Electronic-governance (e-gover- nance) is fast emerging as an important tool for achieving good governance especially with regard to improving efficiency, transparency and making interface with government user-friendly. e-governance denotes the application of Information Technology (IT) to the processes of government functioning in order to bring about better governance which has been termed as SMART (Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsive, and Transparent). Two concepts ‘e-gover-nance’ and ‘e-government’ often emerge in overlapping manner in the context of IT and governance. Much of this is due to the lack of a standard definition of e-governance and we in India have been using this term in a general sense. In the case of e-government the services and information are delivered to the citizens or clients through electronic medium while in the case of e-governance, the interaction between the citizen and the government takes place through electronic medium and decisions are processed electronically. It is necessarily more interactive and goes beyond e-government. During the last few years there have been major initiatives among different Governments towards ushering in Information Technology and its tools in the functioning of Government. Though the central and several state governments have taken some major initiatives in implementing e-governance during the Ninth Five Year Plan period, these efforts are yet to take the shape of a systematic national programme. Thus in the Tenth Five Year Plan special emphasis has been given to the use of Information and Communication Technology into different areas of government activities. This helps in achieving higher level of efficiency and transparency in the whole bureaucracy.

As yet, the programme of e-governance has put emphasis on providing connectivity, networking, technology up-gradation, selective delivery systems for information and services and a package of software solutions. It is now necessary to look seriously at the re-engineering of procedures and rules which form the core of any effective programme of e-governance. Keeping all this in view, the master plan of e-governance in the Tenth Plan has been guided by the following principles:

• A clearly focused vision of the objective of introducing e-governance.
• The range and standards of delivery of information and services to the people must be defined, with time frames within which they are to be attained.
• Any plan or scheme for e-gover-nance should be sustainable and should not be a passing fad.
• Standardisation of technologies without any delay. Otherwise, the ensuing confusion will negate the advantages of use of IT.
• Areas of public and private funding should be clearly spelt out.
• State-specific plans and schemes must be drawn up, keeping in mind the situation in different states.
• All schemes must be interactive; otherwise they will only be labour-saving devices for government functionaries.
• Government to government (G2G), government to citizen (G2C) and government to business (G2B) modalities have to be developed.

Good governance is perhaps the single most important factor in ensuring that the objectives of the Tenth Plan are achieved.

There are a good number of appreciable e-governance initiatives that have been mentioned in the 10th Five Year Plan Document. To mention a few, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan have launched the Chief Minister’s Information System to monitor a range of activities from developmental programmes to redressal of public grievances. The Andhra Pradesh Development Monitoring System has a database (with spatial as well as non-spatial parameters) of the entire 75 million population. APSWAN (Andhra Pradesh State Wide Area Network), a state-wide network for voice, data and video communication, is the basic information highway for improving government-citizen and government-industry interface. The state’s Secretariat Knowledge Information Management System (SKIMS) efficiently manages information in the Secretariat. Rajasthan’s Vikas Darpan envisages a geographical information system (GIS)-based planning and decision support system. The Disaster Management System in Gujarat maintains communication during natural disasters. The state’s VIDYUTNET, India’s first VSAT-based communication network, supports real-time data applications for power generation and distribution. The use of IT in the delivery of public services has several success stories. Andhra Pradesh’s TWINS project enables the citizens of the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad to access 18 services of six departments through a single window. The smart card-based driving license project of Gujarat has equipped all the Regional Transport Offices with state-of-the-art enrolment and issuance centres. The Bhubaneshwar Development Authority in Orissa has set up kiosks that map the city using GIS. Citizens can now check on the status of existing schemes for housing, commercial and industrial projects without depending on middlemen. Tamil Nadu’s tele-medicine project allows doctors in remote areas to consult experts on special cases or for referral purposes through a direct ISDN link. The West Bengal Electronics Industry Development Corporation has implemented a map-based GIS project for one-stop access to all information pertaining to a municipal area. The state government has also designed a web and kiosk-based education information system to help students with career counseling and selection of educational institutes.

People often end up in a soup while looking for information about government officials or services due to deficiency in information and communication infrastructure. Lack of transparency in processes, and mismanagement in systems and operations, is rampant. The inaccessibility of information affects the rural poor more than other sectors of the community. Similarly, deficiency of market information (on commodity prices, various input suppliers, etc.) leads to loss of income and exploitation of rural entrepreneurs by middlemen. Such exploitation and losses further marginalize small and marginal farmers and village artisans. With 22 telephone lines and 3 computers per 1,000 people, India in deed has a very poor basic information and communication infrastructure. Even though this infrastructure is highly concentrated in urban areas, Internet access via the telephone is still difficult and expensive in urban areas. In rural India, more than half of India’s villages lack telephone connectivity, let alone Internet access.

The implications of this scenario on the rural people (with differential impacts on the poor and other vulnerable groups) are three-fold:

• Loss of income
• Loss of time
• Loss of opportunity

In this context, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can play a significant role in making information available at a reasonable cost. ICTs promise to provide innovative solutions to the problems of poverty and inequality by accelerating development and introducing transparency into systems and operations.

There are several instances that can be referred here. In Karnataka, computerization of treasuries has helped capture every transaction at all district and taluka (sub-district) treasuries.

Under the Warana project of the NIC (National Informatics Centre) in Maharashtra, facilitation booths in the rural areas provide information about employment and agricultural schemes and government procedures, automated assistance in completing applications for government certificates, crop information, information on bus and railway services, medical facilities, water supply etc. Drishtee is a platform for rural networking and marketing services for enabling e-governance, education, and health services. It runs with state-of-the-art software that facilitates communication and information interchange within a localized intranet between villages and a district centre. In Melur, near Madurai, the Tamil Nadu government’s rural access to service through the Internet has brought about an e-revolution of sorts. Public call office (PCO) kiosks here are equipped with a personal computer, multimedia kit, web camera, and audio system. They even have power backup. Some 300 interlinked villages in Tamil Nadu are able to electronically share data on crops and cattle diseases. When in need, village elders can even take part in a panchayat videoconference. There are related adult education programmes and people are getting empowered. The Andhra Pradesh government and a local software solutions company have designed a package that will use mobile computing devices to help meet the healthcare needs of rural people.

The Andhra Pradesh government and the software solutions provider CMC Ltd have designed a novel healthcare project to tackle issues relating to rural health in the state and eventually, the country. The project is part of the India Health Care initiative and is being funded by the World Bank. As part of the project, auxiliary nurses and midwives (ANMs) working in primary health centres (PHCs) in the remotest villages will visit rural households equipped with personal digital assistants (PDAs). Important healthcare information on pregnant women in the villages, infants and children, eligible couples, incidence of diseases and the relevant treatments, planning preventive and remedial measures, etc will be keyed into these digital assistants. After the ANMs return to the primary health centre this information will be fed into the desktop computers and then transferred to the district-level and state health commissioner’s office using the available network.

There, data compilation and report generation can be done in a couple of minutes, enabling the authorities to mobilise the personnel and materials required to attend to the needs of specific villages needs within hours. Gone are the days when the Panchayat head sat under a tree and counselled villagers. As part of its venture to facilitate the spread of IT, the National Informatics Centre (NIC), Hyderabad, has designed and developed a new citizen-centric product —’Ekpanch’ or Electronic Knowledge-based Panchayat — targeted at gram panchayats. The module will help in providing information and knowledge management at the panchayat level. Ekpanch comprises nearly 30 main modules and 150 sub modules online with 30 sectoral functions of gram panchayats. The integrated modules in the software include agriculture, land records, irrigation and water conservation, dairy and animal husbandry, fisheries, social forestry, elections, small scale industries, housing, water, roads, bridges and culverts, alternative energies and poverty eradication. Primary, technical and adult education, libraries and cultural programmes, markets, health, women and child welfare, social welfare, cottage industries, public distribution, protection of property and gram panchayat administration are some of the other functions carried out by the software. The NIC official said that orders issued by the state government regarding village secretariats as well as the functions of the village secretary besides representatives of gram panchayats were all considered in the package.

These are just a few instances which show the titanic potential of e-governance for the benefit of mass. Given the country’s linguistic diversity, the need of the time is the use of local languages in the IT implementation process. It is promising to mention that, particularly because of the pioneering work done by C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Ministry of IT, Govt of India), the technology is now very much available.

India is the second largest country in population in the world with over one billion inhabitants. There are 18 constitutional languages with 10 scripts and over 1650 dialects. Development of a nation with such diversity depends on acquiring, absorbing and communicating knowledge seamlessly. IT has emerged as an enabling technology in reducing the knowledge gap across different linguistic groups encompassing over 90 percent of India’s population that is not English-literate. It is, therefore, necessary that people should be able to use computers and other IT systems in their own languages and derive the benefits of enhanced productivity and better quality of life through good governance. With the mission and vision of communicating without language barrier & moving up the knowledge chain, C-DAC with Govt of India has launched TDIL, Technology Development for Indian Language. Its major achievements till date, include OCRs (Optical Character Reader) for Indian Languages, Word Processors for all Indian languages, Sanskrit based knowledge tools, Websites in Indian languages, translation tools and many more. This by itself could give a major boost to IT implementation efforts. Thus to conclude we can say that judging by the ways in which information technology is being used in governing villages, and of course municipalities and towns with the ongoing process of implementing local governance in their vernaculars, the ‘e-future’ of India looks bright.