West Bengal, Jharkhand and Bihar have emerged the worst three e-governed states in India, according to an IDC-Dataquest study.
West Bengal, which has been traditionally slow to computerise, covered a lot of ground in the last few years but still has long way to go, the report said. It is among the last three on six of the 12 citizens satisfaction parameters and seven of the 15 business satisfaction parameters.
Interestingly, West Bengal, that ranked 19, had a per capita allocation of Rs 13.78 on IT, higher than the IT spend of the best e-governed state Tamil Nadu at Rs 8.31, showing that IT spend is not the sole criterion for providing good governance.
Not unexpectedly, Bihar, a first time entrant in the list, was a laggard in all 27 parameters for citizen and business services.
Jharkhand was among the bottom three in nine of the 12 citizen parameters and all 15 business parameters. The only three parameters where it was not among the bottom three were agriculture, healthcare and employment exchanges.
Tamil Nadu, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, Haryana and Andhra Pradesh emerged the five best e-governed states of 2008-09, according to the survey.
Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh climbed three spots each over last year's ranking, to emerge at one and fivepositions respectively.
Delhi slipped two ranks from one last year and Himachal Pradesh and Haryana climbed five and 14 places respectively to be among the top five states of the year.
Karnataka and Kerala record the highest drop in e-governance satisfaction Karnataka, home to India's Silicon Valley, dropped nine places to 16 followed by South Indian state of Kerala that dropped 13 spots to reach 18.
"E-governance has a long way to go in India. Central departments are duplicating work as they build multiple citizen databases, like Census, voter IDs, PAN records, food and civil supplies, and wasting thousands of crores." said Prasanto Roy, chief editor, Dataquest.
"India's federal structure gives autonomy to the states, who are keen to guard their turf, but turns into a challenge when it comes to replicating good projects as the states are distrustful of providing too much information transparency to Central departments," Roy added.
On the outlook, the report states that Indian states are lining up ambitious e-governance projects. The Union Budget for 2008-09 increased the allocation to the Department of Information Technology by 12 per cent to Rs 1,680 crore. The scheme for establishing 100,000 Citizen Service Centers (CSCs) and setting up State Wide Area Netrworks (SWANs) across states is also in progress.
The Dataquest-IDC survey measures citizen satisfaction under 'e-Governance Satisfaction Study' along with ease of use, availability, and quality of e-governance services. The results of the survey are based on a survey that assessed every state's IT vision, implementation and ease of use of services. It also took into account IT allocation for new projects in 2007-08, implementation of these projects, and user satisfaction among 3,150 citizens and businesses. E-governance projects in 21 states were profiled for coverage and achievements that had combined weight of 11 per cent in the overall assessment.
Each state was also assessed on the per capita IT spending on projects implemented in 2007-08 with a weightage of 6 per cent in the overall assessment.The states were rated on the basis of ICT and social, educational infrastructure and were allocated weightage of 8 per cent in the overall assessment. Finally, the study evaluated the effectiveness of IT deployment, based on a survey of citizens as well as businsses regarding actual satisfaction with the delivery of services.
Feedback was sought on 12 major government services to citizens as well as 15 key government services to businesses. To make a meaningful and broad-based assessment 3,150 citizen users and business users were covered with 150 interviews in each state divided equally among urban and rural citizens and professionals and business heads of small, mid-size and large corporates. The scores obtained from this survey were allocated a weightage of 75 per cent.
