The cost of a messyland administration: October 2005 Issue

ISSN 0973-161X Volume I issue 7, October 2005

Bhoomi: Impact of computerisation of land records in Karnataka PAGE 13 R(e)volutionary journey of Singapore e-Government PAGE 18 Creating a competitive domestic industry-SiTF endeavour PAGE 22 Web-based personnel administration for government PAGE 39 The first Asian monthly on e-Government

McKinsey Report 2002 on the factors reducing Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s economic growth rate.

The cost of a messy land administration! Page 13 Cover Story Rajeev Chawla Bhoomi Project knowledge for change

Page 18 Country Focus Choy Peng, IDA Singapore

Page 31 Regional Focus Aman Singh, CEO, CHiPS Chhattisgarh

A special preview on

Page 23 www.conflux.csdms.in

10 15 25 26 28 40 400

countries

international partners

corporates

thematic sessions

Indian states

keynote speakers

www.conflux.csdms.in

delegates

One Conference. Conflux2005.

CONTENTS

The first Asian monthly on e-Government

Cover Story

Bhoomi: Impact of computerisation of land records

Country Focus Singapore

in Karnataka

QUOTES

R(e)volutionary journey of Singapore e-Government

P.V. Bhat and Rajeev Chawla

Interview: Choy Peng, IDA Singapore

Creating a competitive domestic industry - SiTF endeavour Interview: Patrick Koh, SiTF Singapore

In Practice

Web-based personnel administration for government Anil K Sharma and R Subramanian Empowering communities through knowledge (ECKO) Ganga Prasad GL, Amitav Nath and Mainak Sarkar

Commentary

User attitudes to e-Government citizen services in Europe Jeremy Millard

Malaysia

e-Government initiatives of Malaysia: Fueling growth on fast track Maniam Kaliannan

Regular Features

6 News Review 12 egov by numbers 14 Q & A Rajeev Chawla, Govt. of Karnataka, India

Regional Focus: Chhattisgarh

“Budget is not a constraint for any IT project in Chhattisgarh” Interview: Aman Singh, CEO, CHiPS Chhattisgarh

23 Conflux 2005 Preview - IV Find the latest agenda!

Book Review E-Government Toolkit for Developing Countries

45 46

About Town Facts and Data

Cover image The chart on the cover page is taken from McKinsey report 2002. It says that land market distortion in India reduces its economic growth by 1.3 % a year. 90% of India’s land titles are under legal dispute. This severely hinders the incentive for land developers to invest in retail or housing. As a result, India has by far the highest property prices in Asia relative to income. | October 2005

“The only way ahead is to revolutionize the nature of the Indian State… A learner state, but one, that performs those fewer, and indispensable functions better.” Arun Shourie, Former minister of Disinvestment, Govt. of India in his book, ‘Governance and the Sclerosis that has set in’

“While the basic needs of human kind have long been food, clothing and shelter, the time has come to add ‘information’ to that list.” Yoshio Utsumi Secretary General International Telecommunication Unit

“Current goals for European e-Government measure quantity, not quality. Governments must refocus on offerings that improve users’ experiences and drop targets based on percentages of public services online.” Rebecca Jennings Senior Analyst Forrester Research

Read the magazine online at

www.egov.csdms.in 3

Editorial Guidelines egov is a monthly magazine providing a much needed platform to the voices of various stakeholders in the arena of e-Government, apart from being a repository of valuable information and meaningful discussion on issues of e-governance in general, and egovernment in particular – both to the specialist and the generalist. Contributions to egov magazine should be in the form of articles, case studies, book reviews, event report and news related to e-Government project and initiatives, which are of immense value for practitioners, professionals, corporate and academicians. We would like the contributors to follow these guidelines, while submitting their material for publication. • Articles/ Case studies should not

•

exceed 2500 words. For book reviews and event report, the word limit is 800. An abstract of the article/case study not exceeding 200 words should be submitted along with the article/case study. All articles/ case studies should provide proper references. Authors should give in writing stating that the work is new and has not been published in any form so far. Book reviews should include details of the book like the title, name of the author(s), publisher, year of publication, price and number of pages and also send the cover photograph of the book in JPEG/ TIFF (resolution 300 dpi). Book reviews of books on e-Governance related themes, published from year 2002 onwards, are preferable. In case of website, provide the URL.

•

The manuscripts should be typed in a standard printable font (Times New Roman 12 font size, titles in bold) and submitted either through mail or post. • Relevant figures of adequate quality (300 dpi) should be submitted in JPEG/ TIFF format. • A brief bio-data and passport size photograph(s) of the author(s) must be enclosed. • All contributions are subject to approval by the publisher. Please send in your papers/articles/ comments to: The Editor G-4, Sector 39 NOIDA (UP) 201 301, India Tel +91 120 2502180-87 Fax +91 120 2500060 Email: info@egov.csdms.in

Advertising Opportunities in egov Magazine! I would like to explore the various advertising opportunities for my organisation, for the purpose of growth in terms of sales and brand present. My details are mentioned as below:

Government Decision Makers

Let

...and You bridge the distance

Name ....................................................... Organisation ............................................ Designation .............................................. Address .................................................... City ........................................................... State ........................................................ Pin Code ................................................... Phone ....................................................... Mobile ...................................................... Fax ........................................................... Email ......................................................... Date ......................................................... I would like to meet with someone from egov team Please send me your advertising kit containing all necessary details Please mail and fax this form to egov CSDMS, G-4 Sector 39, Noida 201 301, U.P. India Tel +91-120-2502180-87 Fax +91-120-2500060 Email egov@csdms.in Web www.egov.csdms.in

Note: Printout of this form is valid submission.

www.egov.csdms.in |

EDITORIAL

The great Indian land (dis)ease!

Vol. I, Issue 7

October 2005

President M P Narayanan Editor-in-Chief Ravi Gupta Sr. Assistant Editor Vikas Kanungo Assistant Editors Anuradha Dhar (New Delhi) Isa Seow (Singapore) Sub-Editor Dipanjan Banerjee Designed by Deepak Kumar Bishwajeet Kumar Singh Web www.egov.csdms.in Editorial and marketing correspondence eGov G-4 Sector 39 NOIDA 201301, India Tel +91 120 2502181-87 Fax +91 120 2500060 Email info@egov.csdms.in Printed by Yashi Media Works Pvt Ltd New Delhi, India egov does not neccesarily subscribe to the views expressed in this publication. All views expressed in the magazine are those of the contributors. egov is not responsible or accountable for any loss incurred, directly or indirectly as a result of the information provided. egov is published in technical colloboration with GIS Development (www.GISdevelopment.net)

“I predict that in the next 150 years the countries in Latin America and elsewhere joining these 25 (countries with a developed economy) will be those that spend their energies ensuring that property rights are widespread and protected by law, rather than those which continue to focus on economic policy.” –Hernando de Soto (Peruvian economist and champion of property rights. Time Magazine in April 2004 nominated him as one of the 100 most influential people of the World)

Not a single day passes in India when one does not read in newspaper about a murder or two due to a land dispute. If one collects this data for the whole country on a single day, it may not be surprising to find that this toll could be very well more than 100 people a day!! According to an estimate, there are around 30 million cases pending adjudication all over India. On an average it takes 20 years for Indian courts to resolve a dispute or adjudicate a matter and if land is involved the time taken is longer. At the present rate of disposal even if there are no new cases filed, it will take 324 years for us to clear the present backlog. And let’s not forget, around 90% of the disputes in the Indian courts is related to land! India is passing through a real estate boom. The property prices in the major metros in India have risen by more that 40% in last one year. According to a report, the comparative price of land in New Delhi is many times more than that of Singapore, Bangkok, Sydney or Kuala Lumpur! We are aware of the Bhoomi project. It has transformed the lives of millions of poor in the rural Karnataka. And it could not have happened without widespread usage of ICT for generation, compilation and dissemination of land records in transparent manner. But, in spite of its wellknown success, replication of Bhoomi in several states in India World Bank Report - Doing Business 2004 has not yet happened even after several efforts. This is a long story and we promise to carry the story of land administration from each of our states in the coming issues of the magazine. If there is one Mission Mode project in NeGP, which needs to succeed at any cost, my take is for land administration. As said by Harnando de Soto, no country can become a developed country without a fair and transparent administration, which ensures property rights for the citizens!

Ravi Gupta Ravi.Gupta@csdms.in

| October 2005

NEWS REVIEW

e-Government

INDIA e-Governance plan now to get implemented in every municipality According to the Union Urban Development ministry sources, a new scheme of eGovernance designed to use information technology to deliver public services in a much more customer-oriented and cost-effective manner is going to be introduced soon. Initially, the scheme will be implemented in all the ‘million plus’ cities and extended to the ‘one lakh plus’ cities in the next phase. While the management of services will remain with the urban local bodies, helped by the state governments in the case of cities other than the million plus ones, the Union Ministry of Urban Development wants to take up handholding operations for a period of two to three years till the staff is trained in the operation and maintenance of the hardware.

Hyderabad Municipal corporation goes e-Way As the first urban local body, the Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad (MCH) in India is going to introduce ‘Oracle Financials’, a software application programme for computerising double entry accounting system. Budgeting, general ledger, accounts, cash management and the likes are some of the financial modules to be implemented as part of the project. The new e-Initiative will enable payment on taxes online and will provide better provision to monitor grievances. 6

Pune gets e-Facility centres As part of e-Governance initiative, 14 e-enabled Citizen Facilitation Centres (CFCs) are to come up in 14 ward offices of the Indian city Pune shortly that are meant to get things easier like license, No Objection Cerificate (NOC) or a specific permission. CFCs will provide services for the citizens at the click of the mouse be it for procuring birth and death certificates, health licenses for restaurants, transfer of property, payment of property taxes or any other taxes, water or drainage connections, Tax NOCs and any citizen complaints.

centres. The online solution will enable the customers to make all payments, including electricity, telephone, road and property taxes at the click of a button. With the new service, Master Card or Visa Credit Cardholders can log on to e-Seva website for making payments. e-Seva will be provided to 8,500 out of 30,000 villages in the Southern Indian state Andhra Pradesh, which have above 3,000 population, by the end of 2005.

Now credit card on mobile phones

SUWIDHA - the e-Governance phase gets expansion in Punjab Single User-friendly WIndow Disposal Help line for Applicants (SUWIDHA) is now getting expanded in all the 72 Sub-Divisional Magistrate (SDM) offices of the Indian state Punjab after the successful implementation of the project in all the 17 Deputy Commissioners Offices in the first phase. Applications from citizens for all the SDM level services will be accepted at SUWIDHASDM counters. Citizens can also check the status of their applications deposited on SUWIDHA Counter at District level through website http://suwidha.nic.in.

Bharti Tele-Ventures has announced a tie-up with ICICI Bank and Visa to launch mChq in India, the credit card facility on the mobile phone. The new service will allow Airtel subscribers to purchase goods for as low as Rs 50. Once the product is bought, the retailer sends an SMS to the customer from a special mobile phone mentioning the amount. The customer then enters his PIN number and sends back an SMS to the retailer acknowledging the amount to be paid. Airtel customers subscribing to this service will be issued a new SIM card free of cost while ICICI Bank cardholders will be issued an add-on card on the basis of their existing ICICI Bank-Visa credit card.

New online facility from e-Seva

Orissa starts e-Tender in public sector

e-Seva, an Andhra Pradesh Government enterprise, in association with the ICICI Bank, launched the online payment solutions in the Indian city Hyderabad that will enable the registered members of eSeva to make their payments online. The members can avail of the Internet payment gateway at all the 50 e-Seva

After a spate of violence in Orissa over tender fixing, the state government has geared-up to start the e-tendering process to bring transparency in the system. Chief minister, Shri Navin Patnaik, has already asked Orissa Construction Corporation and Orissa Bridge Construction Corporation, the two state public sector www.egov.csdms.in |

NEWS REVIEW

units to provide detailed information of the works contracted out to private parties during the last five years in the Government website www. orissagov.nic.in.

campus will serve as an international centre of excellence for the IT industry with a special focus on IT-enabled services.

e-Sahayata begins in Orissa Keonjhar district administration in the Indian state Orissa has opened a Citizen Information Center at the collectorate where people can have the benefits of information and service available in a single window through e-Sahayata. eSahayata is an integrated district level electronic information-cum service provider system, which will provide information and services pertaining to various departments of the government working in the district to the public in a friendly and efficient manner using information and communication technology (ICT). Some new services like social welfare schemes, civil supplies, rural water supply and sanitation, and education would soon be added to the facility list currently made available to the people.

Coal trading gets new facet with portal and e-Auction

portal coalrx.com. The company plans to auction one million tonnes of coal through this portal during the current financial year, as told by the ViceChairman and Managing Director of the company, Mr Arun Kumar Jagatramka. The company is already running a steel trading portal steelrx.com. The company is also in talks with Coal India Ltd (CIL) for eauction of coal produced by CIL subsidiaries to non-core sector consumers, he said.

The first phase will be developed on 350 acres in the heart of Kochi, Kerala’s commercial hub, in seven years, and is expected to create 33,000 jobs. The Kerala Government will lease 100 acres to DIC and 250 acres will be sold at a mutually agreed price. The completed park is expected to cover 1,000 acres and create at least 75,000 jobs.

Kerala signs MoU with Dubai Internet City to develop a ‘Smart City’ Net trading catching-up with young generation

Gujarat NRE Coke in India has entered into Internet-based coal trading by launching a portal coalrx.com. The company plans to auction one million tonnes of coal through this portal during the current financial year. The new portal will enable the company to sell coal produced in its Australian mines to small and medium sized noncore sector consumers in India. The company is also in talks with Coal India Ltd (CIL) for e-Auction of coal produced by CIL subsidiaries to non-core sector consumers. GUJARAT NRE Coke today launched an Internet-based coal trading

DIC is currently in talks with authorities elsewhere in India, Pakistan, Iran and Malta to set up facilities there. Under the terms of the MoU, the Kerala Government will transfer ownership of the existing Infopark project, an IT business park in Kochi, to Dubai Internet City. This will be merged into the Smart City project that will be developed alongside, said a statement issued in Dubai. Smart City is expected to be one of India’s largest IT parks and have a positive impact on the local economy.

Dubai Internet City (DIC) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the South Indian state of Kerala to develop Smart City, a hi-tech business campus for information technology companies in the city of Kochi. The ambitious Dh1.26 billion ($343 million, or Rs15 billion) project had been under discussion for several months. The

Net trading, the new age trade through Internet is seeing a boom with around 10 per cent of the daily turnover in the cash segment of the Bombay S t o c k Exchange (BSE) and the National Stock Exchange (NSE) generating through this. According to broking firms providing Net trading facilities, it is the younger generation between the age group of 20 to 40 years who took lead in registering themselves over the past year. Also, there is a substantial increase in female clientele during the same period.

A man is known by the company he keeps. October 2005company. Be in| the right

www.conflux.csdms.in

NEWS REVIEW

ASIA Online upgrade for UAE IT agency

to Oman’s e-government initiatives, while enabling its members to cut the time and costs traditionally associated with the procurement function,” said Tariq bin Ali Al A’amri, chairman of Tejari Oman. Once its offices have been established, Tejari Oman hopes to begin discussions with key stakeholders from industry and government, before the service becomes fully operational late this year.

Myanmar finalises ICT development master plan General Information Authority (GIA) recently decided to update and upgrade their website, www.gia.gov.ae. The Arabic version of the site has already been updated with a new look. According to the authority, the upgrading work has started and will finish within ten days. GIA will also be working at the Ministry of Finance for the full implementation of e-Government in the country. The GIA was established in 1982, when it was known as the National Computer Centre. The most important services provided by the GIA include information technology consultancy, study, training and technical support services for all ministries and government institutions. Its function is to establish and recommend required systems for sharing computer information and applications among the governmental agencies in the country.

Oman launches e-procurement services Tejari, online marketplace, which already operates in a number of countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, will be launched in Oman thanks to a partnership with Omania e-Commerce. Online marketplace Tejari will offer its eprocurement services to businesses as well as government. The company says its online procurement service will help government departments and companies to lower the costs of procurement, while improving the transparency of the process. “Tejari Oman will contribute significantly 8

Myanmar is finalising a one-year draft upgradation project of an ICT (information and communication technology) master plan for implementation to speed up the ICT development in every business sector in the country. The master plan is aimed mainly at developing ICT infrastructure, drafting ICT related laws and regulations, implementing ICT in the education sector, achieving the comprehensive use of ICT in the public and private sectors and liberalizing ICT services and investment. Besides, it calls for development of information infrastructure, emergence of e-Commerce and e-Government systems, lifting of restriction on ICT commodities, and building of ICT capacity to create an e-Society after reducing the digital divide among regional members.

Kuwait goes for optical fibre infrastructure Kuwait’s State Ministry of Communications (MOC) is buying a gigabit passive optical network (GPON) solution that will serve about 60 per cent of the access areas involved in the present roll-out. The solution will enable the MOC to offer triple-play services (voice, video and data) to subscribers via a fibre to the user (FTTU) architecture. As MOC’s strategic partner for this project, Alcatel will support the full end-to-end system integration for both the network and the service roll out. The Ministry of Communications (MOC) was established in 1956 to offer only telephone exchange lines services and

telegraph. The range of services was broadened during the last 50 years leaving only the Internet and mobile telecommunications for the private sector. MOC’s access network will be gradually upgraded by replacing the existing copper access with a passive optical fibre infrastructure. Subscribers will benefit from Alcatel’s state-of-the art converged access infrastructure that enables the delivery of services like voice, high speed Internet, voice and multimedia over IP, and IPTV (including high definition TV, video on demand, and home entertainment).

Dubai Municipality’s portal to get award at WSIS Tunisia Six winners of the UAE Contest for eContent, a national contest to select the best e-Content applications, will represent the country in the World Summit Award in Tunisia in November. Dubai Internet City, Dubai Media City and Dubai Knowledge Village organised the national competition as part of its commitment to the WSA. The WSA is a global competition backed by the UN that seeks to select the world’s most innovative and creative e-Content applications. These awards will be presented at the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) in Tunisia in November. The six winners who will represent the UAE in the World Summit Award are: e-Government Dubai Municipality’s (DM) Website (DM’s portal offers more than 300 online services to the public), e-Science CADMagazine.net, e-Learning The Career Coach (Multimedia package for career development), e-Entertainment ExpatWoman.com (a monthly magazine), e-Business Jotun Professionals Network, e-Culture Alwaraq, a comprehensive free Arabic Digital library. Special mentions were awarded to the Dubai Police’s touch-screen kiosks (e-Government), My ICT School (e-Learning), Yahadi Web Browser (e-Entertainment), HalloDubai.com (e-Culture) and Tejari.com (e-Business). www.egov.csdms.in |

NEWS REVIEW

WORLD Germany adopts Scottish e-petition system

Germany’s Parliament, the Bundestag, has just launched an electronic petitions system that is modelled on a tool used by the Scottish Parliament’s Public Petitions Committee. Scotland’s ‘epetitioner’, which has been shortlisted for an eEurope award from the European Commission. As par of the e-Democracy projects in United Kingdom, this ePetitioning system allows ordinary citizens to raise the issues affecting them. Unlike a traditional query or complaint which often becomes buried in paperwork, the progress of the petition once it is in the hands of government must be fed back to the petitions website. Rather than just sign their names to a cause they agree with, people are invited to join an interactive forum to discuss their views in more detail, offering insights, web links and background information on a particular topic or even express opposition to an idea. The German initiative comes on the back of close co-operation between Scotland’s Public Petitions Committee, the International Teledemocracy Centre (ITC) at Napier University and the Petitions Committee of the German Bundestag. Since its official launch in February 2004, Scotland’s e-petition site has had 50 submissions, which collectively have attracted over 21,000 signatures and around 700 discussion comments.

UK councils will meet e-Government targets The UK government claims that local authorities are on track to meet the target of having all of their services e-enabled by the end of the year. Electronic | October 2005

enablement of local authority services has rocketed from 26 percent in March 2002 to 77 percent in March 2005, according to the latest “Implementing Electronic Government” report. The councils forecast that 93 percent of all of their services will be available online by the end of September. Local e-Government Minister Jim Fitzpatrick said that citizens in nearly 200 councils can now file planning applications online and calculate their benefit entitlements. In addition, almost all local authorities now allow library books to be renewed online and provide access to information on public transport, council reports and committee minutes. Fitzpatrick added that councils’ e-Government efforts were already saving the government money.

Netherlands to launch electronic health dossier The Dutch government is establishing a database that will track citizens from birth until death. The Ministry of Health said the database, due to launch in January 2007, would open an electronic “dossier” for each child at birth. The dossier will contain health and family information, with school records and police records (if applicable) being added over the individual’s lifetime. Each person’s record will be given a Citizens Service Number, which will attach to the file throughout the citizen’s life. The ministry said that various government agencies will contribute to the dossier, but no private citizens or companies will have access to the records. A ministry spokesman said the system would improve the sharing of information between agencies, enabling government organisations to alert each other to children with potential problems by flagging the individual dossiers of children.

New Australia government website to strengthen crossagency work The launch of a new Australian government website (www.connected.gov.au)

reflecting its e-Governance strategy is going to help the public servants work more effectively across Government departments and agency boundaries. The web site provides practical tips and examples to assist public service employees to work across multiple agencies through links to guides, tools, directories and training information. The connected Government website will also provide researchers and the public with a clear view of how the Australian Government is delivering better outcomes through cross-agency approaches, apart from assisting the public servants.

Ethiopia rolls out online aid management tool Ethiopia has become the first country to implement the Aid Management Platform (AMP) from the Development G a t e w a y Foundation, a nonprofit body whose mission is to help developing countries make the most of the internet. AMP is a web-based information-sharing tool that aims to improve the coordination of international development aid, in order to enhance the results of its use for people in developing countries. The tool helps in the administration of international aid by tracking and reporting on aid flow and aid programmes. It also aims to improve planning, allocation, disbursement and general management of aid resources through facilitating access to standardised information about aid activities. “Deploying AMP in Ethiopia is a critical part of our effort to ensure that aid programmes are aligned with Ethiopia’s national development priorities,” said Fisseha Aberra, head of the Multilateral Cooperation Department in Ethiopia’s Ministry of Finance and Economic Development (MOFED). Led by MOFED, the AMP rollout was a joint initiative of the Development Gateway Foundation, the OECD, the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank. 9

NEWS REVIEW

ICT for Development

e-Admission in Indian schools reduces dropout mark The new online admission policy of Delhi Government in India for primary level schools has successfully brought down the dropout rate from 15 per cent to 5 per cent this year leading to 70,000 new admissions, of which 35,000 are girl students who never made to school beyond the fifth standard. Education Minister Arvinder Singh Lovely told that use of modern technology, change in strategy for spreading universal education and coming down heavily on red-tapism had helped in reversing the trend of dropouts prevalent in Delhi. Mr. Lovely said use of the online admission system introduced this year had led to a major improvement in the admission scenario in Government and aided schools. With the introduction of the online admission system the total admission had touched the record figure of 2.10 lakh instead of the routine 1.4 lakh students joining the sixth standard in Delhi Government schools. The Education Minister informed that earlier students and their parents had to face problems for school admissions because they did not know the actual availability of seats and the location of schools after passing out from fifth standard from the MCD schools. Tough rules for getting a Transfer Certificate and the indifferent attitude of some principals led to huge dropout rate. However, introduction of the online admission system changed it and instead of the routine 1.40-lakh students joining the sixth standard in Delhi Government schools, the total admission had touched the record figure of 2.10 lakh.

BPOs go rural with GramIT of Satyam IT major Satyam Computer Services Ltd is using the model of outsourcing as a tool to create employment in rural areas and to check migration to urban centres and thus Business process outsourcing (BPO) is going rural in Andhra Pradesh now. Satyam’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) outfit Byrraju Foundation has set up GramIT, the objective of which is to create enough wealth in villages and livelihood for educated unemployed youth in villages. The 50-seater GramIT centres proposed in each of the identified villages covering four districts will operate in two shifts. The services of these BPOs are targeted only at domestic companies.

IT access to schools in Hindi belt of India Around 1,250 schools situated in four of the most backward districts across the Hindi-speaking states of Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh in India will get connected via 12 satellite interactive terminals supported by EduSat by January 2007.

(IGNOU) have jointly agreed to work on the project in collaboration with the school education departments of the respective states.

The cheapest mobile phone now in India Indian engineers at the Bangalore development centre of German semiconductor leader Infineon have helped create the world’s first mobile phone, that is cheapest phone of its type, costing around US$20 (Rs. 900-1,000) and works from a pair of off-the-shelf ‘AAA’ size batteries. Infineon engineers had also tested versions, where, by doubling the memory chips on board, one could add colour to the screen as well as multiple Indian language capability. Infineon also announced that the Chennaibased wireless telecom network provider Midas Communication Technologies, would shortly add simultaneous voice and data Internet telephony options to its indoor fixed-wireless portfolio, by deploying another recent Infineon chip offering, the INCA-IP. This can provide a ‘last mile’ hop of up to 35 km from the nearest access point.

PNB launches website for farmers

With the successful implementation of this project, the government of India will come one step closer to its objective of universalisation of elementary education. The department of space, ministry of human resource development (MHRD) and Distance Education Council, Indira Gandhi National Open University

Punjab National Bank (PNB) announced the launching of a website pnbkrishi.com to cater to specific needs of farmers. For easy access to the information available in the website, touch-screen kiosks have been installed at the bank’s farmers’ training centres and agro centres. It would also provide update and on-line details about the prices of agro products prevailing in various mandis and the prices in the wholesale market. *In collaboration with i4d (www.i4d.csdms.in)

Lies, damn lies and statistics. 10

Find the truth.

www.conflux.csdms.in www.egov.csdms.in |

NEWS REVIEW

Geo-Informatics

UK Police and local authorities put criminals on the map The UK’s fight against crime is turning to computer based maps in order to pinpoint criminal behaviour more effectively. Crime & Disorder Reduction Partnerships (CDRPs) in areas including West Midlands, Barking & Dagenham, Newcastle, Nottingham and South Yorkshire are now using a software Crime Analyst from ESRI (UK), to make data mapping and analysis a more mainstream weapon against criminal behaviour. Crime Analyst helps crime fighting by creating reliable crime maps of geographical areas in minutes, uncovering crime patterns, like journey to crime, repeat offences, time of crime and geographical hotspots and reducing the time taken to compare and link similar offences.

Aid agency ‘Concern’ uses GIS to fight hunger in Africa Aid agency ‘Concern’ has received a donation from ESRI Ireland for 30 copies of their product ArcView. Using GIS Concern can map and assess the vulnerability of areas where it provides aid. ArcView allows the agency to have a spatial understanding of the nutrition and food security vulnerabilities in the areas of work. This allows them to plan their interventions in areas of greatest need. ‘Concern’ is currently piloting the GIS software in several countries in Africa including Malawi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Niger. The ArcView software is instrumental in furthering the aid agency’s understanding of the context of where they are working. It offers potential for improving analysis | October 2005

of the areas of work and allows us to plan the most effective response to the most vulnerable communities. In some African countries there are very few accurate maps available in the areas where Concern is working. The agency’s staff is now creating maps using ArcView software. The benefit of this to all our future activity is immeasurable. Beforehand the staff relied on memory to draw the area they were working and to estimate the location of communities and villages. In Malawi, the national government already uses ESRI software. Now that Concern has the software, they are able to feed into the national data collection and analysis of the food security and nutrition situation to provide a real picture of the extent of hunger and poverty across the country.

ER Mapper launches Local Government site licenses program ER Mapper providing enterprise geospatial imagery solutions has launched the “RightLocal” Program. The new program provides a flexible, budgetfriendly option for small and large local councils to manage, process and deploy their imagery assets using ER Mapper’s award winning solutions. Through an enterprise-wide access model, Local Governments can purchase unlimited use of the full suite of ER Mapper’s imagery applications, including ER Mapper application for image processing, Image Web Server for image deployment / delivery, RightWebMap for integration with image and GIS services, application plug-ins to provide additional power to desktop software. The RightLocal program provides Local Governments with the opportunity to use the leading imagery products at a price that supports and facilitates innovation.

Nigeria to deploy satellite in conducting census this year Nigeria’s census slated for November may be conducted with remote sensing satellite to be offered by United Nations

agencies. According to reports the satellite system meant to be deployed for the exercise was such that had the capacity to match whatever figures were produced after the head count, with images recorded in each area where the figures were computed. According to sources, the use of satellite for the population census would prevent the fraud, which had characterised past population census exercises in Nigeria. The satellite can pick objects including images of the size of a car, and that whatever images were spotted from the orbit would be compared with computer projections in the head count, to determine the accurate overall figure for Nigeria.

India signs up for Galileo project

Satellite positioning system Galileo has extended its arms with India signing up as a partner in the project. India joins China, Israel and Ukraine, who are already members of the program. The European Commission said discussions with many other countries were underway, including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Malaysia, Norway and South Korea. Galileo, the first global positioning system to be controlled by civilian rather then military authorities, is due to go operational in 2008, with some 24 satellites. By the end of this year development costs will have breached $1.36 billion (1.1 billion euro), while 2006 to 2008 will see another $2.61 billion (2.1 billion euro) in costs. However, the system is expected to reap good returns, bringing revenue of $274 million (220 million euro) a year. *In collaboration with GIS@development (www.gisdevelopment.net)

egov

by Numbers

1020

million Indian rupees has been allocated for computerization of Land Records and other E-Governance initiatives of the Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India.

million land records, belonging to the farmers of Indian state of Karnataka has been computerized under the project â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Bhoomiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

24 countries across the world are actively working on policy measures to include Open Source Software in different e-Government projects.

60 million documents pertaining to all companies registered under the Ministry of Company Affairs, Government of India will soon be digitised and made available through Internet.

10,000 million Indian rupees is the amount being proposed by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on information technology (IT) in India, for creating a national e-Governance fund.

100,000 Common Services Centres (CSCs) are to be set up in rural areas by the Department of Information Technology, Government of India by the year 2007.

219

1,000 different types of bill payments originating out of various PSUs are to be serviced under the FRIENDS (Fast, Reliable, Instant, Efficient Network for the Disbursement of Services) initiative of the Kerala State IT Mission in India.

billion USD is the total worth of the market to be created out of the IT spending of Western European Governments, by the year 2009.

million USD of Content Management software market is going to emerge out of e-Government initiatives in Asia-Pacific countries over the next three years.

Source:

1020 - www.nisg.org

24 - www.e-cology.ca/canfloss/report

1,000 - http://egov.mit.gov.in

20 - http://egov.mit.gov.in

10,000 - www.nisg.org

49 - www.idc.com

60 - www.nisg.org

100,000 - www.mit.gov.in

216 - www.idc.com

www.egov.csdms.in |

COVER STORY

Bhoomi: Impact of computerisation of land records in Karnataka Bhoomi project is an initiative, which brought about transformation of age-old habits of keeping land records manually into an efficient system through technology that delivers results and brings smile on faces of lakhs of farmers, who have been suffering from whimsical and corrupt village accountants supervising the manual land records. Computerisation of land records of all 177 taluks in Karnataka was completed in three years from 1999 to 2002. The enormity of the project (20 million records and 70 million fields) did not deter it from achieving its goals. In fact Bhoomi is unique in several ways and for the first time in country a digital fingerprint identification system for official records was used. Fortunately, Karnataka government had Rajiv Chawla, a committed and visionary technocrat at the right time and the right place. Success of Bhoomi inspired other states to emulate and Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and a few other states have shown commendable performance too. Karnataka now chairs a national committee for countrywide implementation of land records computerisation project. Bhoomi has been chosen as a mission mode project under NeGP by Government of India for Nationwide roll-out. This will expedite the scaling-up of the project to other states while ensuring uniform implementation pan country. Background In ancient times land revenue was possibly the only source from which a Government derived entire income. Further, its incidence was on a large section of the population as a major proportion of the people relied on land for their livelihood and existence. Thus, tax on land proved to be the primary source of the Stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wealth. The revenue collected varied among regions and also depended upon the regimes. Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s independence ushered in the era of the welfare state and accordingly land revenue or the tax on the agricultural land also witnessed a reduction. Further, other sources of taxation became the primary sources of income for the Government. However, the importance of land records cannot be undermined due to the decline in the importance of land revenue. Land records form the base for all land reforms and hence regular periodic updation of land records is essential in all States. Land records form the basis for assignment and settlement of land titles. These records must stand the test of legal scrutiny. Land is a very precious source and the land records system must safeguard the rights of the legal owner of | October 2005

the land. Issues of land rights not only raise legal complexities but also have socio-economic dimensions. The state needs to ensure the maintenance of an accurate and genuine land records system to further its policy objectives of land reforms, protection of legal rights over land and efficiency in maintenance and updation of these records. Manual maintenance of land records does hinder effective collation and analysis of the data contained in them.

Bhoomi application Bhoomi, the software for land records management has been fully designed and developed in-house by National Informatics Centre (NIC), Bangalore, a Central Government organization, using the state-of-art technology. Bhoomi is an online system to carry out the mutation on live data with built-in workflow automation in local language (Kannada), for ease of use and operation by the officials. The mutation updation process on Bhoomi gets fully synchronized with the fieldwork done by the revenue officials. The system has been integrated with fingerprint technology to ensure foolproof authentication, for each updation and

approval by the revenue officials. Bhoomi provides two public interface modulesmanned kiosk to deliver land records on demand by the farmers and touch screen kiosk to access the details of land records without intervention by the revenue officials. It facilitates the scanning of the field mutation order passed by revenue authorities and also notice served on the public, so that they could be referenced later for various purposes. It also generates various analysis and pendency reports in textual and graphical forms. Tight integration of the business rules of land records with the application system has made it very difficult for the user to deviate the rules. For example, the revenue officials cannot update or approve the mutation by deviating from the first-in-first-out rule. However the senior officer can deviate by giving valid reasons. This helps the Government to serve the public impartially. It also will not allow for carrying out certain types of transactions to take place on Government lands and thereby assists the Government in controlling the lands from being encroached. Bhoomi has brought transparency in maintenance and updation of land records. Currently, the land records are in the public 13

domain. Any individual for any land parcel in the taluk may obtain copies of the land records by providing the owner name or survey number. Farmers may know and take print out of the status of their mutation requests at the kiosk.

Q&A with Rajeev Chawla

COVER STORY

Secretary, e-Governance Government of Karnataka, India

Implementation challenges Bhoomi project team has faced numerous challenges during implementation of this scheme in the last five years. These challenges have been handled and overcome successfully by the Bhoomi project team. Many actions have been taken to improve the uptime of computers at Bhoomi kiosks by providing generators, etc. More than 1000 officials have been trained on the Bhoomi application for smoother operations at the Bhoomi centres. Around 108 Village Accountants (VA) have been trained on advanced topics to provide implementation support at the Bhoomi centres. Numbers of regional level workshops have been conducted, for the revenue officials, to create the awareness of the new system. Facility managers with service level agreements have been appointed to maintain the hardware at the centres. Facility managers have also been assigned with the responsibility of supply of preprinted stationery to the Bhoomi centres. The printing process has been made more secure, to deal with the problem of fraudulent certificates. In the process of mutation, the discretion power of the officials has been curbed.

Impact analysis Quick availability of ownership certificate across the counter has resulted in hundreds of owners getting their RTCs (Records of Right, Tenancy and Crop inspection Certificate - the name of the land records document in Karnataka) on a daily basis. For getting this document, their dependency on the VA has been reduced and at present, they get it at their own convenient time. Use of Touch Screen Kiosk by the public at the taluk office indicates the enthusiasm and the interest of the farmers. Farmers are themselves learning how to operate the kiosk by observing the operations carried out by the previous user. This is also helping the rural people to understand, 14

What are the 3 critical factors for Bhoomiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s success in Karnataka? The three critical factors for Bhoomi success in Karnataka were the following: a) The political will to undertake this project: The then Chief Minister very clearly and unequivocally stated in all public and private forums that this was the highest priority for the State Government. This may be no doubt in the minds of officers and officials that Bhoomi had to be implemented within a limited time. He further showed his political will by mentioning this in the budget documents for two consecutive years and reviewing it from time to time. b) The Administrative Will: The Administrative set up was geared to take up this project. Right from the Principal Secretary to the Deputy Commissioners, there was clarity in the minds of the people as to how the project had to be implemented in a time bound manner. c) The determined and hard working project officer: The Project Officer knew how he was proceeding and what work the milestones. He worked hard to solve all the problems of the field staff and was available all the time to everybody right up to the level of Village Accountant to listen to them whenever they wanted to communicate and to take appropriate actions very quickly and immediately. What are the main challenges being faced in the upscaling of Bhoomi project? The Bhoomi project has been up scaled in Karnataka and is now operational in

all the taluks for last four years. However, the project is not up scaling in different States. This certainly is not an issue of technology or the software. The main challenges are the following: a) Lack of administrative will to take up the projects in most of the States: The officers either get transferred on their own or are shifted by the State Govts. This results in a situation where the incumbent is not able to or is not willing to go forward in a planned meticulous way thus all the components of the projects are not handled properly. b) The lack of involvement of the Revenue officials right from the village official level. This is leading to a situation where the data is not getting validated resulting in either nondiscontintinuation of the manual system or after discontinuation of the manual system coming back to the manual system. What decisions should be taken up at the State-level and national level to upscale Bhoomi project? a)

An officer should be posted who should be competent and willing to take up this responsibility for at least 3-5 years. Neither he should be transferred nor he should try for his transfer so as to continue with the project till it is stabilised. Appropriate user charges to be put in place starting from day one to ensure self sustenance of the project. This would translate into requirement of first finding out the probable demand on the system on one side and the recurring cost of the system on other side only after both are known that one can fix user charges. www.egov.csdms.in |

COVER STORY

know and use the computer without much difficulty, and fear has been removed from their minds. Farmers also apply for mutation and expedite the process by reviewing the status of their request online, presenting documentary evidence to supervisors in the event of their requests are not being processed within the stipulated time period. With the computerized system, administrators quickly determine the number of approved and overdue mutation orders. By the end of July 2005, the total revenue generated through issuance of RTC is more than Rs.500 millions. The average monthly collection is between Rs. 15 million and Rs. 20 million. More than 1 million farmers are utilizing this on a monthly basis. An independent study conducted on the Bhoomi system has highlighted that nearly 78.3 percent of all Bhoomi users take one RTC in a year. It has been noted that 51 percent users take the land records copy for applying for loan/advance from a bank, 17.2 percent for mutation/updation of land records, 14 percent for verification of outcome of a mutation request and 16 percent as documents in courts. Public Affairs Council, Bangalore, an independent agency, had evaluated the Bhoomi system, using a systematic methodology, in July 2002. This evaluation showed significant impact on efficiency in delivery and corruption. Following are a few highlights of this report: i. Many users (66 percent) were able to utilize the Bhoomi kiosks with no help,

ii.

in contrast to 25 percent in the case of the manual system. Most users (79 percent) of the Bhoomi kiosks were able to process their | October 2005

applications without having to meet any official except the counter staff, in contrast to 19 percent who had to meet one official in the case of the manual system. iii. Users indicated that the Bhoomi kiosks provided error-free documents to more users (74 percent) in contrast to 63 percent in the case of manual system. iv. Almost all users of the Bhoomi system had confidence to complain and sought rectification (93 percent), as compared to less than half (49 percent) in the manual system. v. All users of the Bhoomi facility who wish to receive a hard copy of the RTC pay a fee of Rs.15/- each and receive a receipt for the same. vi. Most Bhoomi users (79 percent) reported a minimal waiting time in the queue of 10 minutes or less. vii. The most serious issue is that of corruption and bribery. Two-thirds of the users of the manual system paid a bribe and reported having to do so very often. In contrast, only 3 percent of users of the Bhoomi system reported paying bribes. viii. While technical capacity of the system plays an important role in its success, the approach of the people who handle the task is of critical significance too. Most Bhoomi users (85 percent) rated staff behavior at the Bhoomi kiosks as good; none of the users of the manual system rated staff behavior as good. The limited study conducted by Mrs. Hanstand and Lokesh in January 2001 indicated that most of the farmers favored the old system of the land records. Some teething problems like regular power failure in the rural places seemed to be the main reason for this. Many of these problems have been overcome now with alternative mechanism. One of the important aspects for

Bhoomiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sustainability is the constant improve-ments that have been made in the applications and systems, in response to the feedback received from various stakeholders.

New initiatives Presently, three different Departments namely, Registration, Tahsil office and Survey, maintain land related information. These Departments use and process the land information as per their procedures and rules, which are inter-linked and interdependent. In fact, Registration Department initiates the mutation on the land record and this results in survey work of the land. The public has to visit all these three Departments to get changes done on title related information, which cost him money and time. As such, integrated or interlinked systems do not exist among these activities. Further, a misplacement of the request at one of the Departments may also occur. Besides, these systems and processes are not transparent to public. Now, the Bhoomi system is addressing these issues. It has established the proper handshake with Kaveri system of Registration Department. The sale transactions are generated and sent on daily basis from Registration Department to Bhoomi system electronically through the State Data Centre (SDC) and Bhoomi collects and processes them as per the business processes. Bhoomi is also getting integrated with the survey activities. Every mutation of Bhoomi generates requests for survey. It also monitors and stores the progress of the survey. Apart from this it also captures the map details in the image form and records in the system. Bhoomi front-end 15

COVER STORY

Before Bhoomi 1.

Opaque system - The manual system of land records maintenance was highly opaque. 20 million records were maintained by over 9000 Village Accountants. The sub district office did not have any updated copy of such records. Thus a situation of virtual monopoly of Village Accountants over these records was prevailing for many years. Records were not open to public scrutiny and were updated many a times only on various considerations. Prone to manipulations - Manual record administration was prone to manipulation. There have been large instances of Government land being shown in the name of private parties. Harassment and Extortion - Many a times farmers faced harassment and extortion for not only provision of land records to them by the village officials but also for processing requests for change in land title. Delay in delivery of land records - On many occasions such delay was unintentional. Even if a Village Accountant was willing to give such records in time, he was not available when farmers wanted him most as he was manning more than 4-5 villages. Therefore, there was no certainty about timely availability of such records when a farmer required them. Cumbersome mutation process - The process of mutation (change in land title) was very cumbersome. Applications were being given to village officials who virtually enjoyed discretion of either processing them or not. As records were maintained in decentralised manner, there was no reporting mechanism available at sub district level about the pendency of such applications with Village Accountants. Lack of any monitoring mechanism in manual system made farmers amenable to all pressures from hierarchy of the Department. Cumbersome crop loan mechanism - Banks often asked various land records before lending crop loans to farmers. Farmers in turn had to hunt village officials with no guarantee that banks would not ask for any more records. This made crop loaning process prone to delay and resulted into harassment to farmers. Delay in disposal of civil litigations - The courts often required various land records for disposing land based civil litigations (which formed more than 70% of total litigations). Records were not forthcoming from Village Accountants easily and in time resulting into delay in disposal of civil litigations. Farmers had to often spend, in

also delivers the image of these maps to the public on demand. Financial institutions sanction loan/ advance to the farmers against their lands. The farmers have to furnish the land records copy with the details of the financial aspects recorded against his name in the land records. As a result the farmer makes repeated visits to the Land Records 16

many cases more than 5-10 years for disposal of their land litigation cases in absence of these records

After Bhoomi 1.

Farmers can quickly get their land records from Kiosks and are protected from harassment and extortion. As against time delay of 3 to 30 days they now get their records in less than 2 minutes. No overhead cost is to be incurred. No application is required to be submitted at the kiosk. The records are authentic and legible. Use of biometrics authentication system for updation of records have freed farmers from the worry of probable manipulation of their records by some times some unscrupulous officials. They can lodge application for mutation (change in land title) to their land records at the mutation kiosks, get acknowledgement for the same and can monitor the progress using touch screen kiosks available in some Bhoomi centers. They would then get their updated land record in a fixed time frame without the need of approaching any authority. As against earlier time of 70-200 days, mutation would now require less than 35 days. Easy maintenance and updation of land records documents. In manual system land records updation used to get delayed by as high as 1-2 years in some cases. Now it would always be in sync with time. Access to farm credit would now be less cumbersome. Online connectivity to banks would ensure farm credit to farmers in less than 5 days as against 25-30 days in manual system. Easier for the farmers to pursue land related litigation in the court.

Department and financial institutions. To overcome this difficulty, a new approach is being worked out to integrate Bhoomi and financial institutions, so as to electronically process the request and exchange the data. Bhoomi system has changed the style of delivery of land records in Karnataka. Manually operated kiosks have been

established in each Tahsil Office to deliver land records documents to the public on demand which have been criticized by various stakeholders of the system. Presently, Government of Karnataka is interacting with private agencies to establish private kiosks at the village level, using Private Public Participation (PPP) model. In this model, the private agency www.egov.csdms.in |

•

At a glance… • •

•

There are 6.7 million rural land holders in Karnataka. There are 20 million records of rights, tenancy and certification (RTC). Bhoomi system operational in all 177 talukas in Karnataka. A unique biometric security system that uses a person’s (in this case the relevant official’s) thumb print instead of a password. Land record centre is in each taluk office for public interface. By the end of July 2005, the total revenue generated through issuance of RTC is more than Rs 500 millions. The average total monthly collection is between Rs. 15 – 20 million.

• •

More than 1 million farmers are utilising this on a monthly basis. 78.3 percent of all Bhoomi users take one RTC in a year.

• • • •

would setup and operate the kiosk at the village and Government of Karnataka would provide the access to their data to serve the public. In this process, service charges collected will be shared as per agreement. The private kiosk operator at the village would download the land records documents from the Central system and deliver to the farmer. This avoids farmer to visit the Tahsil Office for land records, saving his time and money. It was observed that there was no mechanism for senior officers to monitor the performance and pendency of the Bhoomi system. Moreover, these officers were not able to know the reasons why the mutations were being rejected. A web based monitoring system has been developed to ease out the above concerns of senior officials, by way of generation of various pendency / analysis reports. In this process, the officer drills down to the individual transactions to query its status. The web based system also ranks the revenue inspector under various categories (state-level, district-level and taluk-level) based on various parameters. This has become a good tool for senior officers to evaluate the comparative performance and also to build competitive spirit within the staff. It has also been observed that fake land records documents are in circulation in Karnataka. To overcome this issue, Bhoomi system has adopted latest technologies, namely, affixing holograms on the documents along with encrypted barcodes. This has ensured further authentication of the land records | October 2005

documents by the department. Land Records documents in Karnataka include the season-wise and cultivator-wise crop details. In the Bhoomi system, these details are to be prepared by the Village Accountants in the field and fed into the system at the taluk center for all the three seasons. The speed of data feeding is not as per expectations, and this had led to a delay in availability of the crops on the land records document. To overcome this problem, around 200 village accountants have been given simputers (hand-held device) on a pilot basis. With this handheld device, each village accountant visits the field and captures the cultivator-wise crop details into this device directly and uploads these crop details directly from the simputer to the State Data Centre (SDC) and in turn, the same flows to the Bhoomi system. This way the crop data is made available immediately to the farmers. The pilot of this has been proved to be successful. The crop details of 5 - 6 seasons have been completed using these simputers in the last 2 - 3 years, on an average of about 600 villages every time. Government of Karnataka is planning to extend this program to other villages for crop updation process.

•

A.Rama Mohan Rao and P.V.Bhat. ‘Bhoomi: A Case Study’ Case study available on Volume 10 of ‘Land Reforms in India, Computerization of Land Records’ Sage Publications. Checchini, Simone, (2002). ‘Bhoomi: Preliminary Findings on Costs’, Poverty Reduction Group, The World Bank, July Government of India, (1985). ‘Seventh Five Year Plan (Chapter on ‘Land Reforms’)’. Planning Commission. Hanstand, Tim and S.B.Lokesh. (2002). ‘Computerization of Land Records in Karnataka: Observations from a Simple Field Study’. Unpublished. Rural Development Institute, Bangalore. Lobo, Albert and Suresh Balakrishnan. (2002). ‘Report Card on Service of Bhoomi Kiosks: An assessment of benefits by users of the computerized land records system in Karnataka’. Public Affairs Centre, Bangalore, November. Rai, Kuldip and D.K. Bhalla. ‘Computerization of Land Records in India’. http://www.gisdevelopment.net/ application/lis/overview/lisrp0015.htm. The Hindu. (2002) ‘IT for agriculture: Karnataka move’. 3 April. http:// www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2002/04/ 03/stories/2002040303460600.htm

P.V.Bhat Technical Director (Bhoomi), National Informatics Centre, Govt of Karnataka

References •

Chawla, Rajeev and Subhash Bhatnagar. ‘Bhoomi: Online Delivery of Land Titles in Karnataka, India’, Case study available on World Bank’s e-government website. Source URL: http://www1.worldbank.org/ publicsector/egov/bhoomi_cs.htm

Rajeev Chawla Secretary, e-Governance Government of Karnataka, India sccyegov-dpar@karnataka.gov.in

COUNTRY FOCUS SINGAPORE

R(e)volutionary journey of Singapore e-Government The Infocomm Development Authority (IDA, www.ida.gov.sg) of Singapore is the key body of Singapore government responsible for charting the growth of its infocomm industry and spearheading the delivery of citizen-centric e-government services, regulating the telecom industry. One of their main objectives is to build and operate the Government’s IT infrastructure. egov brings you an exclusive interview with Wu Choy Peng, Deputy Chief Executive (Industry) and Government Chief Information Officer, IDA, Singapore.

Choy Peng, wu_choy_peng@ida.gov.sg

What was the genesis of e-Government activities in Singapore? How and when did it start? e-Government is a word that has become fashionable over the last 4-5 years. But IT in Singapore government started long ago in the year 1981, when the government decided to set up the National Computer Board to drive the Civil Service Computerization Program. It was thought that the computer industry would be a potential area of economic growth for Singapore and computerisation itself would improve efficiency and productivity in government. Hence, Singapore government would take the lead. First, we should use technology for our own efficiency and productivity gains. By doing so, we would create a demand for computer professionals and industry players. I would say e-Government is a natural evolution of the Civil Service Computerization Program. We started using technology in the back office to reduce paper work, automate back office activities and reduce manpower. Technology should not be used in isolation but it should support other goals, objectives and philosophies. It has been a long journey. In the late 80’s, we realized we have implemented many computer systems within government, but greater value would come from “joining” these systems. So, we introduced one-stop-change-of-address. When you move house, you go to the neighbourhood police post and inform the policeman on duty. He updates his computer system and this change-ofaddress is broadcast to all government agencies. This made changing address very easy and convenient for the citizens. Then came TradeNet, MediNet, LawNet, etc., which made use of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) technologies to connect government and private sector computer systems. In the mid- to late 1990s, the Internet became pervasive. The Internet allows us to deliver government services directly to the computer in the home, the school and the workplace. 18

From my perspective, e-Government is an evolution and journey, in which our use of Information Technology increases in scope, depth and sophistication.

Has the e-Gov vision with which you started been fulfilled? Or does some of them remains to be done? In the area of “Delighted Customers”, we have a very impressive number of government services, which are already online. All services that are feasible to be delivered online, are already up and running. In terms of usage, about 80% of customers who have used online government services are satisfied with the quality of these services. www.egov.csdms.in |

COUNTRY FOCUS SINGAPORE

More can be done to “delight customers”. We should continue to drive the development of “integrated services” – services that cut across agencies’ organizational and functional boundaries. We should do more systems like the Online Business Licensing System, which won a UN award this year. It took us 2 years to fully develop the Online Business Licensing System, after a lot of persuasion, negotiation, policy reviews and business process re-engineering. The area of “Connected Citizens” is a new outcome in our e-Government Action Plan. This is about using the e-Channel to supplement the current channels of consulting citizens on public policies, getting feedback from citizens on government policies and programmes. Our target is to have all government agencies to explain their public policies online. Today, public policies are published on the Internet at various stages of development so that our stakeholders can have a say in their formulation. The e-Channel is also an effective channel of building virtual communities with similar interests and needs. The Singapore government has recently launched the Seniors Portal and the Youth Portal, in partnership with social and community groups. The 3 rd outcome of our e-Government Action Plan is “Networked Government”. This is not only about wiring up the government and connecting computer systems. In designing and developing our e-Government services, we need to work as a “Networked Government” to integrate policies, business processes, and information systems to deliver “customer centric” government services. What lessons Singapore has for other countries to learn? Almost all e-Government plans share the same vision and goals. But I notice that different countries are motivated differently. For some countries, e-Government is about increasing transparency. For some, e-Government is about quality of public services. For some, e-Government is about cost savings. In some, e-Government is politically motivated and driven. A lot of what a country can or cannot achieve depends on a lot of other factors, such as ICT infrastructure, ICT literacy, acceptance of technologies by politicians, civil servants, general public, businesses, state of public sector reform and more. One factor is the availability of a pervasive and affordable national ICT infrastructure. Singapore is fortunate in this aspect. Singapore has more than 60% home penetration of computers. All public libraries have Internet enabled computers for public use. All schools have a pervasive Internet enabled computing infrastructure. Likewise, all community centres are equipped with Internet enabled computers for public access.

Ultimately, e-Government cannot replace good government. In fact, good government is a pre-condition for a successful e-Government. Every country has to find its own solution. Has one of the motivation been cost of government? Most definitely. In the early days of computerization, every project must demonstrate a strong business case in the form of a cost benefit analysis. For Singapore, the public sector does not see its role in creating jobs within itself. It is more important to grow the economy, which will in turn create jobs. Hence, computerization in the early stages had focused on productivity gains and headcount reduction. In the last 4-5 years, there is recognition that e-Government creates non-quantifiable value such as greater convenience for our customers, increased transparency and accountability for service standards, etc. At any point during implementation was there any resistance? In any thing you do, there would be pockets of resistance. All in all, e-Government implementation in Singapore has been relatively smooth. Our public servants are savvy users of IT. They work well across agencies. Our people are generally IT literate and welcome new technologies. Although we have put most government services online, we have also programmes to help people who have no convenient access to the Internet and those who are unable to use the Internet. Public libraries, schools and community centres have

I notice that different countries are motivated differently. For some countries, “ e-Government is about increasing transparency. For some, e-Government is about quality of public services. For some, e-Government is about cost savings. In some,

”

e-Government is politically motivated and driven. | October 2005

COUNTRY FOCUS SINGAPORE

Internet enabled computers for public use. There are e-Citizen centres where assistance is available to help people use online government services.

e-Service Maturity Diagram

In implementing e-Governance in Singapore, who provided the technical skills? In the 80s and early 90s, the technical skills were primarily provided by the previous National Computer Board. Highly specialized systems were outsourced to the private sector. In 1997, the government decided that the National Computer Board would focus on the project management role, while systems development, operations and maintenance would be outsourced to the private sector. The National Computer Systems Pte Ltd was divested. Today, the CIO role is performed by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore. We continue to work very closely with the private sector for systems development, operations and maintenance. Both MNCs and local IT companies continue to be an important source of technical advice and skills. How have you tried to measure the success of your e-Government programmes? Both our e-Government Action Plan 1 and e-Government Action Plan 2 have well defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and targets. The 1st Plan had simpler KPIs and targets, which were easy to measure and quantify. The 2 nd Plan has more sophisticated KPIs to measure adoption, usage and satisfaction with online government services. We have met all our targets for our e-Government Action Plan 1. By 2003, more than 1600 government services were available online. Many online government services have resulted in tangible cost savings for government, which in turn translated to lower administrative charges for our customers. We are well on our way to achieve our targets for the 2nd Plan. For example, we have met our target of having at least 90% of people who need to use government services do so online at least once a year. We are still a bit behind in our target of having at least 90% of people who use our online government services being “satisfied” with the quality of these online government services. We have also exceeded our target of implementing at least 12 whole-of-government integrated online services. What are your plans going from e-gov to m-gov? We think there is great potential for many existing online services to be delivered to our customers’ mobile phones. There is also great potential for new innovative services to be developed and delivered through the mobile channel. M-Government is likely to be a major thrust in our next e-Government Action Plan. 20

What is the role of the private sector in e-Government in Singapore? All IT systems, except those classified as SECRET and above, are developed, operated and maintained by the private sector. Outsourcing to the private sector is an irreversible trend. We have also formalized the Public-Private-Partnership model in procuring services from the private sector. In the past, government would just pay for everything, acquire everything as an asset, and then ask somebody else to operate the system and provide the service. In some major development projects, which are asset intensive, the private sector maybe in a better position to maximize the value of these assets. In such instances, the PPP model would be a win-win arrangement for the public and private sectors. For IT systems developed by the private sector for government, our default policy position is for the Intellectual Property of the system(s) to be retained by the contractor. Again,

For IT systems developed by the “ private sector for government, our default policy position is for the Intellectual Property (IPR) of the system(s) to be retained by the contractor.... recognising the fact that the private sector is in a much better position to maximize the value of this IP by productising and selling such systems.

”

this is in recognition of the fact that the private sector is in a much better position to maximize the value of this IP by productising and selling these system(s). This more “enlightened” approach to government IT contracts will also lower the cost of such systems to government. How did this lead to a good growth of companies? For example, our TradeNet system has been replicated in many other countries. The company is Crimson Logic. What are the challenges, which Singapore went through during the development phase? In the early development phase, the business case for IT projects was clear and compelling. When extending automated back office www.egov.csdms.in |

COUNTRY FOCUS SINGAPORE

Results of e-Government perception survey 2004, Singapore 74% of the population have read or heard of at least 3 government e-services

“We are still a bit behind in our target of having at least 90% of people who use our online government services being “satisfied” with the quality of

”

these online government services.

88% of the government transactors used electronic means at least once in the past 12 months

operations to online services, the value tends to disproportionately tilted to the citizens and businesses. The government agencies have to work harder to transform their business processes to derive greater value from these online services. Generally, we have far fewer challenges than other countries. We have world class ICT infrastructure that is pervasive and affordable. We have politicians and public servants who are IT savvy and embrace technologies. We have only 1 level of government, and government agencies work very well amongst themselves. We are a small country, with only 4 million people. The public, private and people sectors are cooperative and work well together. Does IDA bother about what technology to use – Open Source or Proprietary? Our philosophy is very simple – value for money and fit for purpose. We specify our business objectives and requirements, and let the private sector put together solutions that best meet our requirements and objectives. We do not prefer or discriminate against Open Source. For us, this “Open Source or Proprietary” debate is not an ideological debate.

81% of users were satisfied with the overall quality of the e-services

Is there any strategy to take this model out from Singapore and implement somewhere else? Yes, we think many of our e-Government solutions and expertise is “exportable”. We would like our IT companies that have delivered e-Government solutions for the Singapore government to be able to take these solutions to other countries. In this respect, we will give our companies whatever support and assistance they might need to successfully market and implement e-Government solutions for other countries. On a Government-to-Government level, IDA will engage in G-to-G collaborations to support strategic national objectives. What are some of your major launches coming up? The e-Government Action Plan 2 will end on 31 March 2006. We are now working with all government agencies to develop the e-Government Action Plan 3 and we hope to announce this 3rd Plan middle of 2006. On a higher and a more strategic level, IDA is developing a national ICT plan, called iN2015, where iN stands for Intelligent Nation. Many people in the private and public sectors are involved in this co-creation process. This Blueprint will also be launched in the middle of 2006.

| October 2005

COUNTRY FOCUS SINGAPORE

Creating a competitive domestic industry - SiTF endeavour Patrick Koh, Chief Operating Officer of the Singapore infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF), in an interview with egov, explains the current challenges faced by e-Government industry in Singapore and suggests a few right steps required to be taken by them to compete in the international market. The Singapore infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF, www.sitf.org.sg) is the national trade association representing the infocomm industry. It was formed in 1991 from a merger of the Singapore Federation of the Computing Industry (SFCI) and the Microcomputer Trade Association of Singapore (MTAS). To better represent and champion the interests of its 500 members, which include both multinationals and SMEs, SiTF has formed eight interest groups or chapters along specific industry segments - ASP/IDC Alliance Chapter, Digital Media Chapter, eLearning Chapter, Singapore Enterprise Chapter, Security Chapter, Web Services Chapter and Wireless Chapter. Early this year, it formed the e-Government chapter with the support of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA). These chapters provide the necessary focus of events, marketing and branding, market development and other initiatives. Last year, the SiTF organised 92 events in Singapore and overseas, an average of two events a week. These activities are organized along six strategic areas - Marketing & Branding, Networking, Business Intelligence, Internationalisation, Education and Development, and Representation

International marketing One key area of focus is Internationalisation. Since 2001, SiTF has been promoting the branding of the local IT industry through its ‘Made in Singapore & Proud of IT!’ (MIS) branding. “Singapore is well known and highly respected as a regional IT hub,” explained Koh. “But our companies are relatively unknown in foreign markets. The brand association will help them market and promote themselves more effectively.” SiTF’s internationalisation efforts 22

include mounting business missions to emerging markets. Several missions have been organised in the past three years to China, Thailand and Vietnam, and several others are planned - mainly funded under IE Singapore International Marketing Promotions Programme (IMAP). “These missions are not only designed to open new markets and identify local business partners for our local IT companies,” said Koh. “They also enable our companies to plan ahead to go into markets which may not be fully developed yet.” According to Koh, Singapore’s rapid development in IT has been a doubleedged sword for our IT companies. “On the one hand, our companies have developed the skills and competencies to develop leading-edge solutions such as in eGovernment,” he explained. “On the other, the small size of Singapore tends to keep our companies small, which means they don’t have the size and scale to handle big projects overseas.” To overcome this inherent limitation, SiTF has been pushing for its members to work together in clusters. The best expression of this has been in the Singapore Solutions Centre (SSC) in Shanghai, China. This S$3 million centre, which was set up jointly with IDA, brings Singapore IT companies together in five industry clusters. By collaborating, the cluster members gain the size and scale to seek out large projects they cannot otherwise do on their own.

Government’s role While SiTF has done and achieved much in opening up foreign markets for local IT companies, it counts the Government as a key strategic partner. The support from Government agencies such as IE Singapore and IDA is a critical success factor, he said.

Patrick Koh, patrick@sitf.org.st

Government assistance programmes such as IMAP and IDA’s Overseas Development Programme (ODP) have enabled Singapore IT companies to venture abroad. Bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) have helped. But it is in the eGovernment space that the Government has made the most meaningful impact. After many years of lobbying by SiTF, the Government has finally agreed to allow IT companies to retain the intellectual property to solutions they develop in Government IT contracts. Previously, the IP on these solutions rested with the Government agency which awarded the contract. This prevented the IT developers from redeveloping and commercialising their solutions to overseas buyers. The move now enables IT developers to expand their product offerings. “The Singapore Government has a strong reputation for insisting on quality and our developers can now show an impressive track record,” said Koh. The Government’s decision is the result of a long-term relationship that SiTF has built up with the Government. This, together with win-win relationships with foreign industry partners, delivers substantial value to SiTF members directly and provides the foundation for a robust export-oriented IT industry. www.egov.csdms.in |

CONFLUX 2005 PREVIEW IV

The Grand New Delhi 17 - 19 October 2005 Organisers

Host state

Institutional partner

Co-organisers

Government of NCT of Delhi

Media partners

Silver sponsor

Innovation partner

Platinum sponsor

Knowledge partner

Supported by

ISPAI

Internet Service Providers Association of India

Associate sponsor

Gold sponsor

V-SAT partner

CONFLUX 2005 PREVIEW IV

CONFLUX 2005 (DRAFT AGENDA) Day I (October 17, 2005) 8.00 am – 9.00 am 9.00 am - 10.30 am

Registration Vision Session: e-Government Opportunities and Challenges • Suresh Prabhu, Member of Parliament, GoI • Wajahat Habibullah, Secretary, Ministry of Panchayati Raj, GoI • S. Lakshminarayanan, Secretary, Inter-State Council Secretariat, Ministry of Home Affairs, GoI

10.30am – 11.00 am 11.00 am – 1.00 pm

Inauguration of Exhibition + Tea Keynote Session: National initiatives on e-Government • R R Shah, Member Secretary, Planning Commission, GoI • R. Chandrashekhar, Joint Secretary, e-Governance, Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, GoI • M. Rajamani, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Urban Development, GoI

1.00 pm – 2.00 pm 2.00 pm – 3.30 pm

Lunch NeGP - Mission & Vission R. Chandrashekhar Joint Secretary e-Governance, MoCIT, GoI (Chair) Piyush Gupta, General Manager (CB & KM), NISG Ramanathan Somasundaram , Manager Projects, NISG

e-Governance in Urban Local Bodies M. Rajamani, Joint Secretary, MoUD, GoI (Chair) Lee Baker, Chief-of-Party, IndoUSAID FIRE (D) Project R S Murali, Consultant, NCR Consultants Ltd., Chennai

e-Panchayat S N Tripathi, Secretary, Dept. of Panchayati Raj, Govt of Orrissa C S R Prabhu, DDG, NICHyderabad Rama Hariharan, Principal Systems Analyst, NIC- New Delhi

Rakesh Mehta, Commissioner, Municipal Corporation of Delhi R D Shinde, Commissioner, KalyanDombivilli Municipal Corporation

3.30 pm – 4.00 pm 4.00 pm – 6.00 pm

Tea/Coffee Break NeGP - Mission & Vision S. Abbasi, Director, DIT, GoI Ashis Sanyal Director, e-Governance, MoCIT, GoI Renu Budhiraja, Director, DIT, GoI

e-Governance in Urban Local Bodies Sanjay Jaju, Commissioner, Hyderabad Municipal Corporation Vijay Kumar, Commissioner, Municipal Administration, AP Nilaya Mitash, Secretary, Urban Reforms, Govt. of Karnataka Anirudh Kumar/ SP Singh, IndoUS FIRE (D) project

6.00 pm – 7.00 pm 7.00 pm – 8.00 pm

e-Health Dr Reuben Samuel, National Consultant (Public Health Specialist), WHO Madhulekha Bhattacharya, Professor & Head, Community Health Administration, NIHFW Ranjan Dwivedi, Project Manager, WHO Rahul Jain, NIC-Haryana

Tea Inaugural Ceremony Shiela Dikshit, Hon’ble Chief Minister of NCT of Delhi Maxine Olson, UNDP Resident Representative in India Roger Finan, Director, Regional Office for South Asia, IDRC India

8.00 pm – 9.00 pm

Cocktail and Dinner

www.conflux.csdms.in |

CONFLUX 2005 PREVIEW IV

Day II (October 18, 2005) 9.00 am – 10.30am

Keynote Session: International e-Government Perspectives • Thomas Riley, Chair, Commonwealth Centre for e-Governance • Maniam Kaliannan, Faculty, University of Malaysia • Sanjay B Lollbeharee, Deputy Director, Ministry of IT & Telecom, Mauritius

10.30 am – 11.00 am 11.00 am – 1.00 pm

Tea Keynote Session: Indian e-Government Perspectives • Dr Vijayaditya, Director General, NIC, GoI • C T Misra, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture, GoI • P. I. Suvrathan, Addl. Secretary, DARPG, GoI • J. Satyanarayana, CEO, National Institute of Smart Government, Hyderabad

1.00 pm – 2.00 pm 2.00 pm – 3.30 pm

Lunch NeGP - Central Mission Mode Projects Arun Sahu, Addl. DG, Directorate of Systems-Customs & Central Excise S S Khan, Director (IT) Department of Income Tax MCA 21 P K Sarangi, Director, Ministry of Rural Development

Delhi Government Initiatives Prakash Kumar, Secretary, IT

UNDP-ICTD Projects •

Rakesh Mehta, Commissioner, MCD Anil K Sharma, Director, Personnel, PWD Vijay Kumar, Director, Education Dept. Dr. Vijay Madan, Commissioner, Dept of Transport

• • • • • • •

3.30 pm – 4.00 pm 4.00 pm – 6.30 pm

ICT Interventions for improving self governance in Panchayati Raj Institutions, Kuch Nav Nirman Abhiyan, Gujrat Project Ashwini, Byrraju Foundation, Andhra Pradesh Tarahaat, Development Alternatives Mahiti Manthana, IT for Change Agri-Business Centres, Kerela State IT Mission Village Information System, Gujrat Informatics Ltd., Govt. of Gujrat I-Community Service Centres (iCoSC), Govt. of Himachal Pradesh Integrated Panchayat Planning & Management System (IPPMS), Dept of Panchayati Raj & Rural Development, West Bengal

Tea State e-Governance Plans (under NeGP) Prakash Kumar, Secy.-IT, Govt of NCT of Delhi J N Singh, Secy.-IT, Govt. of Gujarat B S Bhaskar, Commissioner IT, Govt. of Assam

Delhi Government Initiatives Sanjiv Khirwar, Addl Commissioner, Dept. of Trade & Tax Talwant Singh, Additional District Judge Manisha Saxena, Deputy Commissioner, South District Ashish Kundra, Addl. CEO Delhi Jal Board

5.30 pm – 7.00 pm

Networking Tea

7.00 pm – 7.30 pm

Dinner Speech

7.30 pm Onwards

Cocktail & Dinner

| www.conflux.csdms.in

e-Gov Strategic Framework/Admin. Reforms P I Suvarthan, Addl. Secy, DARPG Vinay Thakur, Technical Director, NICNew Delhi Vikas Gupta, Assistant Professor, IMT Ghaziabad

CONFLUX 2005 PREVIEW IV

Day III (October 19, 2005) 9.00 – 10.30 am

International e-Government Perspectives • • • •

Jeremy Millard, Head, e-Governance, Danish Technological Institute Salem Khamis Al-Shair, Director, e-Services, Dubai e-Government Ian Swann, Vice-President, SAP AG Dennis Pamlin, Policy Advisor, WWF Sweden

10.30 – 11.00 am 11.00 – 12.30 pm

Tea Keynote Session: Indian e-Government Perspectives • Rajeev Chawla, Special Secretary, Revenue Dept., Govt. of Karnataka • Ajay Sawhney, Joint Secretary, Dept. of Personnel & Training, GoI • P K Mohanty, Director General & Executive Director, Centre for Good Governance, Hyderabad • Amitabh Pande, Group GM (IT Services), IRCTC

12.30 – 1.30 pm 1.30 – 3.30 pm

Lunch Break State e-Governance Plans (under NeGP) N S Kalsi, Secretary-IT, Govt. of Punjab Sanjeev Gupta, SecretaryIT, Govt. of HP Rajesh Gupta, Secretary-IT, Govt. of Bihar Ram Sewak Sharma, Secretary-IT, Govt. of Jharkhand

3.30 – 5.00 pm

Content Management

e-Agriculture

Dr K Kamal, Director, DSIR, New Delhi

C T Misra, Addl. Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture, GoI

Dr. V Prithvi Raj, Director-IT, Govt. of Pondicherry

Dr. V P Sharma, National Institute of Agriculture Management, Hyderabad

Ganga Prasad GL, Centre Head, C-DAC, Bangalore Seemantinee Sengupta, NIC, New Delhi

Dr. Amol Goje, Director, VIIT Sunil Khairnar, ISAP

Mala Mittal, Technical Director, NIC, New Delhi

Cyber Laws/e-Police

Technologies

Citizen Service Centres (CSCs)

A B Patki, Sr Director & HOD, e-Commerce Division, DIT

Srikant Pathak, Tata Infotech

Ashis Sanyal, Director, eGovernance, MoCIT, GoI CSC Program, DIT (Chair)

Subrata Roy Gupta, NIC, West Bengal State Centre Kamal Dave, Advocate

Dibakar Ray, NIC, New Delhi Madhusudhana Rao, Centre for Good Governance, Hyderabad Rajendra Prasad, District Information Officer, NIC Mirzapur

Anchal Dhir & Kreeti Nagappa, NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad

Frank Tulus, telecentre.org, IDRC Sukanya Rath, NASSCOM Foundation Amod Kumar, DM, Mirzapur, Lokvani, Vikram Jeet Grover, Technical Director NIC, Punjab Mala Mittal, NIC, New Delhi

5.00 – 6.00 pm 6.00 pm

– National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) Track – Rural Computing Track

Valedictory Session Tea

GoI – Government of India NeGP – National e-Governance Plan

COUNTRY FOCUS MALAYSIA

e-Government initiatives of Malaysia: Fueling growth on fast track

he public sector in Malaysia is going through a period of rapid change (http://mawar.www.gov.my). The government’s leading role in spearheading the surge forward into the information rich digital age has compelled the public sector to lead the way (Hazman & Ala-Aldin, 2000). In the last several years, the public sector has become a major investor and user of information technology. The allocation for and expenditure of public money for the purchase of IT has steadily increased over the years (Eighth Malaysian Plan, 2000-2005, Budget 2003). During the Eighth Malaysian Plan period, a total of RM 5.2 billion was allocated for ICT related programmes and projects. This has enabled Malaysians to take advantage of advances in ICT to improve efficiency and productivity, thus contributing to the increased overall competitiveness of the economy. The dual objective of e-Government in Malaysia is to reinvent the government in terms of service delivery through the use of IT and to catalyse the successful development of the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) with IT as one of the leading sectors of the economy (Othman Yeop, 1997). While computerisation programmes in both the public and private sectors were going on for several decades, it was with the MSC that Malaysia caught the attention of the world with this initiative to create an entire ‘cyber-region’ and a base for a world class technology, multimedia and content industry.

The background and present status of IT development in Malaysia The MSC story begins with the “Vision 2020” statement and its commitment to making Malaysia a fully developed country by the year 2020. The Vision 2020 statement (Mahathir 1998) was conceived in 1991 by consultants at the Institute for Strategic and International Studies and later fully embraced by the former Prime Minister, Dato’ Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. It was realised soon thereafter that bringing Malaysian average | October 2005

The dual objective of e-Government in Malaysia is to reinvent the government in terms of service delivery through the use of IT and to catalyse the successful development of the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) with IT as one of the leading sectors of the economy. income up to the level of a “fully developed” state by 2020 (estimated to be about US$10,500 ) (McKinsey and Associates, as reported in K.J.John, 2001) could not be achieved by simply focusing on the significant increase in manufacturing (projected to grow by approximately 7% per year and topping out at 38% of GDP in the mid-1990’s). To make the grade and to bring Malaysian wages up to the level of a fully developed country, it would require another strategy and another “engine” of economic growth. Consultants and advisers to the Prime Minister proposed that the incipient of new information and communications technology (ICT) revolution, then becoming apparent, was giving birth to a new economy, the “Information Age” of the global economy. The MSC is considered a long-term strategic initiative (1996-2020), which involves the partnership between the Government (as the chief architect of its vision) and the private sector (as the main drivers for its implementation). Basically, the MSC is a dedicated corridor (15 kilometers wide and 50 kilometers long) which stretches from the Kuala Lumpur City Center in the north to the new Kuala Lumpur International Airport in the south. Besides offering ICT initiatives, the corridor aims to attract the ICT companies of the world to locate their multimedia industries, undertake R&D, develop new products and technologies and export services from the corridor as their base. The corridor is also providing the ideal growth 27

COUNTRY FOCUS MALAYSIA

environment for the local entrepreneurs to transform themselves into world-class companies. The MSC master-plan envisions a 20 year time frame for the full implementation and execution of the entire programme. This time frame is broadly divided into three phases, along with their targets as shown below:

Phase I (1996-2002) Successfully create the MSC

Phase II (2003 – 2009) Link MSC to other cybercities in Malaysia and worldwide

Phase III (2010 – 2020)

• • • • •

One super corridor Core of 50 world class companies Launch 7 flagship application Introduce leading framework of cyberlaws Cyberjaya and Putrajaya as intelligent cities

• Create web of corridors • 250 world class companies • Set global standards in flagship applications • Harmonised global framework of cyberlaws • 4 intelligent cities linked to other global cybercities • All across Malaysia • 500 world class companies • Global test-bed for new multimedia applications • International Cyber Court of Justice in the MSC • 12 intelligent cities linked to global information highway

Accelerating ICT and e-Government initiatives: Governance structure Following are some of the important organisations involved in spearheading the ICT programmes in Malaysia: e-Government Steering Committee (EGSC) This is the highest level committee for e-Government implementation in Malaysia. The Steering Committee is chaired by the Chief Secretary to the Government. Members of EGSC include representatives from various government agencies such as the Economic Planning Unit (EPU), Implementation Coordination Unit (ICU), National Institute of Public Administration Malaysia (INTAN), Treasury, Ministry of Energy ,Communications and Multimedia, Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU), Office of Auditor General, Public Service Division and Multimedia Development Corporation (MDC). MAMPU acts as the Secretariat to the EGSC, which plays a key role in providing policy direction and approval of the e-Government programmes and activities. In addition, the committee also monitors the progress of implementation of each pilot project under the responsibility of lead agencies. The Multimedia Development Corporation (MDC) Established in 1996, the MDC leads the development and implementation of MSC. Being a government - supported organisation, it acts as a champion and international promoter of the MSC. Its stated mission is “to shape a world leading environment, attract and nurture leading-edge and world class companies, facilitate knowledge transfer and wealth creation, and build a value-based, highly effective institution”. MDC acts as a “one-stop-shop”, for facilitating companies to re-locate to the 28

MSC. It shapes MSC-specific laws, policies and practices by advising the government and standardises MSC’s information infrastructure and urban development. One division of the MDC is the MSC Venture Corporation, created to provide venture capital to innovative and emerging ICT enterprises and multimedia companies at the start-up, growth and pre-IPO stages. Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning (MAMPU) MAMPU was set up in 1977 as a central agency within the Prime Minister’s Department. It was entrusted with the task of introducing administrative reforms in the public sector in order to upgrade the quality, efficiency and effectiveness of the Malaysian public service in accordance with national goals. MAMPU advises the Government in the area of organisational management and acts as consultant to various agencies for organisational development. It also provides technical and management expertise as the central agency for ICT development and office automation in the public sector.

Key initiatives Several pilot projects have been identified to spearhead changes and promote electronic government using various tools and measures.

e-Services e-Services includes electronic delivery of driving and vehicle related services, utility bill payment and on-line health information. The e-Services application will enable the public to transact more easily with government and utility companies via multiple delivery channels such as kiosks, Internet services, etc. There are four government bodies that are involved in this e-service. They are Road and Transport Department (JPJ), Ministry of Health, Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) and Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TMB). JPJ will provide all the driver and vehicle registration, licensing and summons services including test scheduling and test taking electronically. Ministry of Health will have on-line information on health related information be it personal health, public announcement of certain deceases or medications, or medical information and education. TNB and TMB will provide the www.egov.csdms.in |

COUNTRY FOCUS MALAYSIA

avenues for utility bill payment facilities electronically as well as one stop center basis.

e-Procurement e-Procurement is an online government procurement process for goods and services linking 33,000 suppliers to government agencies. All federal, state local government agencies purchase goods and services and it is estimated that government spends about RM 35 billion annually on total procurement (Rais and Nazariah, 2003).

of hire and employee welfare. Pre-employment level consists of manpower planning and recruitment. Day of hire level facilitates placement. Employee welfare covers confirmation of appointment, pensionable status, training, salary management, promotion and retirement. Managerial functions include the foundation of the HRMIS.

Project Monitoring System (PMS) The Project Monitoring System is designed to provide a mechanism for the planning, controlling and monitoring of development projects in an integrated manner. It will provide accurate and timely capture of project information and also ensure that up-to-date information is available in variety of formats to enable management at all levels to analyse, forecast and prepare reports for development projects. PMS is an on-line end-to-end project monitoring system creating a collaborative environment for better management of development projects. It has been implemented nationwide across 24 ministries. The system has the following features: • information can be retrieved by agencies at any time • capability to conduct social impact analysis and simulation and forecasting in Phase 2 of the project • flexibility to produce reports according to requirements • sending of real time online information electronically • standardisation of project codes for consistency • graphical and multimedia features and functions • consistent and timely information from centralised databases

Generic Office Environment (GOE)

Creating a citizen centric portal is one of the nine strategic initiatives started by MAMPU to kick off the Public Sector ICT Strategic Plan. Human Resource Management Information System (HRMIS) HRMIS is a system providing full human resource management functionality for Government to develop and manage its human capital. HRMIS is aimed to provide a single interface for government personnel to perform human resource management functions in an integrated environment. It will serve as a centralised repository for human resource data capture to enable better access to strategic and consolidated human resource information for government agencies, contributing towards better planning and management of government human capital. HRMIS addresses HRM requirements for operational and managerial functions. The operational functions include three broad levels that are pre-employment, day | October 2005

Generic Office Environment aims to provide a generic environment to Government staffs. The GOE is expected to improve the communication solutions for effective and efficient collaborative activities amongst the staff. The following initial modules have been identified: • Messaging System • Electronic Meeting and Bulletin Board

Electronic Labour Exchange

In May 1999, government agreed to the inclusion of the Electronic Labour Exchange (ELX). ELX aims at improving the mobilisation of the nation’s human resources and to ensure that manpower utilisation is optimised through the systematic matching of job seekers to job vacancies. The three primary applications of the ELX ate the Job Clearing System (JCS), Labour Market Database (LMD) and the Office Productivity System (OPS). Together, these applications form a one-stop centre for labour market information that will be accessible to the public, both locally and overseas, including Malaysian students abroad and potential foreign investors.

e-Syariah This application was introduced in April 2002 and the aim is to introduce administrative reforms to upgrade the quality of services of the Syariah Courts by enhancing the effectiveness of the Islamic Justice Department (JKSM) in coordinating and monitoring its respective agencies and to improve the productivity and efficiency of the Syariah Courts management nationwide.

An integrated approach The precursor to the e-Government initiatives is the computerisation programme. Government have spent more than RM 3 billion on ICT hardware, software, 29

COUNTRY FOCUS MALAYSIA

telecommunications equipments, project management and systems development. Programmes such as the preparation of Information Systems Plan (ISP) and appointment of Chief Information Officers (CIO’s) are to enhance daily operations and services. Even though government computerisation initiatives are predominantly focused on agency- specific services, while the E-Government programme takes on a ‘whole of government’ approach towards a modernised and efficient government using information technology and multimedia. It requires both effective planning and coordination across multiple agencies in the government and the complexity of implementation is further exacerbated by non-technical requirements that include among others: • Balancing of financial and economic constraints against the achievement of the strategic objectives. • Ensuring successful build-up of resources and skills. • Ensuring buy-in and ownership across all involved parties within the government. • Ensuring a common understanding of expectations across all parties. • Ensuring a focus on outcomes rather than individual technology capabilities or technology outcomes. • Setting common standards and frameworks across the pilot projects, for example Business Process Reengineering, Change Management, Technology Architecture, Help Desk and others. • Managing the interfaces of inter-related functionality and interfaces with existing legacy systems. • Ensuring effective management of multiple consortia and of the multiple organisations that make up some of the more complex consortia.

Current e-Government status in Malaysia (2003-2005) The Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) has started laying the groundwork to initiate nine strategic initiatives to kick off the Public Sector ICT Strategic Plan (The Star, 27/10/2003). The aim of the initiatives is to enable all government agencies to operate in a fully integrated electronic environment. The identified nine strategic initiatives are: • Citizen Centric Portal • Business Community Portal • Local Government System • Land and property System • Online Income Tax • Integrated Financial Management System • Government to Employee Portal • e-Learning • e-Social Services For the year 2004/2005, the government’s focus would be on rolling out more pilot projects nationwide and the implementation of e-Court and e-Land (The Star, 1 Jan 2004). The e-Procurement project is expected to be rolled out to 3500 government procurements sites nationwide in addition to current 1500 sites that are already connected. The generic Office Environment (GOE) project would be rolled out to 14 agencies with a base of more than 2 000 users. The Human Resource Management Information System (HRMIS) project, once implemented in the 10 pilot agencies would be rolled out to all other agencies nationwide in stages. In addition, there will be some services, which will be improved in year 2004/2005 such as RTD summons enquiry and payment services, RTD Learners Drivers’ License issuance and renewal services, Electronic scheduling and theory test, Royal Malaysian Police traffic summons/ enquiry services and Tenaga Nasional and Telekom Malaysia - utility bill enquiry and payment services. 30

Major issues for Malaysia’s e-Government Despite early leadership, Malaysia’s eGovernment initiatives face major challenges in moving to higher level of maturity and impact. Major factors include: • Lack of broadband infrastructure hindered rollout • Low usage of Mykad beyond identity functions • Slow adoption of e-Government applications due to lack of integration and insufficient engagement of key stakeholders • Low PC ownership and low ICT literacy among the members of the society • The information provided by government agencies via the e-Government sites is stale and not current • The sites are not easy for the novices to navigate • Implementation of Tele-health did not succeed due to inadequate change management and inappropriate “Build Own Operate” business model • The need for educational reform at all levels i.e. primary, secondary and university education in order to create a knowledgeable society.

Conclusion In summary, the success of e-Government rides heavily on a comprehensive development and implementation programme that touches all aspects of government. It requires new processes, systems, structures, training to develop new skills and shared values. Following the principle of “Think Big, Start Small and Scale Fast”, once pilot projects have been undertaken, expanding with time to a wide ranging rollout programme embracing all government departments and services at the federal, state and local levels.

Maniam Kaliannan Faculty of Administrative Science & Policy Studies Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Malaysia maniam123@salam.uitm.edu.my

www.egov.csdms.in |

REGIONAL FOCUS CHHATTISGARH

“Budget is not a constraint for any IT project in Chhattisgarh” Chhattisgarh, earlier a part of the state of Madhya Pradesh (India), came into being on November 1, 2000. Despite being a new state, Government of Chhattisgarh is taking many e-Government initiatives to deliver significant benefits to citizens and businesses. It has come out with IT and ITES Policy and is first state in India to design a comprehensive roadmap for e-Governance. CHhattisgarh infotech & biotech Promotion Society (CHiPS) has been created as a nodal agency for propelling IT growth and implementation of IT plans in the state.

Aman Singh, CEO, CHiPS Chhattisgarh ceochips@nic.in

Chhattisgarh Government is framing an e-Government Road Map for the State. Could you share a few of its highlights? I am very happy to share with you that Chhattisgarh is the first State in India which is systematically developing an IT Road Map. The task of framing an e-Government Road Map has been initiated in order to identify the various IT needs and priorities of the departments. In phase 1 of the e-Government Road Map, the e-Government Vision, e-Government Strategy and e-Government Blueprint are being prepared. A series of meetings with departments have been held as a part of visioning exercise. Currently, the second round of meetings with the departments is being conducted as a part of strategy exercise. The draft e-Government Vision document has been prepared and is in the last stage of finalisation. The Phase 2 and Phase 3 of the eGovernment Road Map deals with e-Government Program and e-Government Ecosystem respectively which would be taken up subsequently. With all the IT projects in pipeline, can you explain how these are going to help the Government? Will these projects reduce the operation costs of the Government in the future? The IT projects are definitely helpful for the Government as they increase the transparency of information and working efficiency of the Government employees. | October 2005

Aman Kumar Singh, CEO, CHiPS (www.chips.nic.in) shares with egov, wide ranging issues concerning with implementation of e-Government projects in Chhattisgarh. Public-Private Partnership is being thought of for all the upcoming IT projects being planned for the State. Currently, CHOiCE project uses an entrepreneurship model where local people become small entrepreneurs. e-tendering projects is being implemented on a PPP model. eProcurement is the first state wide project to be implemented on a PPP model. We also intend to implement our ambitious Chhattisgarh State Wide Area Network project on PPP model.

With more and more information being made available to the citizens, the working of the Government gets more and more prompt and reliable. Chhattisgarh is a State with no historical legacy and Government as a policy has encouraged automation and outsourcing wherever possible. Establishment cost in Chhattisgarh is one of the lowest for any State in India. It is only through leveraging technology we can increase our productivity and curtail the cost. How is the State government encouraging public-private partnership?

How do you ensure ‘quality of service delivery’ by private players in PPP initiatives? What are the monitoring and evaluation measures to ensure quality, credibility and reliablity of e-Services provided through private parties? The State wide IT projects being enormous in size, the Private Party who bids for the work need to prove its credibility in efficient offering of such services with a clear proven track record. Moreover, since CHiPS (a team of IT professionals) is the State Nodal Agency for implementation of IT projects in the State, a continuous monitoring would be done through CHiPS in order to ensure the quality of service delivery. Since the monitoring and evaluation measures are project based, a detailed structure and mechanism is being developed in order to ensure the delivery in the scheduled time by the private parties. For our future IT initiatives, the 31

REGIONAL FOCUS CHHATTISGARH

Major IT projects initiated by the Government of Chhattisgarh a) CHOiCE (Online G2C Services) CHOiCE is an acronym for CHhattisgarh Online Information for Citizen Empowerment. CHOiCE provides one stop solution for, anywhere anytime based secured services for all the requirements of citizen. This project deals with online disbursement of Government services to the citizens and it is one of the most comprehensive solution covering 130 services, which include issuance of certificates, electronic payment, information on schemes, MIS etc. The project uses state of the art technology with digital signatures and biometric security devices. CHOiCE is presently being operated in Raipur and would be rolled out in the remaining districts of the State. Service Level Agreement (SLA) would be well structured and quantifiable. The implementation of future IT projects would necessarily include an independent third party audit. What are the approaches of Chhattisgarh Government in terms of IT architecture, business process re-engineering and capacity building while proceeding towards e-Government? The departmental architecture components in Chhattisgarh are extensible and scalable to adapt to the changing environments. By creating a common delivery portal, the State also seeks to effectively address issues related to interoperability between departmental applications. The State Government recognised the need to democratise the information technology ownership, control and use. It is therefore promoting the use of open source / free software which may help State to compliment / supplement proprietary software for lowering the cost of IT ownership without compromising the quality of the application. With regard to Government Process Reengineering, I must state that it is most fundamental to any automation process and needs to be done by involving all stakeholders. In my personal opinion, too much and too less of Government Process Reengineering are equally disastrous. Government Process Reengineering needs to be of the optimum level. With regard to Capacity Building, the Government of Chhattisgarh has given focused attention. A part of this strategy, the initiatives on capacity building focuses not only the top most layer of the administrative machinery pyramid i.e., the political executive but also the humble Class IV employees of the Government. In a very ambitious training 32

b) Gyan Vinimay (e-classroom) The project takes an integrated view of the e-learning system where online lectures and onsite training are synergized. Under this project a very high bandwidth video conferencing connectivity between IIT Kanpur and Engineering Colleges of the State have been established. Depending on the faculty shortage and the expertise shortage, classes are held by the faculties of IIT Kanpur for local students. Similarly, faculties from these engineering colleges are being sent for training in IIT Kanpur for their skill up gradation. Already 129 online sessions benefiting 640 students and 55 days of onsite programs benefiting 146 faculty members have been achieved. c) Bhuiyan (Online Land Records) This project deals with the automation of the land records of Khasra and Bangalore One. The work has been completed and around 0.3 million records have been distributed till date. The online mutation work is currently being taken up and would be in place within a year. Chhattisgarh has done digitisation of 70% of its maps and in the next three months, digitised maps would also be issued online. d) e-Gram Suraj This project deals with online availability of village information upto the sarpanch level. The information is made available through Simputers and at the same time data is entered into simputers and made available to the blocks and state headquarters. The project has been implemented in two Blocks and would be rolled out in other Blocks subsequently. e) eProcurement The State intends to implement eProcurement in all the departments of the State to capture whole purchase cycle from cradle to grave in the automated mode. The implementation of eProcurement is now in the pilot stage in the five departments of the State viz., Chhattisgarh State Industrial Development Corporation (CSIDC), Health Department, Public Works Department (PWD), Water Resources Department (WRD) and Chhattisgarh State Electricity Board (CSEB). The project would be rolled out in other departments subsequently. Departmental studies have been conducted for the various process reforms needed and the final Request for Proposal (RFP) would be coming out in a months time. f) State Wide Area Network The State is in the process of implementing a very ambitious project of developing State Wide Area Network (SWAN). The proposed network is going to be a hybrid network using leased line, VSAT and Wi-Max technology. The Government of India has already given in principle approval for funding the above project under national e-Governance action plan. The total estimated cost of the project is around Rs.150 crores, out of which Rs.80 crores is to be given by Government of India in form of grant. The methodology adopted by Government of Chhattisgarh for implementation of this project is going to be a Public-Private Partnership model. g) Geographic Information System (GIS) The State has developed a very comprehensive GIS system having 37 layers. Using satellite data, natural resource mapping has been carried out on 1:50,000 scales based on satellite imageries and digital processing. www.egov.csdms.in |

REGIONAL FOCUS CHHATTISGARH

programme, whole Government machinery including the political executives, senior bureaucrats and whole class of Government employees including Class IV have been imparted computer training. In order to increase the capacities of the college students, e-classroom has been rolled out. For the benefit of school children a very ambitious programme of creating “Centre of Excellence” for imparting education in each of the district head quarters has been started. This “Center of Excellence” has the sixty seater state-of-the-art laboratory for imparting IT education to school children. Do you envision any advantage being derived from the recently announced National e-Government Plan (NeGP) of India? Since the e-Governance issue is being taken up at the National Level by the Department of IT under the National eGovernance Plan, the States would be highly benefited in terms of funding, project expertise and the various ground work exercises. Also, since all the States are implementing e-Governance projects, a good knowledge repository would be readily available facilitating the States to decide on the right technology and r ight implementation partner for its implementations. It is worthwhile to note here that horizontal and vertical sharing of knowledge are equally important. What is the allocated e-Government budget for Chhattisgarh this fiscal year? What are your budgetary plans for future? Let me tell you very frankly that budget is not a constraint for any IT project in Chhattisgarh as the State is financially well managed. This is a clear directive from the Hon’ble Chief Minister himself.

“With regard to the

e-Readiness survey, while respecting the ranking, I must confess that certain criteria like exports figure and number of IT units etc are militate against a

young and a tribal State

”

like Chhattisgarh.

Chhattisgarh is projected as Average Achiever in the eReadinesss survey 2004 done by DIT. Are you satisfied with the progress of the State? Which areas do you plan to focus on, in coming years, to take Chhattisgarh forward? Chhattisgarh is a new State and most of its population lives in tribal areas. Almost 44% of the State area is under forest and the other areas of Chhattisgarh are yet

to be developed. Owing to these constraints, implementation of IT is a challenging task for us. With regard to the e-readiness survey, while respecting the ranking, I must confess that certain criteria like exports figure and number of IT units etc are militate against a young and a tribal State like Chhattisgarh. In my personal view, IT has two components. While the first component deals with export figures where the southern states and Delhi are doing remarkably well, the second component deals with leveraging IT for improving Governance. Chhattisgarh is doing remarkably well in the second component and in the next couple of years would be ranked among the front line States in India. At present, the focus is to build a strong institutional framework in order to sustain the eGovernance projects being initiated. The Individual based decisionmaking is being transformed into an institution-based decision making so as to ensure continuity and uniformity in the process of ensuring sustainable working of eGovernance projects. What are the key challenges you are facing in introducing e-Government in Chhattisgarh? Chhattisgarh being mostly a tribal State, the availability of right skilled personnel for the right task is a key challenge. Also, the mindset and attitude of the Government staff to shift from the existing manual working system to an electronic working system is a slow transformation process as it involves change management. The terrain of Chhattisgarh is also a key challenge as nearly 44% of the State is under thick forest cover. With all these hurdles and constraints, Chhattisgarh is taking smart and innovative strides under the able leadership of our Hon’ble Chief Minister Dr. Raman Singh.

How to win friends and influence people? Learn| October it all. 2005

www.conflux.csdms.in

BOOK

Book review E-Government Toolkit for Developing Countries Neeta Verma, Mohandas VS, Sonal Kalra 2005: UNESCO New Delhi 210 Pages; ISBN 81-203-2647-4 “E-Government Toolkit for Developing Countries” is produced by National Informatics Centre, the premier ICT organisation for Government of India at the behest of UNESCO, Asia Pacific Regional Bureau for Communication and Information, New Delhi. Organised into nine chapters and twenty-nine case studies from across the globe, the book can serve as an ideal startup manual for the e-Government practitioners entrusted with the task of planning, implementing and monitoring e-Government projects in developing countries. The book will take the readers in a systematic way from understanding e-Government, developing an action plan for the government, capacity building etc. unto the monitoring and evaluation of e-Government projects. Chapter one titled as “ Conceptual Overview” deals with the distinction between e-Governance, e-Government and e-Democracy, which are generally being used in the same breath by many practitioners. The authors have dealt with the benefits of e-Government, which will help generate a political will as well as literacy among the employees on the benefits of implementing e-Government in public sector. The authors have described a maturity model for e-Government, which is a replica of World Bank model. The brief discussion on the other models developed by various scholars and multilateral agencies in addition to the presented model would have been more helpful. Overall, this chapter is very well written and provides a ground for the beginners to understand e-Government and the role of various stakeholders. The implementation of e-Government in a country requires a conductive environment to realise its potential for development. Chapter two in the book provides the inputs for conceptual understanding and the importance of ereadiness assessment. Unlike the previous chapter, this chapter deals with different e-readiness assessment models such as CSPP’s readiness guide for living in the networked world, CID’s readiness guide for the developing countries, e-Commerce readiness assessment, McConnell International’s risk e-Business report, Network Readiness Index developed by World Economic Forum, Infodev and INSEAD, eGovernment Index by UNDPEPA and the Economic Intelligence Unit e-readiness rankings. The authors have also put together a suggested framework for assessing e-readiness based upon the features of different models described in the chapter. Chapter three deals with the process of creating a national strategy and action plan based upon the knowledge imparted in first two chapters. The chapter deals in detail with the steps involved in the formulation of e-Government action plan. The chapter ends with a checklist of the steps required for the formulation of eGovernment action plan along with the activities/output for each step. Successful implementation of any e-Government plan requires implementation capacity at the government level and absorptive capacity at the user level. Chapters 34

four through seven discuss building human capacity, infrastructure development and building of public private partnerships for ensuring the success of national level plans on e-Government. Chapter five very briefly touches on the importance of building interoperability framework under the infrastructure development. The authors have described the important consideration to be kept in mind while crafting the framework for public private partnerships. Chapter seven gives a very brief overview of the importance of evolving a legal and regulatory framework along with the examples of legal and regulatory measures evolved by countries like United Kingdom, Australia, United States and India. Some highlights of the Information technology Act 2000 of India are provided at the end of the chapter. The final goal of any e-Government plan at a national level is to provide the seamless electronic public services to the citizens and business entities in a country though a single window mechanism. Chapter eight provides the overviews of the national portals developed by Singapore, New Zealand, United States, United Kingdom, Canada and India followed up by the discussion of key characteristics of national portal. The readers will benefit a lot from this in their pursuit to comprehend the process involved in providing single window services. The last chapter is focused on benchmarking and evaluation techniques for monitoring and evaluation of e-Government projects with a collection of 29 case studies from various parts of the world. Overall, this toolkit is an important resource for the beginners and can act as a startup manual for e-Government practitioners and other stakeholders from developing countries. Vikas Kanungo

To get the book, please contact: Susan Oranger Advisor for communication and Information in Asia UNESCO – New Delhi Office UNESCO House, B-5/29, Safderjung Enclave New Delhi – 110029, India E-mail: s.oranger@unesco.org Website: http://unescodelhi.nic.in www.egov.csdms.in |

IN PRACTICE

Web-based personnel administration for government Personnel Information Management System (PIMS) implemented in Delhi Public Works Department (PWD) has brought about transparency and smooth personnel administration. Hands-on training sessions and commitment of top management has helped in overcoming many implementation challenges. e-Governance enables the executives in taking an objective and unbiased decision with a ‘reliable database’ using I.T. as an accurate data analytical tool. e-Governance in Personnel Administration has been successfully implemented and is in operation in Delhi Public Works Department (PWD) since 15 th Oct 2004. While it is being continuously upgraded with new features, it has brought about transparency in personnel administration in PWD. It has empowered employees as well as administrators. For retrieval of information, dependence on files and supporting staff is largely eliminated.

Features of Personnel Information Management System (PIMS) The web-based software can be implemented in any department/ ministry of any central/ state government with central pay scales. Due to versatility of the package, it has also been laterally extended in Central Government to CPWD. It has at present over 30000 employees on its database. Features of PIMS are summarised as under: Capable of handling employees with different rules of man-management: It is capable of handling any department/ministry with its employees drawn from different cadres with different rules laid down for man-management by different Cadre Controlling Authorities. There is flexibility of adoption of designation wise and cadre wise different criteria for transfer/posting based on tenures of ‘nature of job’, ‘station of posting’, ‘posting in region, circle and/or division’, etc. This main feature of the software enables each of the Cadre Controlling Authority to fix transfer/posting criteria centrally and its uniform adoption in the government by various subordinate authorities delegated to issue Orders of Transfer of employees of that cadre. | October 2005

Integration of any other department/ministry possible: The modular character of the software allows other departments to be integrated to a common database, by adding various office Ids, list of designations, related posts and cadres in those departments/ministries. Decentralised data entry: There is no necessity of employee data collection and its entry before it can be implemented in the department. Here, data furnished by the employee after verification from service records is entered in a decentralised manner by Heads of Offices (HOO) who are in possession of service records. After the data entry in database, the copies of printed data as entered is handed over to employee and also kept in official personal file of the individual employee. Uniqueness of employee Id: The employee Id is generated independently, based on the employee’s name, date of birth, date of initial joining the service and the initial designation at which service started. With no chance of any duplicate employee Id, the database can have data of all employees in the government on a uniform pattern. Online administrative functions: This has online administrative features of • Online transfer/ posting of officials based on tenure at a station of posting, tenure in a particular type of duty and/ or tenure in the same office. • Online relieving and joining of the transferred employees • Online salary bills: In Delhi PWD, it is compulsory for all HOOs/ DDOs to pay salary to its entire staff based on bills prepared through this software. • Online leave application/ sanction and simultaneous updating leave account of each employee. The online view facility available to employees of balance leaves at his credit is convenient to employees. • Promotion module: With seniority lists of all categories of employees available on display to employees, it brings transparency in personal administration. • Online directory of employees: With each HOO as well as employee on login is required to update official and residential contact details. Thus, 35

IN PRACTICE

the online accurate telephone directory is available to citizens, employees and HOOs. â&#x20AC;˘ An instant and sure communication system: For issue of circulars, administrative orders and communication through PIMS mail with appropriate filters applied as per requirement to be communicated to offices, officers and/ or staff. Compulsive monitoring of transfer orders & their implementation: At every login, the system displays the list of employees posted-in or transferred-out from an office till they finally join respective ordered office of posting. This compulsive monitoring enables any Head of Office to bring about and enforce administrative discipline conveniently by locating the absconding transferred employees, who after getting relieved from an office disappear on other lucrative assignments and join back in the new office later. Enforces administrative discipline: The compulsive linkage of payment of salary of each employee through this software can enforce administrative discipline in the Government in ensuring strict implementation of its policies including transfer/ posting orders. Human resource development: It covers all aspects of human resource management and its development. It can be used with advantage in skill up-gradation of employees with training needs appropriately addressed. Online nomination for seminars/training courses based on specialisations allocated to each of the officers is an important tool for proper human resource development. Advantages of unified database: The composite unified database of all government employees would be immensely advantageous to the government, employees as well the citizen at large. Password protected functions: While it addresses day to day personnel administration with user friendly web-based software, the data security mechanism has been ingrained into the system with password protected operations and designation based graded responsibilities of administrative functions for employees under their administrative jurisdiction.

Challenges and their resolution While e-Governance can be applied at all places but the continued online and accurate updating of data always remains a challenge before the management. This necessitates an in-depth study of the system to incorporate certain features in the system to have compulsion for every one to update the data regularly. The reason for its success and failure largely depend on this factor alone. Many challenges, which have been resolved in implementation of this project, are as under: Commitment of top management: It is foremost and essential for the success of any e-Governance project. Top management is equipped with financial as well as administrative powers, both of which are important. Financial powers are needed for facilitating with the required hardware & software, whereas administrative powers are needed for enforcement of its policy. Even the basic information for generation of the minimal database, which is essential for e-Governance, does not come forth voluntarily from the majority of employees of a large organisation. This is because majority of them perform only their assigned routine duties unless forced with administrative powers for implementation of its e-Governance policy. If the top management itself is not committed to e-Governance, it will never be able to get implemented.

Computer phobia: Due to advancement of information technology at an unexpected fast pace, a common employee or an administrator belonging to yester years is hesitant to even touch a computer. This is because he had never been trained in his schooling or professional training before joining the service. This phobia acts as a big deterrent and it has to be dispelled properly by allowing them to feel homely with computers. It is therefore necessary to give a compulsory exposure to each of them in training sessions with the hands-on exposure on use of computer by allowing them to use it independently. Basics of Computer, hardware and Operating System are some of the topics that need to be covered. Besides this, they should be informed about the basic hardware of computer, its operating system, and they have to be made comfortable with other user-friendly common day today application software. Training in PIMS: In order to exploit full potential of the PIMS and develop confidence amongst its users, it is essential to inform them about its operations, capabilities and other finer issues during training sessions in classroom environment with hands-on exposure to the software use. They should be encouraged to ask further probing questions during these sessions for acquainting themselves by about use of software and its potential. In order to ensure implementation of eGovernance through PIMS, each of the offices of Delhi PWD (more than 60), was exposed to five day hands-on-training sessions with three days devoted for Head of Office & his deputy and two days for Establishment Incharge & Clerk responsible for salary bills. With sixteen desktops in a Class Room interconnected with LAN, 6 to 8 offices per week were given hands-on training and were exposed to the web-based application software besides computers introduced as utility tool with its basics made known. Responsibility of data-entry and its accuracy: It is a common practice to create database by making data entry centrally, which could work

Knowledge is power. 36

Get empowered.

www.egov.csdms.in | www.conflux.csdms.in

IN PRACTICE

only in small organisations. But in large organisations, data entry and responsibility for its accuracy has to be distributed. In the present case of PIMS, each employee and the Head of Office (i.e. custodian of service record) were made jointly responsible for the data entry and its accuracy. The employee was asked to fill up a data-sheet based on his information and his Head of Office was to verify the same from service record before making entry in the database through Web-based application. PIMS printout of entered employee data is required to be delivered to the employee and a copy of the same was to be kept in his personal record. Each Head of Office was required to certify the same with data entered of his employees to be accurate as per Service Record and submit to next higher authority. Employeesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; resistance against change: Even if new system might be far better than the traditional one, if the benefits are not immediately visible, majority in big organisations would not like to switch over, due to familiarity and confidence in the old systems, unless there is compulsion to change. Given a laxity, they would revert to old system. It is therefore essential that implementation of e-Governance has to be compulsive for certain key functions of the organisation. The old system has to be dispensed with altogether from a cut off date. If the two systems are allowed to continue together, it is certain that implementation of eGovernance would be rather impossible. In the present case of PIMS, salary bill, transfer/ relieving/ joining orders for all employees was forced on the offices to make it mandatory through the Web-based application and the traditional methods were disbanded altogether. Generation of interest amongst employee(s): The successful implementation largely

depends upon the motivation of the employees at large, which can be generated by making the project attractive in their day today working. It has to be made further attractive by giving them access to the information, which matters to them personally. Transfer criteria and transfer authorities: Transfer/posting or placement on deputation is a normal administrative practice effecting rotation between Intraministries, Intra-departments, Ministry-Department & vice versa, State-Central Government & vice versa. There are huge challenges to be addressed when employees are transferred very frequently with varieties of employees coming from different governments, ministries, departments; different cadre controlling authorities are responsible for their transfer; transferring authorities are based on the designation and the cadre to which the employee belongs; and there are different transfer criteria based on their designation, cadre, station of posting, tenure in an office and the nature of duties. Therefore it is necessary to provide convenience to every transferring authority to be able to exercise effective control on employees under his jurisdiction as per laid down policy. Confidential remarks to keep all such record of pressures for retention or getting desired posting for each employee, could be maintained. It could be seen as and when required by the competent authority in future to do away with future pressures.

Conclusions PIMS can be used with advantage to bring in a uniform e-Governance practice in Personnel Administration in Government. It is capable of substantially reducing paper flow and energy of the Government as bulk of it is wasted in Personnel Administration. It empowers the citizen, employees, the administration and the Government as a whole. It would make the Government more efficient by bringing in a transparency to reduce large number of disputes in Personnel Administration as at present due to non-transparent system.

Anil K Sharma Director Personnel Public Works Department (PWD) Govt of NCT of Delhi aksharmacpwd@yahoo.com

R Subramanian Engineer-in-Chief PWD, Govt of NCT of Delhi rsmani_pwd@yahoo.com

GIS Institute Page 37 Ad | October 2005

IN PRACTICE

Empowering communities through knowledge (ECKO) Role of information in governance

CCDN is the enabling technology that Good governance rests on the pillars of knowledge where information should be permits transparent coupling of acquired and used strategically for public purposes. e-Governance helps in geographically dispersed data resources. This dissemination of useful governance information, which already exists in the public affects efficient distribution of content as also domain into the wider public domain through the use of ICT. This enables citizens movement of the content nearer to the user. to understand what governance services are available for them and allows people The CCDN server provides the local to judge better the existing governance related services and make them informed community the ability to generate, manage and opinion about their performances. deliver customised content. It includes For accessing public information on the digital network by a common citizen, mechanisms for managing and delivering it is essential to have clear strategy to access local level databases maintained in different types of information namely local regional languages as well as to use appropriate interfaces in local languages. information, domain/application specific However to use information to it’s fullest potential, the data is needed in properly information, and generic information from summarised form. This can be possible by using Content Management Systems. web. Content Management System is a software, which can automatically maintain and CCDN (the main project) has been manage information or contents. The information is regularly and frequently divided into two sub projects “ECKO” and upgraded through this system. Content management systems are aimed at “V-CAN”. facilitating the process of uploading, publishing, archiving, searching and removing ECKO (Empowering Communities of the website’s content in an easier and manageable way. They also facilitate to through KnOwledge) (4): place the content online in a real time without specialist help. ECKO (Empowering Communities through Though lot of content management system has been developed, several KnOwledge) is a Content Management weaknesses remain as follows (1): System for creating, capturing, sharing and a) Content collection is an ongoing process and hence needs effective ways to utilising local knowledge of the community. organise, manage and publish them. It focuses on building communities by b) None of the existing content management systems address the specific needs collaborating and sharing their knowledge. of the local community. c) Current solutions are not cost effective V-CAN (Virtual Community Aware Network): d) Lack of processes in place to make CMS more useful. e) Lack of coordination and contribution from public, private and people. V-CAN is an overlay network that addresses f) Lack of personalisation and customisation facilities. the delivery of content near the user by g) None of them aim to move the content in a effective way Framework of Community based Content Delivery Networks near the user. (CCDN)

Centre’s intervention To overcome the weaknesses of content management system, ICT Research and Training Centre (2) at Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) Bangalore has developed ‘CMS4C’, a Content Management System for Community under CCDN (Community based Content Delivery Network) project that addressees the above mentioned weaknesses of the existing solutions.

Community based Content Delivery Network (CCDN) It is an effort to cater the internal information needs of rural masses by creating e-communities and enabling information exchange in an effective way. Some of the key issues in developing such a solution are quality of service, multicasting, intelligent content routing, content peering, efficient delivery mechanisms, content security, content organisation and management. 38

www.egov.csdms.in |

IN PRACTICE

carrying out the functionalities like content discovery, content peering, caching, security and quality of service. V-CAN enables the end-user of ECKO to get relevant information from other communities if it is not available in the local kiosk. The system in-turn builds an electronic network of community with strong interaction between various community kiosks. The system evolves as a Content Distribution Network. V-CAN uses the concepts of peer-to-peer networking for efficient delivery of content by moving it near to that particular e-Community. The ECKO framework sitting with V-CAN will provide value added services in the form of knowledge inferences that has to be made from the multi-dimensional repositories which in-turn has to be created from the sharing of information among the various e-Communities across domains. The inferences drawn from the repositories would in turn help various cross-sections of the community, like decision makers, entrepreneurs, and government organisations. In fact, it would give valuable insights to the needs and requirements of the people.

Evolution of ECKO Content management system for community: CMS4C is a content management system for the management of content, enabling users even without technical knowledge to publish on the Internet and administer it. The main goal of CMS4C is to encourage the rural community to contribute, consume and encash their local knowledge by enabling them to produce, manage, organise, publish, archive and distribute local content. CMS4C has been renamed as ECKO (Empowering Community through Knowledge), which is not only a CMS but is a platform to build ecommunities. ECKO ECKO is application software, a framework for building and nurturing e-Communities. e-Community can be referred to a people of a geographical location, using ECKO as the dais for communication and mutual benefits. This web-based application is more than a content management system, which provides a framework for better communication, increases knowledge sharing and mutual benefits leading to community empowerment. The information generated and provided through ECKO is local, time specific, language | October 2005

specific and in accordance to the social norms, culture etc. Localisation is the main mantra for this application which starts with a local language interface to local content generation and later on communication in local language. The major aims of ECKO can be stated as follows: â&#x20AC;˘ To create and integrate E-Communities of different regions. â&#x20AC;˘ To communicate and share information within and across the community. â&#x20AC;˘ To do intelligent analysis of the community data and draw inferences from them to project it for decision-makers. Utility of ECKO can be classified into a medium for communication, providing specific services like market information, weather information, supporting general services like matrimonial, classifieds and also helping in local content generation and capturing tools. The unique feature of this system is its ability to communicate with other ECKO systems used by various communities.

Features of ECKO Content management This feature enables producing, managing, organising and using the contents that are generated by the rural community. Envisaging the sustainable model, a cost pattern is also designed so that the kiosk operator can sustain by providing content services to the end user. Event management This feature enables the community to organise and communicate events like Polio-camp, health camp, local festival, functions at homes etc to the local community. This feature also supports a calendar and provides easy interface for adding events. News management The feature enables collection and dissemination of local news for the consumption of the local community.

Web services Web services provides various local specific services like weather information, matrimonial information, market price (vegetable, bullion, etc), transport schedules (bus, train, taxi), calendar, and other useful community services. Government can host the information.

Discussion forums The feature acts like electronic meeting place, where community members can share their knowledge amongst themselves. This also facilitates to ask questions to experts for which they can get answers. Citizens can interact with Government machinery.

Architecture view of ECKO Users of ECKO The users of ECKO are categorised into four types: visitors, users (members of e-Community), data provider and administrator. There is no limit to the number of users but authority to approve (each new member of the e-Community lies with the administrator) also publishing and removal of contents lies with the administrator. A visitor is a casual user (non-member) who browses through the system to know what is happening in the community (the non member can get himself updated to the news of the community). That is he can view the community news and events and get information on display at the kiosk centers in the info base published by the administrator depending upon the need of the hour. Users can provide news, article, events information, upload content and participate in the discussion 39

IN PRACTICE

forum. Data providers provide specific information such as current market price, weather information, government information etc. Any number of data providers can administer the content but each of them is responsible only for their specific contents (for which they had been choosen; for example, Gold market rate data provider is a person who is authentic and is responsible for fixing the market rate for gold at that particular locality. He provides only the information for gold market rates). Here the responsibility of the administrator is more as he/she would be the person responsible for the data validation.

The implementation model of ECKO can be captured in the following

Centre’s sustainable approach: From lab to land The Centre follows a holistic and seamless approach in translating enabled technologies into usable products. ECKO has been pilot deployed at different places all over India. The places are Maharashtra, Orissa, Tamilnadu, Pondichery, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan. Although the lack of basic infrastructure like power and connectivity, limit the widespread usage of ICT applications in the rural areas, but the feedback we have been getting is that the end users are very enthusiastic. Due to its localisation support in different Indian regional languages, its simple and friendly user interface it attracts the users. Feedback from partner’s helps us to understand the user’s perception about ECKO; to get insight into level of usage of ECKO; usefulness of the services offered in ECKO; to map the community needs and requirements to the features of ECKO and to plan for further improvements.

Conclusion The aim of the ECKO project is not restricted to just installing a system. It is much beyond that and tries to address the following aspects: improvement of the system design, ensuring that the contents are need based, relevant, up to date and accurate, no duplication of content, localised presentation of both local and global information and that the system is interactive to a large extent. ECKO is certainly a different approach as the project is having the element of direct interaction of the public or the consumers or the services provided by ECKO with the system. ECKO can be used to promote more efficient government services, allowing more and more public to access to the government information in the same form to all access points and make government more accountable to the public. ECKO aims in putting ICT to provide better governance, which is transparent, fair, effective, efficient, accountable and receptive to the need of the citizens. The bottom – up approach makes it a more citizen’s centric system than the government.

References 1. 2. 3. 4.

Prasad,Ganga,G.L.:http://www.i4donline.net/june04/informationsystem.asp ICTRT: http://ictrt.org.in DGF: http://home.developmentgateway.org/ ECKO: http://202.141.136.149

Ganga Prasad GL Centre Head, CDAC Bangalore, gpr@ncb.ernet.in

Amitav Nath Business Development Executive, CDAC Bangalore, amitav@ncb.ernet.in

Mainak Sarkar Business Development Executive, CDAC Bangalore, mainak@ncb.ernet.in

What they don’t teach at Harvard? 40

How does the Government work?

www.conflux.csdms.in www.egov.csdms.in |

COMMENTARY

User attitudes to e-Government citizen services in Europe In 2005, the eUSER project undertook a questionnaire survey covering approximately 10,000 households in ten European Union Member States. Some very interesting initial results inform that face-to-face contact is still the most important channel for contacting government in Europe and One quarter of individual eGovernment users have acted as intermediaries for family members or friends. Introduction In 2005, the eUSER project undertook a questionnaire survey covering approximately 10,000 households in ten European Union Member States, both old and new. In order to achieve as close to a random sample as possible, this was completed using either telephone or direct interview, with the responses being keyed into a database. The purpose of the survey was to provide some of the first systematic evidence in Europe of citizen user behaviour and attitudes to the use of public services, and particularly the role of e-Services in this context. The eUser project surveyed the use by citizens of, and their attitudes to, three sets of e-Services, in e-Government, e-Health and e-Learning. The e-Government part of the survey focused on a number of themes â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the publicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s use of government services, the different channels (or media) employed, the nature of potential future demand for eGovernment, the barriers and experiences in using e-Government, and the socio-economic attributes of e-Government users compared with non-users. The results provide important new information on the role that the Internet is now playing in the delivery and take-up of government services by European citizens. Some selected initial results of the eUSER survey are presented in this article. Fuller and final results will be available at the end of 2005 from the author or the eUSER website.

Use of government services As illustrated in Chart 1, across the ten EU Member States in the sample, almost 70% of all respondents had contact with the Public Administration (PA) in the last 12 months. There is, however, some variation between

Chart 1: Type of service used in contact with government countries, with the more southern EU Member States (France and Italy) having somewhat less contact, whilst there is not much difference between the central and northern Member States and the New Member States of eastern Europe. Although usage levels overall do not differ greatly between service types, the first two administrative services tend to be the most highly used. There are likely to be two reasons for this. First, these are the services, which are most ubiquitous and available because the PAs have tended to roll these out first. Second, because they are legally enforced if the citizen is in a specific situation, the citizen is obliged to use the service. More significantly, there are quite large differences between countries in the use of different service types. In several countries, some everyday life services are used more than some administrative services, for example, in Denmark and Slovenia the use of public services and facilities, and in the UK both the use of public services and facilities and receiving financial benefits and grants. In the southern European countries of France and Italy, the use of tax services is considerably lower than elsewhere, although the UK is also quite low. These differences probably reflect cultural contexts and legal regimes in different countries. The New Member States tend to closely resemble the average usage patterns, with the exception mentioned above of Slovenians. Other data shows how respondents felt about the ease or difficulty of using services, the differences between type of service and country are not large but do

Note: DE - Germany, FR - France, IT - Italy, DK - Denmark, UK - United Kingdom, IE - Ireland, PL - Poland, HU - Hungary, CZ - Czech Republic, SI - Slovania

| October 2005

COMMENTARY

nevertheless show interesting variations. Although overall ease of use is quite high with a score of about 3.5 out of 5, the EU 10 average shows that the most difficult to use services are those involving the transfer of finances, either paying taxes or receiving benefits with the latter the most difficult of all. Amongst the different Member States, Denmark scores the highest in terms of ease of use, and this could be both due to a combination of better designed services and/or more skilled users. There do not appear to be any real differences between older and newer Member States.

lowest at 33%. The intentions of government users in the New Member States to use eGovernment in the future appears also to be slightly less than those of older Member States, with Slovenia again the leading New Member State somewhat ahead of Germany the most lagging older Member State. In terms of intentions to use different levels of e-Government services, the survey shows that potential demand is highest for information services in all countries in the sample. Next comes communication services and finally transaction services, i.e. the least sophisticated services are in most demand. Of the two transaction services, making payments is more likely to be used than using a digital signature, which indicates that the latter remains a significant barrier to eGovernment use. Differences between countries appear to be insignificant in terms of potential demand across the different levels of service.

Use of e-Government on behalf of whom? Chart 2: Media channel used when contacting government Chart 2 shows that the media channel used when contacting government is still overwhelming face-to-face. In some countries, such as the UK and Ireland, however, the use of the postal services and the telephone has overtaken face-toface. Overall, new ICT media provide access for about 20% of all contacts with government, 17% of this via the Internet or e-mail and 3% via SMS. Denmarkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s use of ICT for contacting government is the highest, whilst the older Member States generally, with the exceptions of Germany and Italy, show higher ICT usage than the New Member States. Slovenia has the most use of ICT of the New Member States in the sample at about the same level as Germany.

Potential use of e-Government services

Using e-Government services on behalf of others is an important factor in the overall use of such services. On average, one half of eGovernment users do so, and of these again one half do so on behalf of family and friends and one half on behalf of their employer as part of their job. There are also important differences between countries, with the older Member States generally having higher percentages of the adult population acting as intermediaries for family or friends (lead by Ireland) and as part of their job on behalf of their employer (lead by Germany), whilst the New Member States have a higher proportion of their use of e-Government characterised by

Another set of questions in the survey asks about the future intentions of all government users to use Internet or e-mail for contacting government. Comparing the responses to the existing use of Internet/e-mail by government users shows that the intention of these respondents to use e-Government in the future has the potential to rise from the present 20% level of contacts to 47%. This is a substantial potential rise of well over 100%, although respondents were not asked to indicate when they are likely to use e-Government, and it is known from previous surveys that not all future predictions of use translate into actual use. Nevertheless, strong potential interest is clearly present and shows that policies to encourage future use amongst users of government services are likely to fall on fertile ground. There are few large differences between countries, though Denmark is clearly the Member State with the Chart 3: e-Government users: own purpose, for family or friends, highest intended future use at 63% and Hungary the or for employer 42

www.egov.csdms.in |

COMMENTARY

and Italy anticipate the biggest barriers. The latter two countries together with Poland emphasise particularly the need for face-to-face contact. In the UK, Ireland and Hungary, fears about supplying personal information online are much higher than average. These anticipated barriers before using e-Government are generally much higher than the barriers actually experienced once e-Government is used. After actual experience with e-Government services, fewer users experience barriers or difficulties (between 17% and 32%) compared with the number of users who perceive barriers before use (between 25% and 58%). The most important difficulty experienced after Chart 4: Average number of persons assisted by family or use appears to be that the user feels that there are significant friends acting as intermediary problems or questions the online service cannot deal with. There are also concerns that the online service cannot cater acting on behalf of others. This is likely to be for the userâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own individual needs, whereas the least problematic but still important because of the greater access problems and factor is that the online service is felt to be too complex to use. lower digital skills in these countries, and probably reflects the different stages of Levels of satisfaction with e-Government services development of the Information Society. This As shown in Chart 5 below, overall satisfaction levels with e-Government are very is also shown in Chart 3. similar to overall satisfaction with government services generally with scores Seen from the perspective of persons between 3.0 and 3.5, which indicates that adding online services to the government receiving help from an intermediary when service portfolio does not change such perceptions. This can be interpreted accessing e-Government services, other data both positively, i.e. that the early days of online services with all the attendant collected show that on average 17% of all e- difficulties has been very successful, or negatively, i.e. that online services should Government users did so partially, and 7% did be improving service quality and hence satisfaction. However, the so completely. Support from an intermediary relationship between service quality and user satisfaction is probably not a seems to be highest in the New Member States straightforward one. (reflecting the data in Charts 3 and 4), where Service fulfilment (able to completely do or get what wanted from the electronic the relative number of donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know answers or service) scores second highest after up-to-date and accurate information, but the the lack of an answer were also received, least satisfactory is an aspect of transparency (easy to see whether an e-mail suggesting less familiarity with the idea of message has reached the right person). getting help from an intermediary in these In terms of country differences, Denmark leads in terms of satisfaction as it countries. also leads in terms of use of e-Government services, which could be due both to a combination of better designed services and/or more skilled users, and probably Anticipated and experienced reflects the general level of development of the Information Society in that country. barriers to e-Government services The UK shows the lowest satisfaction levels, and there appear to be no differences Another part of the survey looks at barriers between the older and newer Member States. to the take-up of e-Government by citizens, which are anticipated by many citizens as very important before the services are actually used. Most important is that well over half of potential users think they need face-to-face contact for a specific service. There are also fears about supplying personal information online expressed by 45% of users, but there is also lack of knowledge about whether the service they need is actually available online. Less widespread but still important barriers are potential usersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; impression that there is too much effort involved or that they have insufficient technical means. There are also important differences between countries but no distinction between older and newer Member States. Danish and Slovenian users are generally less inclined to anticipate barriers to use, whereas the Czech Republic Chart 5: Satisfaction with e-Government by country | October 2005

COMMENTERY

Identification methods for e-Government As Chart 6 shows, there are marked differences in the use of the currently available user identification methods, with the most used tending to be the simplest, cheapest and least secure, though for the most commonly used e-Government services arguably secure enough. In terms of ease of use, differences are slight; only the use of digital signatures is a little lower than the others. However, it is probable that once citizens get used to a particular method, it’s ease of use from their perspective increases. There are also important differences between countries, with Italy leading on the use of user ID/ password and PIN codes, compared to Poland which has the lowest use of these. Indeed two of the four New Member States (Poland and the Czech Republic) Chart 6: Identification methods for eGovernment: use and ease of use do not show the pattern typical of the eight other countries in which user ID/password and PIN codes are by far the most common the fear about data privacy important. methods. The data seem to indicate that in these two countries at least, some However, once citizens have used efocus and investment has been made on more ‘advanced’ methods, particularly Government services, the barriers appear less the use of specialised smart cards, in comparison with the other methods. In terms though still important, and relate mainly to of the most ‘advanced’ methods, Slovenia and Denmark leads on the use of digital the difficulty of feeling left alone with signatures and the Czech Republic on the use of specialised smart cards. The very problems or questions. high use of credit cards in Ireland is probably related to the fact that some revenue When citizens need to identify raising transaction services (such as motor tax) are now fully available online. themselves while using e-Government services, most use simple well-known Main conclusions methods (such as user ID and password and Face-to-face contact is still the most important channel for contacting government PIN codes), which are not always suitable for in Europe - 81% of all citizens who contacted government in the last year did so in legal or financial transactions. User person, although not necessarily exclusively by this channel. However, in some identification is still a barrier to communication countries, telephone and post have overtaken face-to-face (for example in the UK and transaction services, although the evidence also shows that once more with 74% telephone and only 51% face-to-face). In the countries surveyed, about 11% of the adult population have used the sophisticated methods are employed (such Internet to access government services and of those who have contacted as digital signature or smart cards) they are often rated as just as easy to use as the more government in the last year, this figure rises to 20%. However, potential demand for e-Government services is about 50% of all well-known methods. government users, and could be higher. Potential demand for e-Government is mainly for information services, then communication services, and lowest for transaction services. In terms of government services generally, citizens rate their overall satisfaction at about 3.5 out of 5.0, a figure which is almost identical to that for e-Government services. One quarter of individual e-Government users have acted as intermediaries for family members or friends, and one quarter have also done so on behalf of their Jeremy Millard employer. Greater proportions of the total adult population in the older Member States have used e-Government on behalf of others in this way, but the share of Danish Technological Institute e-Government users doing so on behalf of others is greater in the New Member Kongsvang Allé 29 States. Twenty four percent of individual e-Government users have received help 8000 Aarhus C in using e-Government services from a family member or a friend. Denmark Most barriers which users anticipate they will meet when using e-Government jeremy.millard@teknologisk.dk relate to difficulty in actually starting, with a feeling that face-to-face is better and

Chicken soup for the soul. 44

And some for the mind.

www.egov.csdms.in | www.conflux.csdms.in

ABOUT TOWN

Conflux

2005

The e-Government Conference

This section lists upcoming e-Government conferences, exhibitions, and other public events for the benefit of our readers.

3-5 October 2005 CollECTeR LatAm 2005 Talca Chile http://ing.utalca.cl/collecter/papers.php

10 October 2005 eGovernment Conference 2005 An IDG Event Italy Rome

26-28 October 2005 IFIP International Conference on eBusiness, eCommerce and eGovernment (I3Eâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;2005), Poznan, Poland http://www.multiagent.com/dailist/ msg00056.html

27-28 October 2005

http://careers.idg.com/www/IDGProducts.nsf/ 0/b0799a03066941cb00256fea006afa0b? OpenDocument

The International Conference on E-Government (ICEG 2005) Lord Elgin Hotel Ottawa, Canada http://www.academic-conferences.org/ iceg2005/iceg2005-home.htm

9-11 December 2005 3rd International Conference on e-Governance (ICEG) Lahore, Pakistan http://web.lums.edu.pk/iceg2005/

4-7 January 2006 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 39) E-Government Track Kauai Hawaii http://www.ctg.albany.edu/conference/hicss/

10-11 October 2005

9-11 November 2005

30 January-2 Febuary, 2006

FT E-fficiency in Government Conference London, UK

Government Technology Africa 2005 Johannesburg South Africa

GTC Southwest 2006 Seventeenth Annual Government Technology Conference Austin, TX

http://www.financialtimesconferences.com/ pages/conference.asp?ecode=ZZ1107

http://www.terrapinn.com/2005/govtechza/

15-17 November 2005

18-20 October 2005

GTC Southeast 2005 Fifth Annual Government Technology Conference Atlanta, Georgia

The 2005 Asia e-Gov Summit Beijing China http://www.worldsummits.com

http://www.govtech.net/gtc/?pg=conference &confid=253

17-19 October 2005

17-18 November 2005

Conflux 2005 The e-Governance Conference The Grand New Delhi India

http://www.conflux.csdms.in

Government Health IT Conference Washington DC, USA e

Conflux

EGov Summit London, UK http://www.egov.worldtradeco.com/

10-13 April 2006 2nd International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST-2006) Portugal http://www.webist.org/cfp.htm

12-16 June, 2006 24-25 November 2005

EWorld Government & Healthcare London UK

7-8 March 2006

http://www.fcw.com/events/ghit/

2005

The e-Government Conference

18-19 October

http://www.govtech.net/gtc/?pg= conference&confid=276

Ministerial eGovernment Conference Manchester, UK

UPA 2006 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Usability through Storytelling Colorado US http://www.upassoc.org/conferences_and_ events/upa_conference/2006/index.html

http://www.eworld-government.com

http://europa.eu.int/information_society/ activities/egovernment_research/minconf2005/ index_en.htm

19-21 October 2005

8 December 2005

eChallenges 2005 Slovenia Austria

eGovernment Conference 2005 Copenhagen, Denmark

2nd Annual Event Information Management in the public sector London

http://www.echallenges.org/2005/

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId= IDC_P8554

6 December 2006

http://www.kablenet.com

Tell us about your event at info@egov.csdms.in | October 2005

FACTS AND DATA

Ease of doing business! World Bank and International Finance Corporation have released a report “Doing Business in 2006”, which provides ease of doing business ranking of 155 countries. The ranking is based on 10 parameters. Top 30 economies on the Bottom 30 economies on ease of doing business the ease of doing business 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 l5 l6 l7 l8 l9 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

New Zealand Singapore United States Canada Norway Australia Hong Kong, China Denmark United Kingdom Japan Ireland Iceland Finland Sweden Lithuania Estonia Switzerland Belgium Germany Thailand Malaysia Puerto Rico Mauritius Netherlands Chile Latvia Korea South Africa Israel Spain

155. 154. 153. 152. 151. 150. 149. 148. 147. 146. 145. 144. 143. 142. 141. 140. 139. 138. 137. 136. 135. 134. 133. 132. 131. 130. 129. 128. 127. 126.

Congo, Dem. Rep Burkina Faso Central African Republic Chad Sudan Niger Togo Congo, Rep. Lao PDR Mali Cote d’Ivoire Guinea Burundi Timor-Leste Egypt Tanzania Rwanda Uzbekistan Eritrea Sierra Leone Angola Haiti Cambodia Senegal Madagascar Cameroon Benin Algeria Mauritania Zimbabwe

•

Ten parameters are — starting a business, dealing with licenses, hiring and firing workers, registering property, getting property, getting credit, protecting investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and closing a business.

•

New Zealand has emerged as the top most country in the ranking, which implies that it is easiest to do business in there.

• India is positioned at 116th, which comes after China (at 91st), Pakistan (60th), Sri Lanka (75th) and Nepal (55th) •

It took 11 procedures, 71 days and cost 61.7% of per capita income on an average for starting a business in India in January 2005, according to the report.

East Asia and Pacific performs well on the ease of doing business

Time to start a business (days)

Source: www.doingbusiness.org

www.egov.csdms.in |

Delegate Registration Form Conflux 2005: The e-Government conference (17-19 October 2005) Digital Learning 2005 (18-19 October 2005) Venue: The Grand, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi-110070

First name ………………………………...…....................................... Last Name …………………………………...…..................................... Designation/Profession ...………………….......................................... Organisation ..………………………………………................................ Nature of Organisation

Govt.

NGO

Private

Address ..................................................................……………………………….……………………………….……............……………………. City ........………………………………………....................................... Postal Code ……………………………….…......................................... State ......……………………………………......................................... Country .......………………………………….…................................… Tel(O) ...……........................................……………………....………… Tel(R) .....…....................................………………………………….…... Mobile ........…………………………….……….................................... Fax ......………………………………………..……….............................. E-Mail .......…......................................………………………………… Website ….....……………………………………................................… I would like to participate in Conflux

Digital Learning

Both

REGISTRATION CHARGES* Conflux 2005 (only) Advance Payment All Delegates

Spot Payment

Day Registration

INR 5000

INR 6000

INR 2500

Till 30 Sept.

Till 15 Oct.

All Delegates

INR 1500

INR 2000

INR 2500

Presenters

INR 1000

INR 1500

Digital Learning 2005 (only) On Spot

Conflux 2005 & Digital Learning 2005 (with 25% discount) Till 30 Sept.

Till 15 Oct.

On Spot

All Delegates

INR 4875

INR 5250

INR 6375

Presenters

INR 4500

INR 5625

Payment Mode Demand Draft

Cheque

Pay Order

Wire Transfer

Cash (on arrival)

Wire Transfer Details : Beneficiary Name-CSDMS; Bank Name & Address-Citi Bank, Noida Branch, A-6, Sector-4, Noida, U.P. India; Account Number - 5-000890-288; Swift Code - CITIINBXAXXX DD/Cheque no.: …………………….......……….................................. Dated: …………...…………………………........................................... Drawn on: ……………………………….........................................… Amount: ...........……………………………………………….................

*Kindly note that there are limited number of free registration seats for Government Delegate. Free registration for government delegates closes on 10th October. Government delegates are requested to carry their ID cards and registration number to the conference venue.

Kindly photocopy and send the filled form to: Conflux/Digital Learning 2005 Secretariat: Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies, G-4, Sector-39, NOIDA-201 301, India Tel: +91-120-2502180 to 87, Fax: +91-120-2500060, Email: info@conflux.csdms.in URL: www.conflux.csdms.in

Asia's first and only monthly print magazine on e-Government.

ov www.egov.csdms.in