Changing paradigm in government business

There is a plethora of government
opportunity that can be explored and banked upon by the Indian SPs.
This is what Ashis Sanyal, former Senior Director-Department of
Information Technology, Government of India, believes. “For
sustainable inclusive growth, we see ICT as an effective enabler for
inclusive growth, deployment of ICT in all walks of government
business, massive application of electronic governance, and there is
a need to bring in citizen-centricity in government activities,”
said Sanyal. One area where the Indian SPs can delve
deep into the government sector is National e-Governance Plan (NeGP).
NeGP has been formulated with inclusive vision, wherein the
government has identified citizen-centric services. NeGP's vision is
to make all government services accessible to the common man in his
locality through common services. It ensures efficiency and
transparency and features centralized initiative but de-centralized
implementation. According to Sanyal, NeGP involves
public-private partnerships as the preferred financial/operational
model; centralized program management; state-wise project level
management; and PMU created in almost all projects wherein external
consultancy is used. Furthermore, government is moving from product
procurement to service, as it believes that asset creation is not the
solution. Today, most of the NeGP projects are deploying the PPP
model, as government is seeing value in PPP model for ICT
infrastructure development projects.

As far as NeGP is concerned, Sanyal
sees forward and backward linkage between SPs and government
agencies. There is potential business opportunity under NeGP for SPs,
as it has massive core infrastructure services like SWANs, SDCs, and
CSCs amongst others. Also, ICT Capex is amortized as Opex over the
project period. Moreover, SPs should not forget the mobile
environment, as it provides an extremely conducive eco-system for
them to grow exponentially. With rural mobile penetration and
infrastructure going up, it can be certainly said that SPs have a
long way to go and prove their mettle.