After more than a decade and a half of intense efforts to electronically enable the government and service delivery, it is time to take a pause and re-assess the frameworks used so far
By Jaijit Bhattacharya
To begin with, e-governance needs to be architected to be truly citizen-centric, moving away from the current models of being department-centric. This would require a complete overhaul of the manner in which e-governance had been architected till date. This is not an easy task and is perhaps the holy grail of governance.
What exactly does “being citizen-centric” mean? It means every time the citizen needs to interact with the government, the citizen need not start off on a discovery of which department and agency will provide the specific service required by the citizen. For that matter, the citizen may not even need to ask for the service – the system should be able to predictively find out the requirement of a citizen and deliver the same. So if a thirty five year old pregnant, tribal, handicapped unemployed woman needs to find what are the benefits that she is entitled to from the myriad departments and agencies of the government (as she is (a) pregnant, (b) tribal, (c) handicapped, (d) woman and (e) unemployed), an electronically transformed government should not expect that this lady will know how to login into the Internet, find the URL’s of the various ministries and departments, and apply for her entitlements, possible in English, and also furnish her documents digitally from a pendrive and upload the same.
The lady should be able to go to a single window, possibly run by a single government or government outsourced agency, enter her profile in terms of age, her status as a handicapped, pregnant tribal unemployed woman, and the system should be able to spew out all her entitlements. In addition, the system should be able to then track her pregnancy, delivery of the child, immunization requirements of the child, MNREGA payments made to the lady, and all this without the lady needing to get back and request.
The system should be able to deliver the services in a personalised manner, through predictive analytics, without the citizen (in this case the lady in question), needing to come back to the e-government system. Hence the ASHA worker should visit the child thus born, on a periodic basis to deliver the immunisations without the mother needing to go back and request electronically. That would be a true citizen-centric system.
What is required to build such a system? Technically, the answer is quite straightforward. The departmental systems need to be joined through a few key data masters. These data masters become the single point of truth for citizen information. Many parts of the puzzle are already in place in India. This includes the Unique ID of citizens (Aadhar) and State Residents Data hub.
However, there is also data that is common across two or more departments. Even if the departments agree to cooperate, one has to agree on the Truth Prioritization – that is, which of the departments actually own that data and hence would be responsible to change the data as and when required.
As an example, if someone’s current address changes, and the person goes to book a railway ticket, can the person ask the railways to make the change in his or her address and that should be taken in by all departments as the new truth with respect to this citizen’s address, or should there be a process wherein the person has to necessarily go to say, UIDAI to change the current address before purchasing the railway ticket? The latter would obviously make the process more cumbersome. The former would lead to deterioration of the quality of data as all departments would not be equally equipped to make changes to key data.
Moreover, departments would need to have integrated processes, requiring significant structural changes in the government. As an example, on applying for a government scholarship for education in a foreign university, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) should be able to automatically provide a passport to the student, which implies that the MEA should be integrated into the police systems to be able to quickly check the antecedents of the student, before automatically providing the passport.
The above process implies that the processes of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Ministry of External affairs, Ministry of Home and state Police need to be all integrated. This is indeed a significantly challenging proposition. However, this is necessary in order to bring in the necessary change to make the government truly citizen centric.
What else is required to move to the new framework? The framework needs to be ferociously inclusive. Inclusive in terms of language, interface and access. Hence, government services need to be provided in local languages. But what if the person is illiterate – as is the case with a significant part of the population. Thus the interface could be speech based or other such interfaces that support the print-blind and other physically challenged citizens.
What is access? Access implies that anyone should be able to get access to the system, through appropriate connectivity, through a dedicated access device or through a community access device, at an affordable cost. If someone is living in a remote area, it would be extremely expensive to provide connectivity through either fibre or through satellite.
Hence enabling domestically created technologies such as utilization of TV Whitespaces frequency, that makes it realistically possible to provide rural connectivity at an affordable cost, becomes a critical policy issue. The government needs to take a policy call to keep public radio frequency resources for the public, instead of privatising the entire public resource.
The TV Whitespace technology works on the principle of sharing the radio frequency resources through a community infrastructure, without the need to have large telecom companies involved. The technology senses that no one is using the spectrum and quickly sends or receives the data packet, thus enabling rural connectivity. Since this operates in the lower frequencies, one is able to connect across 20 km through a single set of antennas, as demonstrated by IIT Bombay.
To make this a reality, the government needs to keep 40 MHz of spectrum to be freely used without license by general public, and thus avoid privatization of public resources.
If we can achieve the above framework, we can achieve a truly citizen-centric and inclusive government that is able to care for the last person standing (antodaya).
The author is Partner at KPMG India.
The article first appeared in print edition of Express Computer magazine, February 2016 issue. Read it here : Express Computer, February, 2016