'Our strongest focus in e-Gov is now on services'

The government of India, fuelled by a will to increase IT pene-tration in the

country by delivering meaningful services, is working towards developing a

strategy to identify viable e-governance projects that can be rolled out

nationally. Zia Askari of CyberMedia News spoke to R Chandrashekhar, Joint

Secretary, Ministry of Communications and IT, Government of India, about the

government's focus on e-governance and also about its plans for the near

future.

How will you define e-gove-rnance? Has the definition of this concept

changed over a period of time?



E-governance can be defined as an initiative designed to make different

government service available-electroni-cally, faster, reliable and in a

transparent mode. Indeed the definition has changed quite a bit. Initially, our

focus was to create basic infrastructure for this concept-the input devi-ces

and the focus was towards increasing the concept of e-governance within the

gov-ernment itself. G2G was the focus then and now it has changed tow-ards

delivering customer-oriented services.

What kind of focus does the government have towards various e-governance

initia-tives and projects?



All the e-government related projects are now focusing tow-ards integrating

various servi-ces towards increasing the IT penetration in the society. So

services is clearly the most imp-ortant focus for us now, though in the

beginning we did not focused on it. The government is also working towards

identi-fying certain viable projects in areas like transportation, land records

and registration.

What kind of roadblocks do you see in front of a national rollout for a

successful e-gov project?



Technology is a very small part of the overall e-governa-nce game plan.

Though there are not many technological roadblocks in front of national roll out-still

there are issues like the difference in language and also the difference in laws

for different states. These can be small issues but we will still have to

overcome these issues in order to scale up different successful e-gov projects

nationally.

Evaluation of various e-gov projects has already been started at the program

as well as at the project level. We are always ready to provide techni-cal

support and funding of certain proj-ects. Moving forward, it is likely that more

than one-third of the spending on e-governance arena will come from

non-government sources.

At present, there are around six registration-focused pro-jects, 15 transport

related pro-jects and a lot of land record related projects running with

different states at the moment. Moving forward we would be taking some of these

select projects for national rollouts.

What do you feel about the announced national broad-band policy, how is it

likely to increase the e-govern-ance focus for the country?



The broadband policy anno-unced by the government is going to provide a

much-needed trigger to increase connectivity at the lower level. Most

importantly, the policy has now allowed the outdoor usage of Wi-Fi. This is

likely to spur the increase in rural connectivity.