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By Shri. R.K. Arora
Executive Director, C-DAC & Director, NCST
Employing Information
and Communication Technology for Citizen Empowerment
- Some Success Stories and Trends
Shri. Govindarajan,
Shri. Bagchee, Shri. Tyagi, distinguished guests, members
of the State Bank fraternity, members from the Press
and friends: Good afternoon. When Dr. Upendra Rao (Joint
Director - IT, SBIICM) had talked to me about 3-4 weeks
ago about this occasion, he mentioned to me that one
of the purposes was to have a lecture on a subject of
topical interest, in the form of a keynote address.
I was wondering as to why I was being approached for
a lecture from an organization, which is generally perceived
among the masses as not being so much IT savvy. Though
this may be a general perception, I do not share it.
So I raised the question' "what would be an interesting
topic that you would like me to cover". He left
it entirely on me, but gave a background on the kind
of audience that would be available at this event. I
also came to know from him and as is evident now, that
this will be the 4th lecture and I am in the select'
group of three other luminaries who have delivered lectures
in this forum. At that point of time I felt greatly
honored to receive this invitation l readily agreed,
and decided to come.
When it came to the
subject of discussion obviously what occurred to me
was to talk about an issue, which we all talk about
in our everyday life, in our general discussions, both
at the official level and also at informal level.
Digital Divide and
Digital Unity
Even though the IT
revolution is sweeping the globe rapidly, one finds
increasingly, the issue of digital divide. Rather than
solving the problem and creating a digital unite, IT
is probably creating a bigger digital divide among the
haves and have-nots. So what is the role of information
technology - to bridge this gap and convert the digital
divide into a digital unite? It is this issue that caught
up my attention and I thought I must touch upon this
subject in this gathering. And therefore I choose, as
you just heard, the topic of employing Information Communication
Technology - ICT is the acronym normally used - for
citizen empowerment, and of course talking to you about
some case studies, success stories and present you some
trends as to where things are progressing. It was also
important that a subject like this is discussed in a
forum like this, apart from the Government level.
Government Initiatives
At the Central Government
level, way back in 1977, when the Government decided
to institute a task force on IT and software to give
a considerable impetus to building this industry, it
was realized that this is a knowledge industry, which
is going to be the main stay in building the economic
strength of the country. In today's scenario, the strength
of any nation is neither determined by its military
strength nor any other strength, but obviously determined
by, the technological strength it has. Technology today
is the capital every nation strives to possess. It is
this capital that translates, that helps to translate,
into economic prosperity. It also helps, to translate
in building sovereign nationalities through, investment
in education, other economic sectors military and so
on.
IT, therefore, becomes
a, subject of paramount importance that everyone has
been talking all these times. After I left the Government,
I took this opportunity to do something to come out
with some usable products usable solutions and usable
technologies which can help convert the digital divide
to digital unite. Therefore I thought that I should
share with you some of my own experiences of the last
4-5 years.
IT as catalyst of
economic activities
Let me start by saying
that practically all world economies have indeed recognized
the importance of information technology in catalyzing
economic activities, in building human resources, in
providing efficient services through government, through
Corporates and through industries. Significant investment
have been made all these years in IT, more particularly
in the last decade and these investments have been integrated
with the development process to reap all the benefits
that we see the developed nations reaping on such investments.
In the Indian context, the situation has not been different,
because no country can obviously afford to lag behind
in this area and therefore as I said a little while
ago, the Indian government felt, and indeed all the
other state governments, other bodies in corporate sector
felt an important need to contribute, invest and use
IT and so on and so forth.
Indian Context
In the, Indian context
there are two important issues that immediately come
to the fore, which I will be focusing in my talk today.
There are other issues also but I would not be covering
them for the sake of time and because the subject is
of large magnitude. But I thought I, would choose the
two most important issues to put before you.
Whenever we talk about
Information Technology we talk about efficiency in providing
the service and the quality of service. We just saw
that this Institute has been accredited with quality
certification. It is not just a piece of paper that
the institute has received. It is the reflection of
the concern that the Institute has, for being able to
provide quality service and the employees becoming quality-conscious,
becoming cost-conscious and becoming conscious in all
their day-today activities, not just within the organization
but also for the services they offer outside the organization.
Therefore quality becomes important. Herein comes the
very important role of the Government, to start with.
Of course there is also a role for the corporate body,
role for the industry and so on.
eGovernance
But it is the role
of the Government that I would like to touch upon. This
role is transformed into what one calls as services
through eGovernance. Now what is the purpose of eGovernance?
What I am referring to in eGovernance are all those
issues which relate to utilizing IT tools and technologies
to provide efficiency, improvement in quality of services,
to provide greater transparency and improvement in the
processes that a government conducts. This ensures that
at the end of the day, the government provides better
services to its citizens. Now this is not different
from any other service, the IT enabled services that
the corporate sector provides.
eGovernance is a technology-driven
methodology. It helps to realize economic prosperity
in a transparent manner with higher velocity of business,
improved productivity and exciting business opportunities.
You see primarily three things in this - efficiency
improvement, better services and exciting business opportunities
to the enterprises and corporates. So in 'eGovernance
it is not only the Government that is involved but the
whole economy gets involved in terms of IT solutions,
in terms of industrial sectors, business communities
corporate bodies, service providers all of us.
However, before the
era of digital economy evolves, questions obviously
asked are - How can the Government become more responsible,
and accessible? How can the Government enhance its role
as the catalyst of economic growth? How can one provide
better government services? How can the Government use
these advanced technologies for transferring benefits
to the society in terms of improving health care, education,
administrative and citizen interface services? These
obvious questions that are asked often to everybody
are the four important parameters, which I would call
as four pillars of eGovernance.
More
on eGovernance >>
Pillars of eGovernance
The Four Pillars of
eGovernance are Technology, Infrastructure, Contents/
Applications and Implementation Strategy. To elaborate:
Obviously we talk about technologies, which enable better
services to be rendered.
Then there is an important
issue of infrastructure, because technology goes with
infrastructure - infrastructure in the nature of communication,
computing, power, transportation and so on, the entire
lot, which are integrated with each other.
Then Contents and applications
- of course even if you build a quality road, you need
to have a good traffic to take all the advantages of
the investments that have been put in building a quality
road. Contents and application becomes yet another pillar
of importance.
And lastly the implementation
strategy: This is often an issue, which comes because
whenever there is an implementation of a new paradigm,
migration to a new paradigm, implementation of a new
concept, the issues that confront us immediately are
implementation strategy and transition management. We
are talking about migrating from the traditional framework
of operation to a different framework of operations
an operation, which is more automated, more transparent,
more quality conscious, and more service conscious.
So I want to present transition management as the fourth
pillar of eGovernance.
eGovernance and
Information
The moment you get
into the concept of eGovernance, you are faced with
the situation of information available - some in manual
form, some probably in electronic form and much of it
in neither of these two forms. All this information
presents, on the face of it, a very chaotic situation,
an information chaos, where there are files and documents
that need to be properly organized for any service to
be provided. It is a situation where one does not know
where to go from and / or where one is. The basic data
and information become relevant, because it is on this,
that one builds the framework to provide the service.
The solution I am going
to present through the following diagram is not a very
difficult solution and it is not a solution that I have
tried to build; it comes to all of us.
The solution in 'the
above diagram suggests is - what are we going to do?
How do we organize this information to be made available
to a certain class of people, the people who interact
with the government, the people who come to the Government
for certification, for approval, for a variety of things?
How do we provide that information seamlessly and in
a transparent manner? These are obviously few things
that come to one's mind.
Decision Support
System
The solution implies
that data will have to be presented on to the front
office through a structured back office organization.
What I am referring here is the architecture of a Decision
Support System (DSS). The four corners (of the diagram
above) essentially refer to four target groups through
which I need to, as a provider, organize the information,
The Central portion refers to how this organization
can be done.
We have all heard that
there was traditionally a two-tier structure of client
and server methodology. Here I am talking of a three-tier
structure - because of the larger penetration of the
Internet leading to people who would like to receive
the services on the Internet. So you have added one
more dimension to the tier, by putting web connectivity
and you can add some more tiers depending on the needs.
How can we convert
the information chaos that you are immediately faced
with, into a paradigm that will be a structured way
of addressing these four user groups through a solution?
I will try to cover the kinds of services through some
examples, based on my personal association.
The Government as a
major functionary is providing the services does need
an efficient decision support capability, so that it
is able to take well-informed and accurate decisions
on, a day-to-day, basis. Now these decisions are to
be taken obviously on the basis of information that
it has. The decisions will be, accurate timely and well
informed, provided the information is also properly
organized. These are the areas where you need information.
More
on Decision Support System >>
Information and
Decision-making
The general areas of
information that the government needs and deals with
are citizen databases - Voters List, Food and Distribution,
Industry, Professionals, Household data, Health, Economic
Status and Demographic data. Such data needs apply across
all geographical areas, all states and all institutions.
These are typical areas where one needs to do day-to-day
decision-making.
How to do decision-making?
Now this decision making process becomes very simple,
if you are able to provide data through technology support,
what is termed as 'Data Warehouse'. You warehouse the
data for doing intelligent mining into the data. If
you are able to warehouse the data, then for mining
of that data intelligently, there are a number of tools
available, which make intelligent mining possible. Once
that becomes possible, an official who has to take decisions
on some live subjects on the basis of this data can
take good decisions. You throw in a query into the data
system; the data system does a quick and intelligent
analysis and presents you the results of that analysis.
Now I am going to present
some case studies on eGovernance, implemented by various
state governments in the country:
Stamp & Registration
You are all aware that
there is a good piece of job done in Andhra Pradesh
in the area of land registration, known by the popular
name of CARD. There are other states Maharashtra Karnataka
etc. also who have implemented such facilities equally
successfully with different kinds of systems by different
names. This is a service, which is citizen-centric service.
The citizens expect three assurances:
-
That documents will get registered
more accurately in terms of their value.
-
That one will not pass through
the hassles that otherwise one would be going through
or would have gone through at a previous time. It
used to take days and months or more time before you
were able to register. And there was a lot of corruption
involved in the whole process.
-
You will get to know whether it
is correctly registered in your name, at any point
down the years and the valuation at any point of time,
which was not possible before. We now have parameters
like accurate and objective valuation, done by a machine
based on the parameters that the department prescribes
and which are transparent. Information is encrypted
in electronic form, which cannot be decrypted easily
or something that cannot be altered. Then you have
the whole database available to you and you can access
the database timely. The time can consequently be
reduced from days and weeks and months to less than
an hour and now it is a question of minutes.
The experience of the
states that have implemented it shows that it is reduction
in time but also improvement in transparency, reduction
in corruption and totally doing away with the hassles
that everybody feels.
More
on Stamp & Registration >>
Land Management
Yet another example
of efficient service that the government provides using
technology is Land Management - an example may be of
a government body, like an Industrial Development Authority,
which deals with allocation of land and all related
issues like offering, sub-letting, mortgaging and so
on and= so, forth, all mundane issues. If all these
functionalities are provided on an electronic form;
more so on GIS base, then one would be able to really
locate the pieces of land as part of a larger geographical
area. Somebody who is interested in buying the land
knows who the neighbors are. If, these are industrial
plots, you know what kinds of industries you have, what
kinds of attributes you would like to have in your land
and even prescribe those parameters. Moreover, you can
prescribe those: pameters and the kind of land you are
interested in, on the net, accessing the site of these
organizations. This is an example of how an industrial
allotment can be made far, easier.
Now, friends, these
are applications, which are already developed, and being
provided for, not just theoretical examples. In all
these, one is seeing visible signs of improvement. You
don't expect overnight improvements to take place, but
then, if one is patient enough, one can see definite
signs of improvement, both in economic terms and quality
terms.
Works Management: PWD
of the states deal with enormous amount of work and
services involving investments in crores. The whole
plethora of activity that they deal with - works and
services - these may be roads, bridges, townships, digging
of wells, tendering or evaluation of tenders, awarding
of contracts to the companies, monitoring of works,
making stage-payments, delivering materials, finally
inspecting those sites, declaring the sites completely
operational. These activities have been and can further
be totally automated, which will bring in greater transparency
in the operations. If all activities of all PWDs across
the country are automated, the result would be greater
transparency through open tender management process,
faster response to the needs through proper accounts
and- works management, and a better management of its
own people.
Local Bodies: Municipal
Corporations all over the cities, councils or local
bodies or smaller towns are another example. They deal
with mundane areas and` these are all citizen-centric
"areas like services related with property tax
billing, water supply billing, certificates like death
and birth certificates, trade licenses, consumer complaints,
MIS and many more which all typical municipal corporations
deal with. Now, if all these are, simply, saying, automated,
then they will provide better services to the citizens.
Octroi is another area
where computerization would mean getting away from cash
transactions. Valuations of octroi can be done automatically,
through the rules that the system follows, payments
can be made automatically through a system of credit
cards or even cheques, and the information can be reconciled
at the end of the day to find out what is the amount
of collection at various octroi posts. In a district
you will have 20 or 30 octroi posts and if all of them
can be reconciled every day, then you can imagine how
much value this information will give to the administration
in terms of cash management.
Coming to the Government,
the Parliament, the legislative assemblies and councils
of the states also have great advantage of reaping benefits
from IT. Election commission is one such example.
Friends, what I discussed
till now is one of the two aspects of eGovernance using
ICT. There is another important element to it and that
is the element of Bharathiya Bhashaen (Indian Languages).
More
on Land Management >>
IT in Regional Languages
We are all aware that
India is very large and geographically dispersed. It
has various economic strata and it is also a multi-lingual
society. There are 18 officially recognized languages
and about 12 scripts. The issue of language, in particular,
has been a main impediment for faster introduction of
IT in India. Therefore if we have to cut the barrier,
we have to get into those tools and technologies, which
will allow us to work in our own languages. However,
there appeared to be 'a contradiction on this score
- on the one hand we wanted to be, the beneficiary of
IT revolution and on the other hand, looking at the
technology, issues from languages' angle to, get benefits
of this revolution. So what was required immediately
was to have developments carried out, which will address
this problem. In 1990, this issue was faced by the Government
and accordingly, an expert group was created, and I
was a part of the group, to work on those products and
technologies, which would enable us to 'work on computers'.
To work on computers means all mundane applications,
whether it is word processing or database management
or messaging through emails, web designs, software development
and so on, that we working on computers in English are
conversant with. All that we have been doing in English,
should become possible to be done in Indian languages
also.
Language technology
is important in a country where we have probably only
5%-7% people who know or speak English and 950 million
or 930 million people who do not understand or speak
English. This large magnitude of people also has all
the rights to be the beneficiaries of the IT revolution.
IT to the masses will become possible by the proliferation
of computers, by having availability of low cost tools
and packages in regional languages, by evolving standards
so that inter-operability of data, information across
languages takes place.
More
on IT in Regional Languages >>
Computer products
available in Regional Languages
There is a large suite
of products that are available today and some of such
products have been developed by C-DAC,
like Gist
Card, Gist
Terminals, Gist
Shell, LEAP
range, ISM range of products, iPlugin,
Gist Mail etc. There are at least half a dozen organizations
that provide solutions of various kinds - you have hardware
solutions and there are software solutions. Hardware
solutions have been available for a decade now, I am
sure many of you would be conversant with these which
convert a desktop machine into a bilingual machine.
You can do your database analysis and database management
in English plus another language of your choice, just
by inserting a card into a slot that is available on
your desktop. Then there is another set of software
solutions for applications that I had mentioned to you,
office automation applications, text processing, word
processing, office automation, messaging tools - a plethora
of tools are available, which enable you to do work
in practically all kinds of areas in which we have been
working in English. These are just some examples. What
kind of functionalities do these tools provide you can
do graphics, you can do text management, you can design
your web pages, use popular 3rd party tools - a variety
of these very commonly used tools, are all now usable
in Indian languages.
We have a number of
institutions today that have web sites, which are bi-lingual.
The picture below is just one example of Indian Parliament
using Indian languages on web sites. This is in Hindi,
and of course in English too.
Issues of fonts
in Regional Languages
Fonts were another
problem some time ago. It was a problem because you
have different types of fonts being used by different
people and by technology providers. And there was the
problem of inter-operability. You have the concept of
dynamic fonts now, wherein you don't need to have fonts
already available on your desktop machine to be able
to access a site, which is using some specific fonts.
Dynamic fonts will enable you to have those fonts automatically
on your machine while you are accessing the database
or accessing information on a site.
There is, also, the
example of video applications. Today in all news studios,
reading of views is done in one's own language, but
all the related activities are done automatically through
products like Gist Video Works including sub-titling
in Indian languages.
More
on Indian Dynamic Fonts >>
Preserving our Heritage
Making available access
to information on Indian Heritage is yet another area.
Indian heritage is something which we are all proud
of and which is available in libraries, in museums,
in a variety of art collections, some in private collections
and so on and so forth. Can we use Information Technology
to preserve this information, and make it available
on the net, to the people who do not have access to
this information?
An example is the commentary
on the Gita by Saint Gnaneshwar done 700 years ago,
in Marathi. This has to be translated into a language
that you can understand in today's context and made
available to people with proper explanations, bringing
you to a particular page, particular chapter, particular
sloka, get to know meaning of the sloka and the context
in which the sloka was recited and so on and so forth.
A CD is available on Gnaneshwari, which gives you a
very user-friendly navigation to go through the commentary
and understand it in your language.
Sanskrit has been the
language of our heritage. There is so much the language
has given to us by way of our epics, the Vedas, the
Gita, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Upanishads
and so on an so forth. If this information could be
captured using all available IT tools, that we are all
conversant with, then this captured information can
be made available to the people once again, on the net
or otherwise. There are a lot of institutions that are
working in this area.
Another example of
what we can do using IT tools is to make an encyclopedia
available. A book like Encyclopedia Britannica is not
available in Indian languages. I have an example of
an encyclopedia for school children in Marathi and I
am aware that similar efforts are being done in other
Indian languages also, through the use of IT tools.
Yet another example
in the area of eGovernance in Indian languages is the
issue of GIS implementation, of applications like utility
planning, town planning, watershed management, forestry
management and so on and so forth. We have seen Land
management earlier and the? GIS enabling of these applications
by the Government, Crime mapping analysis by the law
enforcement agencies, the whole range of applications,
which one can do in the language of choice.
More
on Indian Heritage >>
Conclusion
Friends, I am more
or less towards the end of my talk. There are two issues
that I tried to present to you today. The IT revolution
that has spread all across the globe has spread into
this country too quite deeply. The benefits are best
derived through mechanisms to be put in place not merely
by the Government, but also by corporate bodies, by
industries, by all of us. The first issue that I discussed
has been dealt with by many other countries because
it deals with eGovernance and the second issue has not
been dealt with so much by other countries, because
they have probably one or two languages, as opposed
to 18 languages we have, which have compounded the problems
in our case. So I thought that I would present the problem
that compounded the introduction of IT for what we want
to use it for.
eGovernance through
regional languages is what one has been trying to say
here. One can be very effective taking advantage of
what eGovernance can do, providing citizens with information
that they have a right on, empowering citizens and that
was one of, the words I used in the title of my talk
empowering citizens with the information, giving citizens
the right to information, through mechanisms of eGovernance.
I have presented you only a few of these examples. There
are many more that are already there, many more which
would come.
The computing technology
enables use of ICT for human advancement. And we have
seen some examples. It will happen all over the world.
Let me just take 10 seconds to say that there are ample
statistics available to justify and confirm that those
societies those nations, who have invested in Information
and Communication Technologies are the societies who
have reaped the maximum benefits of their investments.
These investments do become productive over a period
of time for the society to take advantage of.
Advanced technologies
and advanced computing for human advancement is surely
what we have seen as case histories. There are a number
of case histories available from World Bank reports,
reports from UNDP and reports from administrations in
different countries. There are reports in the Indian
context as well. This brings me to the end of this address.
I would like to take
a minute to congratulate this institution here for receiving
the Quality Certification from ISO and also the new
academic block that it has acquired for expanding its
activities and also thanking them from my own side for
giving me this opportunity to be here with you this
afternoon to share with you some of my own thoughts.
I would like to be in touch with you whenever possible
and whenever you feel convenient. Thank you all.
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