The political class still works off-line

It's just one of those many paradoxes that abound in India. Indian politicians routinely thump their chests about India's software strength.

Chief ministers of states "" even the most backward ones "" roll out the red carpet for software czars and frame fancy information technology (IT) policies, never mind power blackouts and poor bandwidth.

MPs and MLAs scramble for free laptops distributed at taxpayer expense. Even Bihar put Laloo Yadav's famous remark "" "yeh IT sab bakwaas hai" "" behind it and, in 2001, planned an international software technology conference to attract investors.

And yet, IT finds very little place in the working of the Indian political system. Sure, the electoral system is getting wired up and computerised voting cards and electronic voting have, to an extent, reduced the role of the bullet in the ballot.

And e-governance is changing the way public services are being delivered. But within the offices of politicians and political parties, IT means little more than a few computers being used as glorified typewriters.

That is unfortunate, because IT can, say National Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) officials, completely transform the manner in which politics is conducted, flattening hierarchies and ushering in transparency.

Local and wide area networks (LAN and WAN) make information easier to access and disseminate, enabling people to contact and influence others and facilitates lobbying.

In 1998, Sanjiv Verma, managing director of the web designing firm Univall Infotech Ltd conducted an on-line poll, 45 days before the 1998 general elections.

The website got around 70,000 hits during that period. There are several discussion groups on political and policy issues on the Internet, many of which get an enthusiastic response.

Clearly, there is an enormous potential to use IT to mobilise public opinion in India. The Internet is an ideal tool for putting out information on candidates for various elections.

Nasscom officials say that, ideally, IT can also enable people to contact their elected representatives easily, making their opinion known on important matters and monitoring their performance.

Within political parties, IT can bring about a significant change in the manner of its functioning. Rajiv Desai, founder-president of public relations firm IPAN, believes it can be an effective tool to increase the productivity and effectiveness of an organisation and empower far-flung clusters and individuals.

It can, for example, help bridge the communication gap within parties which fuels inner party intrigues, increase accessibility of senior party leaders to the rank and file and help the party leadership monitor the performance of its cadres.

United Kingdom's Labour Party has an e-party project which seeks suggestions about how the party can use IT to improve communication with its cadres, help it keep in touch with its members, participate in party decisions and get information across quickly when something happens among other things. Given the vastness of the country, there are important lessons in this for Indian parties.

A quick scan of websites of political parties in Western countries shows immense possibilities. Parties educate the public and build opinion on issues "" national and local "" and invite people's views on them.

They provide details about key people in the party, the position of the party on various issues, as well as details of upcoming conferences, among other things.

On-line chats with leaders are organised and people are invited to send questions on a regular basis. Members of the public can sign up for newsletters sent by email. Parties also have information about membership, other forms of voluntary work and donations.

In India, nobody seems to be even thinking on these lines. IT really came to Indian politics only in the mid-1990s, when the then Speaker of Lok Sabha, Shivraj Patil, started the practice of distributing laptops to MPs and organised training programmes for them.

Barely 5 per cent of the MPs attended these sessions, among them several older generation MPs. Patil recalls I K Gujral and his wife taking keen interest in these classes.

The general disinterest reflected the distrust of IT that was widely prevalent at that time. Politicians were still fiercely opposing automation and computerisation and could hardly be seen hammering away enthusiastically at a key board.

Of course, that didn't stop MPs from taking their free laptops, though it was their children, office staff and sundry relatives who really used them.

MPs were provided funds to hire someone who could help them with computers, but these assistants only ended up as glorified personal assistants (PAs), attending to phone calls and other sundry jobs.

The resistance to IT is waning and the attendance at training sessions in Parliament is more than half. The age divide is being bridged and the current head of the Committee on Information Technology, the deputy speaker of Lok Sabha, is extremely clued in to technology.

He is often known to accost MPs in the corridors of Parliament, checking whether they are attending the training sessions. The Internet is something that politicians across the age spectrum are using a great deal, especially in preparing speeches or accessing information. Patil, for example, often takes the help of his nine-year-old granddaughter to surf the Net.

Yet, even today, few have realised the enormous potential IT has to increase efficiency and change the way politics is conducted. Fortunately, a handful of younger politicians and a few political parties are showing the way.

Individual politicians can and have used IT to their advantage, though not all of them are hands-on users. Take the case of an MP. Each parliamentary constituency comprises five levels of political units, from the gram sabha to the assembly constituencies.

Each MP, therefore, has to keep track of hundreds of elected representatives, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in the area, government officials, village elders, visits to villages, voting patterns, promises made, action taken, developmental work and so on.

This gargantuan task can become much simpler with the right use of IT tools. It was only when former power minister Suresh Prabhu started maintaining a database on developmental works he had sanctioned under the MPs' Local Area Development Scheme (MPLADS) that he found that one village in his constituency, with a particularly vocal Shiv Sena leader, had cornered a majority of these schemes. He was then able to take a firmer decision on putting the developmental funds to use elsewhere.

Not all the politicians have the time or the inclination to spend hours before the computer. But they know the uses to which IT can be put and take a keen interest in software developments.

Quite a few have started displaying their email IDs on their visiting cards. Rajya Sabha MP Prithviraj Chavan of the Congress already has an extensive database on his constituency, Karad, which he taps into regularly.

However, he wants to refine this further. He is now working with a Karad-based software professional to develop a software so he can organise information about villages in Karad as well as key people in these villages "" their names, nicknames along with photographs "" so that he can refresh his memory with the help of printouts or through his laptop as he is driving to each village.

How individual MPs can use IT to increase their efficiency is best illustrated by Prabhu.

He has ensured that all work in his office "" from records of telephone calls to progress reports on developmental works "" is computerised and has got a software development firm to design customised software for a management information system (MIS) to monitor work in his constituency.

Prabhu has three specialised databases relating to his constituency of Rajapur. He has divided the population of his constituency into six interest groups and has got the multifarious welfare schemes relating to these groups organised under these heads.

He is, thus, in a better position to know which schemes are relevant to groups in his constituency and push for their implementation. Says Prabhu: "This would just not have been possible without the help of technology; the information would be unmanageable otherwise."

Besides, Prabhu has a database of all teachers, trade union leaders, caste groups, rickshaw drivers, self-help groups and other key political groups.

There is another database on all the 1,200 villages in Rajapur, based on a survey on 40 parameters, including soil conditions, cropping patterns, climate, rainfall, village bazaar (market) days, caste profile, schools and civic amenities. All villages have been mapped on the basis of this data using GIS software.

All of Prabhu's political managers are on email. He initially wanted to link his political offices in Delhi, Mumbai and Rajapur. When systems developed by software firms proved too expensive,

Prabhu's aides hit upon the idea of using the Yahoo e-group system. There are around 20 members of this e-group and emails on important developments or decisions relating to the constituency are exchanged every day.

Since some of his political workers were not familiar with English, his staff in Delhi and Mumbai initially wrote notes in Marathi, scanned these pages and emailed them as attachments. Later, a Marathi font was downloaded, allowing communication to be carried out in Marathi.

However, it is the MIS package that has made a huge difference to Prabhu's work. Apart from the customised system, some of his aides use Microsoft Access package to manage various databases.

The development schemes have been sorted out area-wise as well as according to ministries and government departments, persons responsible and deadlines.

Action taken is closely tracked, with Prabhu insisting on weekly reports being submitted to him. Several other politicians are known to use IT extensively in their political work "" Kamal Nath and Jyotiraditya Scindia of the Congress, Kirit Somaiyya and Pramod Mahajan of the BJP, to name just four. Yet, these individuals have not been able to influence their party organisations to do the same.