India gets a CIO

“Who said Elephants can’t dance” is a book written by Louis Gerstner the CEO who turned around IBM, the ailing giant that it was in 1992. I am sure many of us feel the same about India. We used to have a growth rate of around 3% that was termed as the Hindu rate of growth. That is history, and we are now demonstrating to the world that Indian Elephants can dance too.

One of the key strengths that any country, corporate or individual needs to compete in this new world is strength in Information and Communication Technology. And it is an area India has clearly demonstrated comfort among a broad cross section of the society. Today we have a booming IT industry ranging from cottage industries to International Giants. But we have not yet capitalised on this strength in strengthening our governance Infrastructure on a national scale.

We have patches of brilliant executions across the country. The modernisation spearheaded by NSDL and NSE with support from SEBI has catapulted the Indian capital market to world standards. There are many other examples like the bhoomi project in Karnataka, VAT computerisation in Kerala, and many more. The tragedy is that this learning is almost quarantined and has not yet formed a part of the DNA of governance. The concern is not just this isolation, there is significant duplication of efforts and investments which benefits the vendors more than the users.

For example GST is one of the most critical national initiatives India is embarking on. The empowered committee after protracted deliberations has brought out a Discussion Paper on GST on November 2009. The Finance Minster has announced that the target for implementation will be 2011, revised from the original target of 2010. A project of such magnitude and transaction intensity can and will succeed only with the help of a powerful ICT infrastructure. But we hardly see sufficient focus on issues of computerisation in all these discourses and deliberations. Each of the interested parties and states are on their own trip and trying to push their own agenda.

What we need now is to establish a framework and guidelines to facilitate IT enabled Governance (ITeG) on a national scale . The Government has woken up to this challenge. It has asked Nandan Nilekani, the Chairman of Unique Identity Authority Of India (UIDAI) to head a newly constituted Technical Advisory Group for Unique Projects (TAGUP). This is a welcome development and can surely contribute towards integration of the divergent initiatives that are going around (often in circles).

I remember attending a party soon after Nandan was appointed as the chairman of UIDAI (read up It Made Sense – 3; Nandan and the Unique ID*). I made a remark that it looked like we have a CIO for government. One investment bankers based in London who was attending this party quipped “I have now one more story to sell India”

But the remark looked a bit preposterous at that point of time. Today it is a reality. I have been keenly watching the development of UIDAI. There appears to be a clear strategy that it is following. The concept note was world class. The RFP that has recently come out for application development can be easily termed as one of the top quality RFP brought out by any government agency. He has also managed to bring together a world class talent pool to support him.

India looks good, India looks corporate, and India has now has a CIO...Read it aloud, it sounds nice and almost musical

“Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.” Isaac Asimov