egov 75: industry speak
ICT is the Change Agent The SMART way for promoting e-Governance is defined as ‘Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsive and Transparent’ government
I Eric Kuo
General Manager MSI – India
ndia has transformed significantly over the past few years. If you look at the country today you see change enabled by ICT. National e Governance Plan has been a comprehensive “programme” of the Government of India and has gone a long way to leverage capabilities and opportunities presented by ICT to promote good governance across the country. With the widespread usage of IT, computers, smart phones, tablets, faster and widespread Internet connectivity and other components of the ICT technologies in India over the last couple of decades, the need for e-Governance has finally got the due importance it always deserved. Articulated in the form of the report on Second Administrative Reforms Commission titled “Promoting e-Governance - The SMART way Forward” which is defined as ‘Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsive and Transparent’ government. The report defined the need for e-Governance to bring the government closer to its citizens (G2C) and businesses (G2B) while promoting inter-government agency cooperation in a friendly, convenient, transparent and inexpensive fashion. For success of an e-Governance project and superior service delivery, it is imperative that the government agency focuses on whole citizen experience. Focusing on the citizen is essential for long term success. The govt. agency needs to integrate information from all points of citizen interaction. The overall architecture for e-Governance needs to ensure that the architecture components are extensible and scalable to adapt to the changing environments. The e-Governance applications that are emerging as islands of successes have to be interoperable. Challenges such as lack of IT Literacy, awareness regarding benefits of e-governance, underutilisation of existing ICT infrastructure, attitude of Government departments towards e-Governance application and Resistance to re-engineering of departmental processes is the need of these times. If we successfully tackle these issues and we are bound to achieve our targets and become entirely e-Governed soon. From
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“There are three basic things in connectivity: Access, Affordability and Application. If one of these is not in place, the other two would not work” – Yogesh Kocchar, Head e-Governance Unit, Tata Teleservices
May 2008
June 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov
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