With a new government taking charge in New Delhi, any progress on this front would go a long way towards improving our global standing. Information technology (IT) can play a critical role in bringing about these governance reforms. Ironically, India may be a global leader in software development, but it has failed to harness the true potential of this revolution to smoothen the glitches within government service delivery.
A massive project in Andhra Pradesh called "Mee Seva" (which means "At Your Service" in Telugu) has shown that it is possible to leverage IT to transform governance and offer citizens considerable relief in their day-to-day interaction with the government.
This project is arguably the world's biggest e-governance initiative handling 350 services and 100 million transactions a year with 7,500 citizen centres run by self-employed youth. The project was awarded the National e-Governance Gold Award for citizen-centric service delivery by the Government of India this year.
Though the outcomes of this project look staggering, the story of its journey needs to be told so that these learnings can help the rest of the country to not reinvent the wheel.
Before the idea of this project arose, various departments in the state, operating as independent silos, were unwilling to reform and reluctant to cede control. This created the conditions for perpetuating vested interests associated with red tape.
So first, the idea had to be conceptualised and conveyed evocatively enough to capture the imagination of the political and administrative bosses, and packaged creatively to get their attention and acquiescence. A blueprint was developed to re-engineer the business processes through data digitisation and digital signatures, cloud hosting and identification of high-volume citizen/business services for across-the-counter delivery through an integrated format. It worked on the concept that all records would be centrally pooled and stored using web-services, so that the documents are electronically verifiable and tamper-proof. Another precondition was to ensure that citizen requests were received in the public domain and outside the confines of a government office, so that the time taken to dispose of them could be tracked.
Technical, legal and structural issues apart, the toughest challenge was to bring about an attitudinal change in the officials concerned, besides ensuring citizen e-participation in a country with a huge digital divide. To mitigate this, an innovative public-private partnership business model was formulated under which educated young people were inducted to open service centres with uniform branding, infrastructure and the right approach to deliver services in return for a nominal user fee.
Ready with a template, the political mandate was taken to start a pilot test in one district, even though there were reservations from the "lobby brigade". However, a vast exercise in identifying the right services, developing software and opening delivery channels started. The first pilot was ready with 10 services in three months. This pilot yielded good results, so the exercise began to spread it state wide. More departments and services were added to this unique business model. Supported by positive political goodwill, legislators were persuaded to promulgate a supportive law and make this a "flagship good governance initiative".
With positive feedback from citizens and strong encouragement from the government, the reluctant officers realised the convenient and cost-effective nature of this experiment. The slowly weakening opposition was dealt with, through strategic insight and robust dialogue. Multi-dimensional teams were constituted to implement the change in department after department.
In the two years since it was introduced, "Mee Seva" has become a revolution in service delivery reform. With services being accessed from anywhere and a strict adherence to citizen charter time limits, Mee Seva has broken the monopoly of the government office and has made a positive impact on the lives the citizens in providing corruption-free access to public services. An evaluation pointed out that with 100 million transactions and an average saving of Rs 1,000 per transaction, Mee Seva has saved a whopping Rs 10,000 crore for indigent citizens and businesses. More importantly, it has provided gainful employment to more than 25,000 young people who have now become digital change agents and a hub for IT-enabled education, and in providing a tele-presence in the villages for health and other extension activities.
The biggest learning that has come out of the exercise is that it is possible to create such a world-class initiative with political and administrative will. But this approach needs a complete transformation in capacity. More than 200,000 functionaries and centre operators were trained on the new IT processes. It is also important for projects of this nature to be implemented at jet speed so as not to provide detractors the opportunity to gang up and undo the gains.
The biggest gain of the project would lie in its eventual ability to break the departmental silos by facilitating online interaction between different departments, thus sparing citizens the misery of acting as a mediator purveying information from one department to the other.
India is a huge, diverse country with varied preparedness levels. In a federal structure with distributed governments and disparate quality of governance at various levels, the role of the Centre is not just to lead and show the way, but also to ensure that best practices are spread with the right infusion of technical and financial support. There is a need to make good governance a central point of the agenda by re-engineering business processes, cutting down procedures and a massive infusion of technology.
We are already on the cusp of a digital revolution; smartphones have brought the internet to the doorsteps of the common man. It is important that these gains are harnessed and the government's service delivery experience, in areas of education, health, agriculture and regulatory administration is adapted and reformed to these changing times. The need is to evolve frugal and simple technological models that can be used by those living at the bottom of the pyramid. This will also create the conditions for sustained and egalitarian growth across the length and breadth of India.
The writer is an IAS officer working as Secretary - IT in the Government of Andhra Pradesh. These views are personal