes. From 1,400 counting centres, round by round tallies came to the EC in Delhi as well as to state headquarters. Any unusual deviation was automatically detected by the software and the information acted upon to check malpractices. The next step is roll revisions, virtually online.

Old style governance would have led to American-type delays in results. Rigging too would have been more difficult to detect.

Hyderabad's and Secunderabad's Twin Cities Intelligent Network Services (TWINS) counters will number 284 by March 2001. twins, says a Union it Ministry official in Delhi, "has broken mindsets and eliminated inter-departmental divides". You can pay utility bills for power, water, building permits, car registration and so on at one counter. In sum, unlike the friends project in Thiruvananthapuram where different computers are used for different utilities, here there is no distinction between the power corporation's machine and the transport authority's computer. The government meets the citizen as one entity.

Old style governance would have entailed standing in line in more than one government office and interacting with surly babus. Workhorse computers never take tea breaks and process all sorts of bills.

Drivers in Gujarat are now given a thumb-impression-based driving licence card designed by a German company. Traffic policemen can check the thumb impression on the card with that of the driver, using a pocketsized "reader". What's more, if the driver violates traffic rules or causes an accident, this is recorded on the card . Five offences and the licence is cancelled. The state Government is now considering using the card for multiple purposes and the Delhi Government has similar plans.

Old style governance would make it easier to forge driving licences and difficult to instantly access the violation record of a driver.

Nobody in Kal Singh's village of Gunawad (Dhar, Madhya Pradesh) could afford to buy his Jersey cow. So Singh (above) took his problem to the local Net kiosk. Using a program called Gram Haat, he advertised his cow on an intranet connecting 32 villages. Some e-haggling later, Premnarayan Sharma of Dilwara village bought the animal for Rs 3,000. Madhya Pradesh's first rural e-commerce transaction was concluded. Gram Haat is one of the applications of Gyandoot, a rural e-governance project that is panchayat-funded but privately managed through kiosks in villages across Dhar. Aside from opening up a bigger market, it allows complaints to be e-mailed directly to the district magistrate and links primary health centres to the district hospital.

Old style governance would have had Singh getting a poor bargain for his cow, unless a mud and stick cattle mela took place. Gyandoot has reduced distances to zero.

Full coverages
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