National policy on e-governance required

Shashwat Chaturvedi

MUMBAI: India, by many, has been described as a graveyard of e-governance pilots. While we keep hearing about new and grander pilot launches each year by a whole hosts of states in India, not much is known about the success of these projects. One of the chief reason behind it has been, there has been no comprehensive policy on e-governance.

Every state government so as to speak keeps re-inventing the wheel, starting from scratch and going all the way up.

Now, Deepak Ghaisas, CEO India Operations and CFO, i-flex Solutions (also the chairman of NASSCOM Product Forum) is mooting the creation of a ‘national policy on e-governance’. “Recently, I was having a word with Sam Pitroda (chairman, Knowledge Commission) and we discussed the feasibility of a national policy on e-governance projects. I am a strong votary of the same and feel that we should be really working on it,” he says.

Talking about the duplication that takes place in innumerable pilot projects, Ghaisas said, “Literally, every state government is re-inventing the wheel. Imagine if we could freeze on certain standards, it would save a whole lot of time and effort and not to mention money. It would also improve speed and transparency in the way the projects are implemented.”

“It would also boost a lot of innovations, once things have been standardized and key learnings between different states exchanged, e-governance would really go to the next level. Take for instance, the local language interface; in India there are so many languages and dialects, in fact more than that of the whole of European Union. Thus it is very important that we share knowledge on different e-governance projects,” he added.

But, it is not only because of transparency and speed that Ghaisas is mooting such a policy, according to him the use of technology by different state governments would give an immense boost to the domestic IT industry.

“According to estimates, 23 per cent of government spending goes on defense, while 46 per cent of it on governance. Now, even if a small fraction is spent on technology, namely to streamline the processes. It will really boost the domestic tech industry. For that to happen we need to have a vision and a robust policy on how to go about things,”Ghaisas added.

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