IT INDUSTRY SHOULD DEVELOP APPLIANCES WHICH CAN BE USED IN RURAL INDIA

IT INDUSTRY SHOULD DEVELOP APPLIANCES WHICH CAN BE USED IN RURAL INDIA

CHANGE OF MIND SET OF THOSE BEHIND IMPLEMENTATION OF E GOVERNANCE STRESSED

New Delhi –August 2, 2007 Information Technology (IT) and e governance experts from the government and private sector taking part in the four day meet of e Governance and digital Learning ‘eIndia 2007′ have stressed on the need of developing hardware appliances which can be used in rural India and bringing change in mind set of people sitting behind the technology for successful implementation of e-Governance in India.

Information Technology (IT) experts from the government and the private sector attending the eIndia2007 have been unanimous on one pint that it is mostly the men behind the technology and their mind set which has defeated the purpose of transparency and e-governance.

” e-Governance means citizens welfare and providing all services to the citizens including birth and death certificates, ration card, land records, driving license and passport by means of internet ” said Mr Wajahat Habibullah, Chief Information Commissioner, Government of India

“Most of the common people are afraid to visit government offices as the staff in these offices is most of the time non co-operative. This is the major hindrance in implementing the successful e –governance, which is a step towards giving power to people”.

Mr Wajahat Habibullah said ” By end of year 2008, most of the states will implement accepting of Right To Information (RTI) applications online and one need not visit any government office to seek information under RTI Act” .

Mr B.K.Goirala, director General, National Informatics centre (NIC) said “IT industry should develop appliances which can be used in rural India. The biggest problem of installing computers in villages was irregular power supply. He urged the industry to develop personal computers which can have their own solar powered back up systems”.

He said , ” a citizen focused approach along Public Private Partnership (PPP) can only provide an integrated platform for achieving the true vision of e-Governance in the country. Government on its part can only provide basic infrastructure including internet, window Facilitation center and last leg connectivity for implementation of e-governance, but PPP is the major key factor for providing totally transparent services to the people”

Mr. Sanjay Jaju, municipal commissioner, Hydrabad said “Andhra government has the maximum number of e-governance projects including e-Seva, CARD, VOICE, MPHS, FAST, e-Cops, AP online—One-stop-shop on the Internet, Saukaryam, Online Transaction processing. The effort behind these projects is sincere but the psychology of government servants behind these projects is quite different from that of private sectors”.

“Technology cannot be made the scapegoat as it is men behind it and their mind set needs to be changed. Technology is a success world wide” he added.

Mr. Michael Woo, general Manager, Asia Pacific , Mitsubishi Electric said that the time gap between the procurement of the hardware and development of the custom applications is so large that by the time application is Ready for use, the hardware becomes obsolete.

Designing of any application requires a very close interaction between the govt. department and the agency developing the solutions. At present the users in govt. departments do not contribute enough to design the solution architecture. Consequently the solution developed and implemented does not address the requirements of an e-governance project and hence does not get implemented .

Experts were of the opinion that the successful implementation of e-governance projects requires lots of restructuring in administrative processes, redefining of administrative procedures and formats which finds the resistance in almost all the departments at all the levels. Additionally there is lack of expertise of departmental in exploiting data mining techniques, updation and collection of real time content onto website etc. Therefore the content as is collected or maintained by various e-governance portals is unreliable or full of gaps. In such a scenario, its difficult for any e-governance solution to achieve its intended results.