Engineering eGovernance Solutions

eGovernance is gradually emerging as the the more efficient alternative to the way governments, the world over, discharge their functions. Dr. Pradeep Sinha examines the merits of e-Governance and C-DAC’s expertise in this relatively unexplored area.

The extensive use of Information Technology (IT) in every walk of life has redefined the fundamental principles of delivery of services and operation of service sectors, resulting in faster and easier delivery of much better services than before. Govern-ments around the world have started realizing that the advancements in IT can as well be utilized to provide better services to citizens and business. As a result, a wide range of IT applications are being developed in various Government departments. Electronic Governance (popularly referred to as e-Governance) has emerged as a keyword for all such IT applications, that take advantage of IT to reinvent the way the Government works. Often e-Governance is used as a synonym to describe an IT driven system of Governance that works better, costs less and is capable of servicing the needs of the citizens and businesses as never before. Its goal is to create a more responsive, productive and effective administration. e-Governance is also referred to as SMART Governance because it aims at using IT to the processes of Government functioning to bring about Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsive and Transparent Governance.

Benefits of Electronic Governance

e-Governance sees the people in government, business and citizens working together for the benefit of all. If properly implemented, the benefits of e-Governance are enormous. Some of its obvious benefits are:

Integrated Information:

e-Governance targets to use a government-wide electronic information infrastructure to simplify service delivery, reduce duplication, and improve the level and speed of service to clients at a lower cost. It recommends creating, managing, and prudently sharing information electronically among the various government departments and the different services offered by them. That is, information will be captured once, as close to the source as possible, then shared and re-used by all authorized users. This will avoid manual transcription and re-entering of the same information repeatedly whenever a citizen goes to a new government department for some services.

Integrated Services:

The integrated information approach automatically lends itself to offering integrated services. Different types of services offered by different government departments like collecting taxes, granting licenses, administering regulations, paying grants and benefits, can be availed at one place. This greatly facilitates the citizens by allowing them to perceive the government as a single body to interact with instead of a number of unrelated entities, operating at different locations in different government buildings.

Anywhere Services:

Provision of fully interactive on-line services by e-Governance gives public access to government services with quicker responses at convenient times. This on-line accessibility of stored information from remote locations allows government officials to serve any citizen from a government office located in any part of the state or country.

Anywhere, Anytime Information:

Delivery of services may require interaction between government officials and citizens, but delivery of public-domain information to citizens can be done without any such interaction. Citizens can obtain information related to government processes and procedures through an on-line system without interacting with any government official. In fact, e-Governance can give the average citizen quick, interactive access to a vast array of information, through computers at home or work or through kiosks in convenient public locations, because this access to information can be available at many different locations and at all hours, there is no pressure on individuals to physically visit a Government Office.

Improved Overall Productivity:

e-Governance will significantly contribute to improved overall productivity of both the government officials and the citizens, as it ensures faster interaction among them by electronic mail instead of moving paper files and letters, and in streamlining the workflow of internal government administrative processes such as procurement, recruitment, evaluation, budgeting, planning. On the other hand, improved productivity of citizens results because of the facility of anytime, anywhere services and information.

Better Decision Making and Planning:

The integrated information base of e-Governance helps planners and decision makers to perform extensive analysis of stored data to provide answers to the queries of the administrative cadre. This facilitates taking well informed policy decisions for citizen facilitation and accessing their impact over the intended section of the population. This in turn helps them to formulate more effective strategies and policies for citizen facilitation.

Better Security and Protection of Information:

e-Governance uses the integrated information approach for keeping all information at one place in electronic form. Thus, keeping the information secure against theft or leakage. Proper backup mechanisms also help in protecting the valuable information from getting lost due to natural calamities such as fires, earthquakes, and floods.

Issues and Challenges

Achieving the benefits of e-Governance may not be easy and goes far beyond mere computerization of government processes. Its successful implementation not only poses technical challenges but also requires a fundamental change in the manner in which the government operates today. In fact, the challenges the Governments are likely to face would be, how to cope with re-engineering the government processes and functions and related issues of new responsibilities for civil servants, businesses and citizens.

Some of the technical challenges in the successful implementation of e-Governance are :

Creating the Integrated Information Base:

Gathering and integrating information is the first basic requirement of e-Governance. This requires building of various types of data entry systems that can operate as close as possible to the source of data and can capture the different types of data to be kept in the integrated information base. Considerable effort needs to be made to the task of deciding what data to keep, how to capture the identified data, and how to integrate information from multiple sources to create the integrated information base. Even universal, easy-to-use access is of little use if the information is fragmented, contradictory, out-of-date, poorly indexed, or simply not of interest or use.

Accessing of Information:

To make the best use of data stored in the integrated information base, they should be universally and easily accessible by the end users. This requires design and installation of easy to operate access devices such as kiosks, push-button telephones and access terminals at all locations from where access is desired. This also requires wide-area networking of all these equipment and the integrated information base. Moreover, essential software that will allow different categories of users to visualize the data in a form useful and understandable to them will also be required.

Finding the Right Information:

The integrated information base contains all types of data that is of interest to many different types of users. Hence, quickly finding and accessing a desired piece of information from this large ocean of information may not be easy for a user. To enable this, the system must have the necessary tools to properly structure the data and quickly search for the desired information.

Security and Privacy of Information:

While e-Governance allows information to be gathered, stored, and shared more readily than ever before, it also raises important issues of protecting information from unauthorized changes and safeguarding personal privacy. Proper user authentication and access control mechanisms need to be implemented to ensure that only authorized users can access a particular piece of information. Additionally, encryption techniques will be required to safeguard tampering of information by unauthorized users when critical information flows on communication channels or networks.

C-DAC and Electronic Governance

e-Governance is a vast area encompassing almost all types of tools and technologies provided by Information Technology. The expertise and technologies developed by C-DAC, since its inception have been utilized towards implementation of a successful e-Governance infrastructure.

Supercomputing Technology:

C-DAC is well known as a pioneer in building scalable, high performance computers in the desktop to teraflop range. These high performance computers are suitably utilized for storage of large volumes of data in the integrated information base, and ideally used for acting as large data base servers with parallel search tools to enable quick access of any desired information from the database.

Multilingual Technology:

C-DAC has innovated its trail-blazing and from very popular Graphics and Intelligence based Script Technology (GIST) that allows the co-existence of all the living languages of the world with diverse scripts on standard computers. This technology is very useful in e-Governance for providing the accessed information to the end users in their own languages. Computer Assistance Translation Technology: C-DAC has developed a natural language purser that has been used to develop tools for translating sentences from English to Hindi. This technology can be easily deployed in e-Governance in view of the requirements that all Government notifications and orders must be bilingual, that is, in both English and in a language of work, like Hindi.

IT Training:

Over the years, C-DAC’s Advanced Computing Training School (ACTS) has been successfully imparting IT-related training to prepare intellecresources for the growing IT industry. The success of e-Governance will certainly depend on IT-literate government officers and citizens. The training expertise available with C-DAC’s ACTS has been utilized to impart IT training to a large number of people. In fact, the Diploma in Information Technology (DIT) course of ACTS has been mainly introduced with this objective in mind.

Multimedia Technology:

C-DAC’s expertise in the development and usage of Multimedia technology, is useful in making an e-Governance system much more lively, attractive and interesting by infusing graphics, image, sound, animation and video in it.

Information System Technology:

In the form of turnkey contracts, C-DAC has gained expertise in the design, development and deployment of information systems that deal with the capturing, storage and retrieval of information. Few examples of such successfully executed projects are : -

- Hospital Information System (HIS)
- Telecom Billing and Accounting System
- Land Management System, Works Management System
- Employees Information Management System
- Accommodation Management
- Inventory Management, Budgeting and Planning System.

• Automation in large laboratory systems
• Supervisory control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system for Power
• Legislative council / Assembly Information Management System;
• Stamp Registration,
• Scanning and Archiving System.
  The applications developed in these projects are very much in line with the applications required in e-Governance. Hence this expertise can be directly utilized to build e-Governance applications across the states.

Data Warehousing Technology:

C-DAC in collaboration with Andhra Pradesh Technology Services (APTS), has developed an information warehouse for aiding state level officials in their decision making process. The objective is to organize Multi Purpose Household Survey (MPHS) data and land records data of the Andhra Pradesh Government, into a meaningful Information Warehouse to assist the Government decision makers and policy planners in taking well informed decisions and assessing their impact over the intended section of the population. This technology is directly usable in e-Governance for better decision-making.

Networking Technology:

C-DAC has also gained expertise in designing and laying large campus-wide networks by executing turnkey projects. These include implementation of an FDDI based backbone networks with a large number (upto 1000) of nodes and server as hub in both LAN and WAN configurations for a number of prestigious organisations in India. This expertise of C-DAC has been utilized in the planning and laying of large networks required for the successful operation of an e-Governance system. To demonstrate its capabilities in e-Governance, C-DAC has set up a test bed of e-Governance at the Department of Information Technology (DIT), Delhi comprising of some of the major technology components discussed above, and showcasing a number of applications developed and deployed in India by vendors including those by C-DAC.

Dr. Pradeep K. Sinha is the Programme Coordinator of the National PARAM Supercomputing Facility (NPSF) at C-DAC, Pune. He is also the Chief Investigator of the Datawarehousing Project of Government of Andhra Pradesh.
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