Digital India 2.0 Hoping for the best

[Excerpts of my speech at Conference on Digital India as a part of 37th SKOCH Summit at India Habitat Center, New Delhi September 2014]

If somebody asks me my opinion about the Indian Movie Industry my reply would be; “It is big and thriving, some of its productions are world class, exciting and memorable. But it has also created a lot of crap.”  My reply would be the same if anybody asks for my opinion on e-Governance in India.

Why do I say so? Let me give two metrics in support of my statement. Firstly as per DeiTY tracking system for electronic transactions we have had just about 2 billion electronic transactions in 2013 and in 2013 this number has already reached this number in the first 8 months. Impressing in a way. But for country with more than a billion population and internet penetration of 100 million (which itself is quite low and is an expression of poor internet infrastructure  and not enough relevant and convenient service offerings compared to 8000 million mobile phones) it is 20 an average of 20 transaction per month per person. When we consider that it covers both central and state services including online utility payments, it is not something to shout from the rooftops.

Secondly, let us take a look at the eGov Development Index (EGDI) of UN which it publishes every year. In the last few years India’s ranking has been hovering in the range of 110-120. In spite of India being a powerhouse in the world of Information Technology, we are so low in the world ranking of EGDI. We have even managed a drop in our ranking from 113 in 2008 to 118 in 2014. On the other hand South Korea holds top rank for past many years.

It is in this context that we should look at the Digital India 2.0 Program that has been announced recently. It has all the Right Intentions, Great Ideas and Enough Resource Allocation. But then, Is it much different from the NEGP of yesteryears?. If we look at NEGP, it also had right intentions, right ideas and enough resources when it was launched. But then why did it fail deliver what it should? The fundamental problem was in the “Implementation”.  Let us take a look at some key learning from our experience of yesteryears. The weakness was in the foundation itself of most of the projects; which includes stable citizen focus, leadership, procurement and contracting strategy, continuous improvements and business models. Let us go a little deeper.

Most of the e-Gov initiatives are “transformational Projects” and not automation of the existing stable processes. Such transformational projects would require a re-look at the existing processes and undertake a re-engineering of the processes with a citizen focus and taking full advantage of what technology can offer. When I say citizen focus it means that the workflow and processes should attempt to make it easy and convenient for the citizen to access the services online. When he asks for a service from one government department he should not be asked to get a document/ certificate from another government department. The departmental systems should be able to talk to the other departmental systems electronically to source/ verify information available with the latter. This in addition to facility for online application could significantly reduce multiple interactions that the citizens have to make with the government departments and the related rent seeking and harassment.

One of the challenges in integrating the systems of different departmenst was the absence of a mechanism for uniquely identifying a person. Now that penetration of UID in India has reached significant levels, this problem has nearly been solved. Therefore, it is important for every departmental automation project to incorporate UID tracking of beneficiaries to the extent possible.

Any transformational project will succeed only if there is a stable and visionary leadership; especially during the conceptualisation and roll-out. Whenever government managed to place such people in the leadership roles the projects benefited. In many cases the selection and transfer policies of the government does not take this into account at all. This means poor choice of mission leaders and or key people frequently getting transferred; especially in critical stages of the project. Such changes not just affect the momentum of the project but are also counterproductive. One of the key reasons of  failure of many e-Gove projects is this.

Establishment of transformational project cannot be handled like an event management. It is an evolutionary process; a journey and not a destination.  But normally many government departments treat all projects alike an event management. There would be a study of the current processes, some kind of process re-engineering, development of specification for developing the software application , choosing of technology solution, getting the solution developed/ customised and rolling out the solution. During this process there we seed involvement of senior officers.

Once it is rolled out it is left to the operating staff to take care. But what is needed for success is continuous improvements. There should be continuous tracking and refinement of the processes, to strengthen validations, communication and clarification for the users on the basis of feedback from the field. This review and refinement should be led by the senior officers responsible for the mission. Only then would it reach adoption and acceptance of a broader cross section of clients. Often the feedback from the field is not given due importance. By the time the normal governmental process gets the approvals for these amendments it would be too late. So much negative image would have been created that adoption would have really suffered. Many users would have written this off. If we take the few projects that has demonstrated significant acceptance like Tax Information Network of CBDT, MCA 21 of Ministry of Company Affairs, Passport Seva Project of Ministry of External Affairs UIDAI etc were those which had taken this philosophy of continuous improvement seriously.

In addition to these efforts for continuous information there is also a need for education and handholding of the users so that they get used to the new system and make fewer mistakes. Even in this dimension many projects do badly.

The other major area of failure is in the procurement and contracting process of the government. Many departments select the lowest cost bidder referred to as L1. This often significantly affects the quality; especially in cases of services because it is difficult to quantify quality and monitor it. Some departments attempted Quality Cum Cost Based Selection (QCBS). But very often most of the bidders are given technical scores which are very close to each other. This is often because the evaluators would like to play safe. In this case, the bid again becomes L1.

In the selection process it is important to have experts in the field who compliment the departmental officials who may often do not have sufficient subject matter expertise. Many departments do adopt SME. But the SMEs are often selected often based on their willingness to give free/ low cost service and readiness to say yes and not on the basis of the quality of expertise. We can’t expect much value addition in such cases.

Then some departments started experimenting with outcome oriented contracts with service providers. It is a brilliant idea in theory. Even in this case most of the departments mess up. Let us see how. To make outcome oriented project a success, there are two critical pre-conditions. (i) There should be clear articulation and agreement on specific outcomes and milestones. (ii) Achievement of outcome requires that both the client and the service provider play their role on an agreed upon schedule.

But in case of most government projects both the above preconditions are not met. Firstly the outcomes are not clearly articulated. Often they are described very broadly which could be interpreted in different ways. Such vague definitions lead to so much scope creep that the service providers lose significantly. Secondly the departments fail so badly in meeting their part of the deal. Often there is significant delay / failure in giving timely approvals, giving input by users, providing feedback on proposed solutions, signing off on specifications and so on. This lead to significant delay, scope creep and increase in required effort. Taking both these together for most of the service providers government projects are loss leaders. Because of this, many good and reputed IT service providers are very cagey in bidding for government project and keep away from government projects in most cases.

It is evident that unless the Digital India 2.0 addresses these above implementation issues it will not be able to do any better. It can be seen from the above that n normal government processes are not capable of handling transformational projects. It has never been designed to support innovation or flexibility or agility that are essential ingredients for successful implementation of transformational projects.

One obvious solution such limitation is to carve these as independent projects and hand these over to a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) which has been suitably structured with sufficient flexibility to take nimble decisions and relevant mid-course corrections when needed. It is also important to have the right kind of leadership, team with relevant expertise and experience and also a supervisory body that recognizes the different approach needed for these SPVs to succeed. Especially the leadership vision and courage to take decisions will be very critical. We have seen examples of such successes. But unfortunately we see that even when SPVs are established the bureaucracy involved in the establishing these SPVs build-in structural limitations that will restrict/ prevent the nimbleness of the organisation and or install unimaginative bureaucrats to its leadership which completely vitiates the ability of these SPVS to make any significant difference.

I hope the focus of the new PMO has on implementation will galvanise the various departments towards better performance.

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“Exogenous and blind interpretation of statutes, topped with hustled implementation of laws leads only to more turmoil and less productivity.”  ― Henrietta Newton Martin