“eGovernance is a partnership between the government and the private sector. It can succeed when both sides cooperate and collaborate in the fullest possible way,” says Tapan Ray, Additional Secretary, Department of Electronics & IT (DeitY)
By Anoop Verma
“After joining the IAS, my first district posting was in Baroda as the District Development Officer. During those days, personal computers were a rarity. Hardly any government office had one,” reminisces Tapan Ray, Additional Secretary, Department of Electronics & IT (DeitY). But despite the low level of computerisation, Ray was fascinated by computers and he decided that his office in the district needed one. Hence, he purchased a Personal Computer for his office.
He says, “In those days, I think, it was called PC-XT. Such was the significance of a Personal Computer in that generally computer-less era that my Chief Secretary came all the way from Gandhinagar to the district for inaugurating the PC-XT.” He also informs that next day the news was everywhere in the media—in the newspapers and even in Doordarshan’s news broadcasts. “The level of computerisation was so low in those days that the purchase of a simple PC-XT was enough to make news.”
When asked about the kind of contribution that the PC-XT made in the overall development of eGovernance in the country, Tapan Ray says, “You can think of that purchase of PC-XT as a small initial step in the direction that has now brought us to the stage where we can start working for Digital India.”
First Steps Towards Computerisation
What kind of work did the PC-XT do in the district headquarter in Baroda? Ray informs that during those days the district Panchayat used to collect lot of information for the ‘village amenities survey’. The information collected was mostly related to the status of approach roads to the villages, the number of schools, drinking water facilities, health, toilets and other amenities that the villages had. However, much of this work of data collection and analysis was done manually. “I thought why not computerise the process? Why not store the data in a digital format in the computer, so that it can be easily retrieved and analysed? It was then that I decided to get the PC-XT,” he says.
“Ours was the first district panchayat in the country at that time to use a personal computer for this kind of data crunching work,” he adds. He accepts that the PC-XT was quite slow to work with. “It was funny,” he says, “if you put a query regarding the number of villages without an approach road, the PC-XT took as much as 3 minutes to type out the result.
In 1989, when Tapan Ray was transferred to Godhra as Collector, he got a VSAT connection from the district to NIC Centre in Delhi. It was used to communicate election results to the headquarters. Ray is of the view that this connectivity led to more efficiency in the work being done in Godhra district headquarters. After this when he was appointed the Collector of Baroda, he tried to bring computerisation to the election process. At that time the Lok Sabha elections were being held, and it was found that the manual counting of votes took too much time. “To speed up the process, we created a Local Area Network with a PC on every counting table. The counting officers at each table would feed round-wise results to the returning officer for aggregating the data in real time. With this system, the time needed for the process was reduced by at least six hours.”
Digital India Programme
Now posted as the Additional Secretary in Department of Electronics and IT, Ray is working with the aim of driving the government of India’s most ambitious development programme—Digital India. He says, “The Digital India programme has nine pillars. This programme puts together many existing schemes, which are being restructured and re-focussed, so that they can be implemented in a synchronised manner. In some cases we only need to make process improvements, which are low on investments but high on returns. Progress is being made on all the nine pillars at a steady pace. During the last few months we have successfully rolled out many eGovernance projects.”
Ray is enthusiastic about the way the large number of mobile phone connections in the country can be used for providing information and services to the citizens. He talks about the IT platform that DeitY has created for quickly sending messages to large numbers of recipients. The Mass Messaging Application has already been developed and it has 1.36 crore mobile numbers and 22 lakh email IDs in its database. When asked about the steps that have been taken to ensure that the system does not get misused for rumourmongering and spamming, Ray says, “We have taken steps to have all the security related safeguards in place.”
“In order to ensure the success of the Digital India programme, we need to get the people across the country to participate in it. This is what MyGov is doing,” says Ray. He explains that MyGov which has been launched by the Hon’ble Prime Minister has been created to generate an atmosphere of partnership between the citizens and the government. The government aims to encourage Citizen Participation towards Good Governance by seeking their ideas, suggestions and grass roots level contribution. “For the first time in the history of this country, technology has been used in this manner to enable the citizens to participate directly in nation building,” he says.
So what kind of response is the MyGov programme having from the people? Ray says, “Currently the programme has 7.5 lakh members. More people are coming in on a daily basis.” But when so many people are expressing their opinion isn’t there a danger of the best ideas getting lost in the crowd? Ray does not think that to be a problem. “We have a team to go through all the ideas that are being provided at the MyGov website. The ideas that have a merit will be forwarded to the relevant departments, where they are further analysed and if they are found suitable, they are put to use,” he informs.
He feels that the biometric attendance system, which has already started covering all the central government offices in Delhi, is leading to seminal improvements in the efficiency and performance of the government departments. “The manual system of keeping attendance is being phased out gradually,” he says. “The Aadhaar enabled biometric attendance system is leading to much better productivity. Those who are habitually late can now be easily identified and penalised.”
Overcoming Challenges in eGovernance
What is the key challenge that the government faces in developing eGovernance in the country? Ray says that the lack of high-speed connectivity in most parts of the country is a cause for concern. Unless there is high-speed connectivity, it is not possible for the government to provide online information and services.
“Once there is high speed connectivity in all parts of the country, it will open up new avenues for Access service providers such as Telecom Service Providers, Internet Service Providers, and Cable TV operators, Content Providers etc., to launch next generation services and spur creation of local employment opportunities in a big way. This will enable us to bridge the digital divide significantly,” he says.
As of now high speed connectivity through optical fibre cable is only available in larger towns and cities. What steps are being taken to connect the villages? Ray says that the government has started the National Optical Fibre Network(NOFN) to connect all the 2,50,000 Gram Panchayats in the country. “This will be done by utilising existing fibres of PSUs (BSNL, Railtel and Power Grid) and laying incremental fibre to connect to Gram Panchayats wherever necessary. Dark fibre network ,thus created will be lit by appropriate technology for creating sufficient bandwidth at the Gram Panchayats,” he says.
He also informs that the estimated cost of the project is Rs. 20000 crore, which is being implemented by the Department of Telecommunications.
How does the government ensure that there is enthusiastic participation of the private sector in the government? Addressing this issue, Ray says that the present government is keen to ensure that the private sector is involved in execution as well as financing of the eGovernance projects. “We understand very well that eGovernance should be a win-win proposition for the private companies,” he says. “If the companies are unable to make legitimate profits, why should they work?”
“Private sector should also take cognisance of the fact that now the country is having a stable policy environment, and if the companies are creating effective systems of eGovernance, they will be able to make reasonable profits.” He goes on to say that eGovernance is a partnership between the government and the private sector. It can succeed only when both sides cooperate and collaborate in the fullest possible way. Digital India has the potential to open up huge opportunities for the private sector as well.
“eGovernance does not have to be a distant dream for this country,” says Ray. “The private sector in the IT industry is doing quite well, so there is no reason why India cannot have world-class eGovernance.”
