E-governance

The Government of India is implementing various e-governance initiatives under four models of e- governance i.e. Government to Citizen, Government to Government, Government to business, and Government to employees. The Government launched the Digital India Campaign under which various initiatives like NeGP, MyGov.in, e-Sampark, Digital Locker are being undertaken. However, implementation of these initiatives faces various obstacles, such as:

Social and economic obstacles

• Lack of vernacular content: e-Governance applications are written in English language which many people find difficult to understand.
• Low IT literacy: Literacy level of India is relatively low and even among the literates large section of people in India are not aware of the usage of Information Technology.
• Digital divide: People who are living below poverty line or in backward areas cannot afford a computer and internet connection for themselves to take the benefits of the e-governance initiatives and other online services.
• High Cost: A huge amount of money is involved in implementation, operational and maintenance tasks. Insufficient human resource: There is a lack of skilled personnel in India to look after e- governance projects.
• Insufficient human resources: There is a lack of skilled personnel in India to look after e- governance projects.

Technical obstacles

• Interoperability: Different e-Governance initiatives lack the ability to work together, which inhibits the newly developed and existing applications to be implemented together.
• Privacy and Security: There are concerns about protection of privacy and security of an individual’s personal data, that he/she provides to obtain the government services.
• User friendliness: The government websites/apps sometimes lack a user-friendly interface and are not updated timely, which prohibits their effective use by the common people.

Steps needed to address the above obstacles

• Single window digitization solution:Make the India Enterprise Architecture (IndEA) framework mandatory at all levels of the government and for all e-governance projects.
• Business Process Re-engineering: Governmental forms, processes and structures should be re-designed to make them adaptable to e-Governance, backed by procedural, institutional and legal changes.
• Monitoring and Evaluation: Monitoring of e-Governance projects should be done by the implementing organization during implementation and be held accountable. Further, the StateData Centres (SDCs) should be maintained by Government agencies such as NIC as it involves handling of sovereign data.
• Public-Private Partnership (PPP): The private partner should be selected through a iransparent process. The roles and responsibilities of government as well as the private partner should be clearly laid down in the initial stage itself, leaving no room for any ambiguity.
• Capacity Building: The governments at all levels should establish Knowledge Management Systems along with ensuring skills up gradation of individuals associated with the implementation of e-Governance projects.

The main aim of e-governance is ‘ease of governance’ leading to ‘ease of living’ of people. There is need to build a congenial environment for successful implementation of e-governance initiatives. This can be achieved by displaying a will to change within government by political support at the highest level and incentivizing e-governance along with the steps mentioned above.