Government of India had put out a draft bill on Electronic Service Delivery (ESD) for public comments. The key features of this scheme are
i) Every department of the government should mandatorily make its service to citizen available through electronic mode.
ii) This ESD should be made operational within five years of enactment of this bill. Extension for another three years will be allowed if there are valid reasons for this delay.
iii) Within six months of enactnment of this bill, every department should publish the list of services which will come within the ESD commitment.
iv) As in the case of the Right to Information Act (RTI), the proposed ESD act provides for Commissions at center and state level to ensure that the expectation under the act is delivered and failure is met with punitive action.
This right for ESD proposed to be guaranteed under an act of the parliament can be seen as maturing of various e-Governance initiatives that the government has been taking in a variety of fields for more than a decade. India is considered to be a powerhouse in the field of ICT and we practically run the back-office operations for the whole world. With this, this should be an easy target. But is it?
World e-Government ranking undertaken by United Nations gives India a rank of 119 out of 192 countries it surveyed in 2010. As my friend Neel pointed out, “How come even after more than a decade of e-Gov initiatives at the highest level, we still want six months for all departments to publish the list of services they can make available electronically and we need five to eight years for this to be fructify?” Reasons are many; but the following appear to be the most fundamental of them.
i) Many of the e-Gov initiatives are computerization of existing operations of the departments, heavily accented to MIS reports for internal consumption and upword reporting.
ii) Processes were not fine-tuned with a citizen focus. Committed service levels or actual performance levels were seldom benchmarked or published
iii) Solution implementation was more activity based than outcome based. Often vendors saw their role as software developers or as hardware suppliers and not as service providers.
iv) More attention was given to the automation of front end without getting the back-end streamlined and automated. In many instances sufficient consideration was not given to building electronic repository of the records and masters or ensuring high data quality which are the foundation blocks for electronic service delivery.
This problem is not unique to government computerization efforts. In many private sector companies also the computerization took this route. To begin with computer was a perk and status symbol for the boss. Then it became a department initiative. It was much later an integrated corporate wide strategy got evolved in progressive companies.
Similarly, in government initially it started as a privilege for the big bosses. Then it became a department initiative left to the interest of the head of the department. Integrated service delivery is still a dream. (read on "India gets a CIO- Part II")
Now when we attempt to make electronic service delivery a matter of right we have to give more attention to the lacuna highlighted above else we will not be able to live up to our promise or the expectation of our citizens and the commissioners will end up inundated with grievances.
Picard: Come back! Make a difference!
Kirk: I take it the odds are against us and the situation’s grim.
Picard: You could say that.
Kirk: If Spock were here, he’d say that we are irrational, illlogical human beings for going on a mission like this... Sounds like fun!
-Star Trek: Generations
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i) Every department of the government should mandatorily make its service to citizen available through electronic mode.
ii) This ESD should be made operational within five years of enactment of this bill. Extension for another three years will be allowed if there are valid reasons for this delay.
iii) Within six months of enactnment of this bill, every department should publish the list of services which will come within the ESD commitment.
iv) As in the case of the Right to Information Act (RTI), the proposed ESD act provides for Commissions at center and state level to ensure that the expectation under the act is delivered and failure is met with punitive action.
This right for ESD proposed to be guaranteed under an act of the parliament can be seen as maturing of various e-Governance initiatives that the government has been taking in a variety of fields for more than a decade. India is considered to be a powerhouse in the field of ICT and we practically run the back-office operations for the whole world. With this, this should be an easy target. But is it?
World e-Government ranking undertaken by United Nations gives India a rank of 119 out of 192 countries it surveyed in 2010. As my friend Neel pointed out, “How come even after more than a decade of e-Gov initiatives at the highest level, we still want six months for all departments to publish the list of services they can make available electronically and we need five to eight years for this to be fructify?” Reasons are many; but the following appear to be the most fundamental of them.
i) Many of the e-Gov initiatives are computerization of existing operations of the departments, heavily accented to MIS reports for internal consumption and upword reporting.
ii) Processes were not fine-tuned with a citizen focus. Committed service levels or actual performance levels were seldom benchmarked or published
iii) Solution implementation was more activity based than outcome based. Often vendors saw their role as software developers or as hardware suppliers and not as service providers.
iv) More attention was given to the automation of front end without getting the back-end streamlined and automated. In many instances sufficient consideration was not given to building electronic repository of the records and masters or ensuring high data quality which are the foundation blocks for electronic service delivery.
This problem is not unique to government computerization efforts. In many private sector companies also the computerization took this route. To begin with computer was a perk and status symbol for the boss. Then it became a department initiative. It was much later an integrated corporate wide strategy got evolved in progressive companies.
Similarly, in government initially it started as a privilege for the big bosses. Then it became a department initiative left to the interest of the head of the department. Integrated service delivery is still a dream. (read on "India gets a CIO- Part II")
Now when we attempt to make electronic service delivery a matter of right we have to give more attention to the lacuna highlighted above else we will not be able to live up to our promise or the expectation of our citizens and the commissioners will end up inundated with grievances.
Picard: Come back! Make a difference!
Kirk: I take it the odds are against us and the situation’s grim.
Picard: You could say that.
Kirk: If Spock were here, he’d say that we are irrational, illlogical human beings for going on a mission like this... Sounds like fun!
-Star Trek: Generations
If you like this post, share it with your friends
thanks for the info on this new bill.more so for your insights on what needs to be done to make it really bear results
ReplyDeleteDear Sir, Thank you very much for informing about the ESD and I agree with your thoughts.
ReplyDeleteGovernment, under its national e-Governance plan has identified around 20 Mission Model Projects (20 departments) to deliver electronic services. While the success of e-governance implementation happened so far is questionable, with the introduction of ESD, coverage of e-Governance plan would now increase to each and every department. First Question that comes to my mind is that who is going to take up the responsibility of implementation. DIT, NIC, Team of consultants, e-mission teams, state IT nodal offices or the Departments themselves?? I feel, many departments who have adopted e-Governance are yet to internalize the term/concept of 'service'.
But, I am hopeful that the implementation of ESD, would persuade the Departments at least to defined the service in terms various parameters. However, many organizations deliver a variety of services which are difficult to be quantified ex: extension services to farmers by agriculture departments which are in the nature of advisory. I am not sure, how this aspect is going to be addressed.
The back end integration of IT systems is certainly going to be a challenge, but one more area that could be important to consider is the integration/streamlining inter-departmental collaboration for a particular service or a bundle of services as many services are fruitful if implemented as a bundle than as a standalone ones (ex: good advisory to farmer would be beneficial only if sufficient water to the fields is ensured).
I hope that the ESD bill( or its implementation guidelines), would focus on some of these issues.