Costs seen key to e-gov success

Nasscom-Business World Infocmm 2004

Cost containment should be a key factor in e-governance model and, as part of this strategy, governments should adopt the outsourcing model, was the dominant view of speakers at the Infocom 2004 on Friday.

Roopen Roy, managing director of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), said e-governance should be preached and practised with cost containment. As a first step in this direction, state governments should adopt the competition model, given that resources are limited.

"Resources and applications should be shared among different states," said Roy. He cited examples, Andhra Pradesh government's Bhoomi project could be drawn by West Bengal, while West Bengal government's education model could be used by Andhra Pradesh. The idea was to share scarce resources.

Ajai Chowdhry, chairman and chief executive officer HCL Infosystems said, states should move from pilot projects to scaling them and the projects should be monitored on a mission mode.

All the speakers agreed that the ultimate objective of e-governance was to change the relationship between the state and the citizen. Roy said, citizen must be treated like a customer.

According to Chowdhry, some issues which would make a difference to citizens' lives were PC penetration in rural areas, centralised passport and visa systems, computerisation of PDS, online police complaints, IT-enabled ESI, PF, online applications for land registrations, tax payments, applications for various licenses.

Jaijit Bhattacharya, CEO, Oracle India, said 80 per cent of all e-governance initiatives have failed. He explained that one of the main reasons behind the failure of the projects was that they were champion-driven. "The system will have to be institutionalised" he said.