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E-Government, Government CXO

Mobile governance to be key focus of DIT

By Priyadarshini Paul | 14 April 2011

Shankar Aggarwal, Additional Secretary, Department of IT, highlighted some of the key milestones and upcoming mission endeavours of his Department at FutureGov Forum India. The Forum, held on Tuesday 12 April, saw central government officials, state IT secretaries and their foreign government peers discussing about pressing issues surrounding e-governance in India.

Presently 13 State Data Centres (SDCs), 26 SWANS providing connectivity to each block of 2 Mbps, 600,000 Common Service Centres, and 95000 tele-centres are operational throughout the country. By the end of 2011 all SDCs will be operational. In addition, the Mobile Service Delivery Gateway (MSDG) for channelling all G2C services through mobile phones will be ready by the end of this year. Aggarwal said, “By 31st December 2011 guidelines for m-governance will be rolled out and all MMPs will get integrated through mobile”.

The Electronic Service Delivery Bill, (that proposes to transform all public services in electronic mode in the next five years and is under inter-ministerial consultation), will be passed as an Act by August 2011. Immediately within 180 days from the date of this Bill notification transforming into an Act, all government departments will have to identify the first set of services which needs to be in electronic mode upon their level of readiness.

He emphasised the need for business process re-engineering, centralised processes of governance but decentralised implementation and creation of a common platform for cloud computing so innovative technologies can be shared by all government units across the country. He also mentioned, “We need to build standards for interoperability on our policies. Today our policy is of open standard – adopt single and royalty free open standard within a particular domain and that will ensure we do not enter into a vendor and/or technology lock-head”.

The key concerns for the Government of India today is ensuring transparency and accountability in governance and harnessing inclusive growth. Hence, e-Governance in India is not perceived as electronic governance, but rather a catalyst for ‘empowerment’. Given India’s ethnic, rural, linguistic, and religious circumstances, Right-based policy legislation coupled with rapid digitisation will drive the economy with highest growth rate in the years to come. Aggarwal emphasised, “We need sustainable inclusive growth rate through quality education, health services, financial inclusion, skill upgradation, employment generation and green technologies.”

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