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Vino John

Take them in stride.

T.E. Raja Simhan

Deploying information technology for e-governance is no longer a matter of choice. It is an imperative.

When the National e-governance Programme was launched in 2006, many questioned its viability and the likely success. Well, the answer to critics could well be that some of these projects are making a marked difference to corporates, and the common man.

As Prasanto K Roy, Editor, Dataquest, says “I would rate it (e-governance projects) 6/10, up from 4/10 in the 1990s.” In that decade, there were very few star projects that made a difference to citizens, such as the railway reservation system.

Now, there are more initiatives, both at Central (MCA 21) and State level — Gujarat’s citizen service centres, Karnataka’s Bhoomi, Sitapur/UP public grievance system and Rajasthan’s BPL site.

The Ministry of Information Technology has gone a step ahead — and sought to measure the success of some of these projects. The findings provide interesting insights.

For instance, users of the Income Tax portal have reportedly had to make multiple visits to the Income Tax office to file their returns. Waiting time has now got reduced by about one-third and there is a significant reduction in total elapsed time for corporate users from 10 days to six days. Chartered Accountants filing on behalf of corporations failed to report data on corruption, but individual filers reported a marginal reduction in bribes, according to the Impact Assessment of National Level Projects, a nationwide survey that captured users’ experience with the manual and computerised modes of delivery for each service.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual e-readiness, 2006, ranks India at 54 out of the World’s 69 largest economies along with the Philippines.

And the Nasscom report on Information Technology on the Economy of India highlights that, despite India’s global IT dominance, internally, the country has a low level of IT investment — only 3.5 per cent of total capital — and minimal dispersal of IT capital of the 30 countries evaluated.

Ahead of India are Tunisia, Qatar, Thailand, Italy, Lithuania, Barbados, the Slovak Republic, Latvia and Cyprus.

Despite the bleak scenario, things are changing in the country. Says Jaganathan, a veteran with a leading Chartered Accountant firm in Chennai, “I hate computers but am now forced to use one at the age of 55 to file the income tax returns online.”

The Ministry of Information Technology assigned different agencies to study three national projects on collection and processing of income tax, registration of new companies (MCA21) and issue of passport.

Among the three, say the findings, MCA21 had the most positive impact on the users on key dimensions. The passport project has had virtually no impact and the results of the income tax survey indicate that whereas corporate users benefited on some aspects, individual filers have not benefited significantly.

In the case of MCA21, even users accessing the services from a public access point reported a saving of nearly one trip. The waiting time at the service delivery centre during each trip was reduced to 25 minutes in comparison to 75 minutes in the manual system.

The project had a positive impact on corruption with the proportion paying bribes having got reduced, from 20 per cent to less than 5 per cent in the case of physical front offices or certified filing centre users, says the report.

The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, was the technical advisor for the study.

In the case of passport, the reduction in the number of trips and waiting time is very marginal as only submission of application is partially computerised, leaving most of the back-end processing in its old ‘inefficient’ form, the survey says.

The incidence of bribery is high for ‘police verification’ and small in case of the passport office, but the impact in both cases is not significant. Very little or no improvement in service quality or quantity of governance has been perceived by respondents, it says.

According to Roy of Dataquest, many say this country is a ‘graveyard of pilot projects.’ Hundreds of pilot projects have been launched and some have done well at the pilot level.

Then the chief protagonist moves on or something else such as elections happens, and the pilot project fizzles out.

Or, in some cases, the pilot project does very well, but in the next State, or even in the next district, the same application starts from scratch with a request for proposal (RFP), tender, and full re-invention of the wheel.

Some central projects such as MCA 21 show what can be done quickly and how that can impact users — in this case business users — positively. There are, however, gaps, with major projects that have not happened, or are happening too slowly, he adds.

Tanmoy Chakrabarty, Vice-President and Head, Government Industry Solutions Unit, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, which was involved in MCA21, says the data in the report mostly agrees with the company’s observation on the project.

The sample size (7,000-9,000 users in 15 to 45 cities for different projects) taken for the analysis was quite satisfactory and covered most of the users of these applications.

One drawback in the study could be the lack of information regarding the platform friendliness, meaning whether the user (of passport, MCA 21 or Income tax) was comfortable with the graphical user interface of the software or not, he adds.

The study yields these key insights:

For an automated system to work efficiently and to be of actual use to citizens, it must provide end-to-end service. Improvement in MCA21 is primarily due to the fact that it provides an end-to-end computerised service.

Total elapsed and waiting time for the citizen is also dependent on how much work is actually automated. The higher the services, the lesser is the waiting and elapsed time.

In other words, if the services available online are not sufficient enough, why would the user go online?

He would rather finish the work manually, and save on the cost of scanner and printers, says Chakrabarty.

E-governance has the potential to benefit India’s citizens exponentially and maximise the return on the government’s investment in it.

The contradiction in India is that the country is recognised as a global leader in the delivery of IT services but suffers from very little internal IT development.

Where technology leads, it tends to be in the private sector, by companies, corporations and non-governmental groups.

Where it is the weakest — and where it can have the greatest impact — is in the public sector, he says.

raja@thehindu.co.in

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