Gopalakrishnan Palakkil
India Business Head (ITS)
MindTree
Governments should select vendors on a more transparent basis rather than a price-based approach
The fact that e-Governance can make service delivery by the government far more superior and predictable has been embraced by all sectors, be it corporate, government or the civil society. Citizen satisfaction has certainly gone up, as government services have come closer and are available 24/7 in many cases. Also, there is more transparency and innovation that is happening across the board. Conceptualisation of National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) leading to mission mode projects (MMPs) at the central and state level has been undoubtedly the landmark event in the e-Governance scenario in the country. The programme has given a framework and a structure to the initiative of using IT.
However, technology is not yet being utilised to its full potential. It is pertinent to have dedicated technology champions, who are empowered adequately, in each entity which takes up all these e-Governance projects.
The future, though, looks good. We are rapidly progressing on the path of speedy delivery of governance services and thus becoming digitally governed successfully. In the coming years, there will be more back-end computerisation and connectivity between different government departments leading to a single window delivery of services to citizens. Common Service Centres (CSCs) would be the main channel of service delivery, education and information dissemination in rural areas in the days to come. We are late on the track of achieving 1lakh CSCs, but can look forward to achieving the target in near future.
The next wave in terms of innovations could be in business Intelligence and cloud computing. Electronic service delivery should be mandatory for all departments, the first step in this regard has already been taken in the draft bill. Governments should trust and incentivise the private industry to acquire domain knowledge and also select vendors on a more transparent basis rather than a price-based approach. Public-Private partnership is the key forward for the success of these projects and private sector should be made more involved in the ideation too so as to give them ownership.
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 “Virtualisation is currently the ultimate remedy for CIOs who are faced with growth challenges, compute power utilisation issues and data centre utilisation problems” |
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