[India] Digitise public data to make it useful: Holmes

["Irfan Khan" <khania2@super.net.pk>]

Digitise public data to make it useful: Holmes

TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ FRIDAY, MAY 30, 2003 01:13:41 AM ]

BANGALORE: There is one simple indicator for introducing e-governance 
to improve administrative functioning, according to Douglas Holmes, a 
leading authority on the subject.

“You know you are in trouble when your bureaucracy becomes a tourist 
attraction,” he said at the eGov India Seminar 2003, organised by 
economictimes.com, in Bangalore on Thursday.

Mr Holmes said digitising the public data allowed users to do much 
more with the information. Apart from just easier access, this data 
can be shared and manipulated to make it useful, he explained. He 
however said government agencies should be open to ideas from private 
firms, to improve the performance of their e-governance systems. He 
said a definite action plan must be constructed and milestones must 
be decided on, before embarking on an e-governance initiatives. 
Today, like most corporates, the government too was under pressure to 
work with a tight budget and yet provide the best services to 
citizens, he claimed.

Earlier, in his keynote address, Mr K K Misra, additional chief 
Secretary and principal secretary (industry and commerce), government 
of Karnataka, said e-governance can substantially reduce the chances 
of malpractice in administration. He said the government was 
considering having a local area network and kiosks to give people 
better access to the state government’s facilities.

The government today was expected to provide services effectively and 
at the least cost, he added. However, he said there was a change in 
the government’s perception of its own role. While it initially felt 
it had to accomplish all tasks related to e-governance, it was now 
more open to involving public-private partnerships in deploying and 
running them.

Mr Misra said providing single utility services were no longer 
viable, with services such as the Andhra Pradesh government’s e-seva 
initiative likely to be the future model for e-governance 
initiatives. Mr Holmes said while the spot-light was on measures to 
ease the burden of citizens, governments needed to also look at 
measures that improved the working and efficiency of their own 
employees and administration.

While both citizens and government have benefited from e-governance, 
several issues have to be yet thrashed out before its functioning is 
smoothed out.

Mr Rajeev Chawla, e-governance secretary, government of Karnataka 
said a distinct lack of enthusiasm among the older generation 
bureaucrats tended to cripple its effectiveness. He said that there 
was need for non-repudiation data and to have manageable 
architecture. For instance while there was talk of using public key 
infrastructure (PKI) in e-governance, it should integrate with the 
back of end of the system, Mr Chawla said at a panel discussion at 
the same event.

He also contended that several other issues continued to shackle the 
growth of e-governance in the country. A major issue was getting 
services to rural areas in the country. Even on the state of 
Karnataka alone, there were over 60 million people in villages, who 
often had little or no access to e-governance initiatives. Mr Chawla 
also made a case for the adoption of standards to allow various 
initiatives to “talk” to each other. Mr Chawla said that training 
bureaucrats was key to increasing the popularity and effectiveness of 
e-governance.

While most of the focus in the e-governance sector was on technology, 
Mr V Chandrashekhar, e-governance practice head at TCS said a human 
element was involved in the process. He said developed countries 
often spend millions of dollars to develop citizen-friendly 
interfaces.

Mr Neel Ratan, executive director, PwC argued that the expectations 
of citizens in developed and under-developed countries varied and 
this posed a challenge to those deploying e-governance solutions. In 
India for instance, land records computerisation bought down waiting 
from months to minutes, but in other countries where such systems 
were in place, the demands would differ.


source: 
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?ms
id=47905090