E-Governance and Rural India 

Governments across the country are attempting initiatives to benefit the rural population

Thursday, February 10, 2005

Governance is a contract between the government and the citizens wherein is defined a set of processes which are carried out by the government to fulfill the spoken and felt needs and aspirations of the citizens. In a democratic system, this contract is defined by the citizen, implemented by the government and monitored by the citizen. How well the governors and the governed participate in this contract defines the degree of goodness of governance. With the emergence of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), a new form of governance, referred to as e-governance, has emerged as a way of reaching out to the people. This has been made possible mainly by the essential nature of these technologies:

ICTs reduce space and time boundaries. Through ICTs, government can reach the most remote and disadvantageous section of the community where it is probably difficult to reach out physically. 

ICTs can be used to promote transparency and accountability. This is made possible through ICTs in government management and operations. 

ICTs enable swift delivery of information and services. ICTs can reduce bureaucratic red tapism by streamlining the operations of the government thereby increasing productivity and efficiency of government agencies. But ICT per se cannot guarantee good governance. It can only facilitate and strengthen good governance, provided it is already adopted as a part of government's policy and strategic vision. 

When introducing ICTs, particularly to rural India, many challenges are encountered. Some of them are: 

Connectivity. Communication Technologies are not very widespread, cost-effective and require skilled manpower for maintenance.

Content. Lack of availability of relevant content that can be easily consumed by the common man. 

Capacity. Underdeveloped human capacities (literacy, social position etc) to harness and sustain ICTs. 

Commerce. Underprivileged sections of society are not very well organized to meet the demands of Internet commerce. The prevailing infrastructure (technical and legal) is not strong enough to elicit favourable responses from people.

Sustainability. Using and maintaining ICTs involve substantial cost which ICT initiatives may not be able to sustain on their own. 

Intellectual Property Rights. With more subjects (area of actions with rights and responsibilities) being transferred to rural PRIs, the content (of their territory) ownership and right to use by other agencies of state/central government, will be a key questions in coming times. 

Asessment at village/ community level, should be an essential exercise to determine the type and quality of content required with a defined periodicity. Government should focus on providing e-governance information and services that provide maximum benefit to the maximum citizen-base. Focus should not only be on the content of information/ services but also on providing easy and cost-effective access points for the citizens. Various models such as those adopted in e-Seva, FRIENDS, Land Record Computerisation Programme etc may be reviewed and replicated as per local needs.

Attempts should be made to introduce communication technologies that are indigenous, cost- effective, suitable to rural areas and that can be maintained locally. Wireless technologies offer potential for solving the last-mile problem. Some technology institutions such as IIT, Chennai are working in this area using CorDect WLL technology. Government should identify gaps, fund, promote and implement such projects through the country's various technical institutions. 
Language is important for providing access to content. Expediting the digitisation of language scripts in UNICODE format (which is both a nationally and internationally accepted standard) is important.

Easy to use tools in the area of Community Informatics [Community Software Solution Framework, such as eNRICH (http://enrich. nic.in)] developed by NIC for rural people should be made available across the country to enable easy organization and exchange of content among rural communities. Such applications should be designed in view of cultural ethos of the region and be sensitive to local specificities. They can enrich user's experience through Attentive User Interfaces (AUI). 

The role of Local Support Agency (LSA) is essential to sustain project activities at village level and carry it forward. The LSA could be Panchayati Raj Institutions, NGO, a Self Help Group (SHG) or some other institution such as cooperative societies. Government may have to support efforts to localize content that is globally available with domain experts such as IARI, FAO and WHO. This will resolve many copyright issues, which may arise if local community people attempt to localize the global content. Further, it lends authenticity to the content.

Building e-literacy should be part of every ICT initiative. The model adopted in Akshaya (http://Akshaya.net) project of Government of Kerala is a case in point. E-commerce can provide a tremendous fillip to the rural economy. RuralBazar (http://RuralBazar.nic.in), an e-commerce solution developed by NIC attempts to address many e-commerce needs of rural producers. But, rural producers need to be strengthened to build quality products and handle bulk orders. Legal and technical infrastructure of e-commerce needs to be customized to meet the needs of local entrepreneurs in backward areas. Agmarknet (http://Agmarknet.nic.in) is an application that brings the prices of different agricultural produce in mandis (local/regional agricultural market) facilitating farmers to take favourable decisions.

ICT initiatives should incorporate opportunities for local employment generation. Areas that may be explored include content creation, translation, ICT center management, ICT maintenance. Government in general and financial institutions in particular should recognize and support the formation of SHG engaged in IT enabled services (such as data collection/entry activity outsourced to SHG by government department on payment basis) related to government programs. This will enhance employment opportunities in rural areas and quality of monitoring in view of frequently updated data availability from the grass-root level. 

Many ICT initiatives fail to sustain their operations once the funding agency withdraws support. Areas where government should focus on are sources of funding and revenue sharing models. Involvement of LSA with the village level ICT project from the beginning, accelerates the weaning process.

The ICT infrastructure (computing and communication environment and Internet) created under already existing ICT initiative should be accessible to people. The government department should be allowed to use it if unused capacity/duration is available. Some of the countries like Sri Lanka are introducing incentives, in initial phases, to local population to enhance the usage of deployed ICT infrastructure.

The road ahead
Rural populace frequently interacts for day-to-day needs with local agencies out of which rural PRIs [Village Panchayats (VPs)/Block Panchayats (BPs)/Zilla Panchayats (ZPs)] hold a significant position and introduction of e-governance in these institutions would bring benefits to these consumers. With the increasing pace of decentralisation (deconcentration and devolution of subjects) to rural PRIs, it will be worthwhile to knit e-services around them. Absence of legacy data in these institutions is also an advantageous point in context of initiating e-governance. 

The Ministry of Panchayati Raj, Govt. of India launched National Panchayat Portal (NPP, http://panchayat.nic.in), in December 2004, which contains the portal framework of state PR departments, all ZPs, all BPs and all VPs with the website of the ministry acting as a gateway home page. The portal will act as information and service delivery points for respective panchayats and are designed to provide vertical and horizontal integration across rural PRIs, facilitating communication, message broadcast, fund transfer, monitoring of programmes among various stakeholders and would act as a front-end. The respective state government and PRIs have been advised by the ministry to commence delivering services and putting content on their portals launched as a part of NPP. Many state governments have taken steps to initiate the back-end computerisation of rural PRIs with ICT solution (Panchayati Raj Institutions Administration Software, http://PRIASoft. nic.in) from National Informatics Centre (NIC, http:// home.nic.in). Orissa is the first state to share the PRIs financial data in public domain through their website http://ori.nic. in/priasoft. The Gram Sabha and Gram Panchayat (elected and non-elected representative of PRI and common man), should be sensitised to the benefits of ICTs so that they become initiating and sustaining agencies of the ICT initiative. While ICT solutions are applied within the functioning of rural PRIs on one hand, there is a need to have Common Service Centres (CSC) acting as public domain kiosks which could be used by the common man to access local offerings from PRIs, content from global sources and export local content to global market. 

As PRIs gain their rightful constitutional status, rural citizens would be approaching these institutions more and more for attaining basic services, in addition to law and order and market. Hence, strengthening the PRIs through e-governance would be the most effective route to bringing prosperity to rural citizens and areas.

Note: The opinions expressed in the article are the personal views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the employer 

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