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'Public-private partnerships key for good e-gov'

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CIOL Bureau
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NEW DELHI: While inaugurating the third Egov Summit in New Delhi - Suresh Pachauri, Minister of state-Personnel, Public Grievances & Pension, said that public private partnerships are a key factor in taking forward the spirit of e-governance.



"The UPA government is fully committed towards enhancing public private partnership environment when it comes to e-governance initiatives. E-governance is all about good governance and it involves creating a viable financial environment when it comes to evolving public private partnerships. We are making necessary efforts to reduce the digital divide in the country," he added.



Stressing the need to realize the full potential of ICT — Pachauri said that technology is not an all-important factor when it comes to implementing an e-governance project and there are other issues to be addressed.



"Technology can only facilitate good governance. So we should not give too much of emphasis on technologies and try to concentrate on implementation. We are yet to realize the full potential of ICT. Lot of effort is needed to transform the government in order to usher in an era of economic and social growth. Ideally, ICT should benefit from technological advancements in all strata of society," he explained.



Speaking at the same occasion and giving insight into issues relating to the national roll-out of various e-gov projects, R Chandrashekhar, Joint Secretary & CVO-DIT said that the whole orientation of government has now shifted towards services and e-gov is no more just a government issue.



"While services and their right delivery is key for e-gov projects. The very concept of e-governance has now gone out of the government environment and now we have a lot of stakeholders who have interest in these projects and their implementations. We are moving from a supply-driven atmosphere to a demand-driven situation," he explained.



Highlighting the importance of process re-engineering while introducing various e-governance projects, Chandrashekhar said that process re-engineering is a critical part of change management and it should be given due importance.



"There are some people who say that we should get IT first and that we should not re-engineer the processes. Second category of people say that we need to re-engineer the processes. I firmly believe that process re-engineering is required to aptly reap the benefits of introducing IT into a process and this is a critical part of change management," he explained.



Explaining the advantages of technology for the whole society — Chandrashekhar said that neutral behavior of technology towards introduction of good governance into disparate social and political environment is beneficial for all.



"A good e-gov project helps in decentralisation as well as provides a centralised approach towards managing resources. As technology is always neutral — it helps is curbing red-tapism and issues related to other malpractice's," he added.



Highlighting some of the problems that the government is facing when it comes to rolling e-gov projects on a larger scale, Chandrashekhar said that there is a lack of capacity within the government to grapple with critical issues related to e-governance.



"Within the government there is a huge deficiency of capacity to grapple with such issues and this is the single biggest bottleneck for the government. So whether it is department of IT or the planning commission — capacity building is a major task," he explained.



With a theme 'Making E-Governance Happen' this series of seminars attracted a lot of interest from the industry as well as the government quarters. Having touched Kolkota on Feb 21 and Mumbai on Feb 24th — New Delhi was the third stop. The next seminar from this series is scheduled on March 3rd at Chennai.

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