UPSC GS Study Notes

Governance

2nd ARC on e-Governance

  • 09 Jul,2023
  • Team ExamGuru

Tags:

GS-II Important Aspects of Governance, Transparency & Accountability E-Governance

Recommendations of 2nd ARC on e-Governance

Building a Congenial Environment

  • Building a congenial environment is a sine qua non for successful implementation of e-Governance initiatives. This should be achieved by
    • Creating and displaying a will to change within the government
    • Providing political support at the highest level
    • Incentivizing e-Governance and overcoming the resistance to change within government
    • Creating awareness in the public with a view to generating a demand for change.

Identification of e-Governance Projects and Prioritisation

  • The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has defined four stages of e-government Projects, each one more demanding than the next. These are:
    • Information: Putting information on web-sites
    • Interaction: Allowing citizens to enquire about services, procedures etc. and filling up forms and submitting them online
    • Transaction: Allowing payments online
    • Transformation: A mix of all the above and allowing the citizen to participate in governance through ICT.

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR)

  • The basic idea behind such re-engineering is to avail of the opportunity provided by ICT in transforming governmental processes and not just in modifying them.
    • For every function a government organisation performs and every service or information it is required to provide, there should be a step-by-step analysis of each process to ensure its rationality and simplicity.
    • Such analysis should incorporate the viewpoints of all stakeholders, while maintaining the citizen-centricity of the exercise.

Capacity Building and Creating Awareness

  • The success of an e-Governance project would depend on building human capacities in terms of necessary knowledge and skills to conceptualize, initiate, implement and sustain e-Governance initiatives across government as also on the ultimate use by citizens of the facilities created.
    • Capacity building efforts must attend to both the organizational capacity building as also the professional and skills upgradation of individuals associated with the implementation of e-Governance projects.
    • Each government organization must conduct a capacity assessment which should form the basis for training their personnel.
    • A network of training institutions needs to be created in the States with the Administrative Training Institutes at the apex.

Implementation

  • Breaking up entire e-Governance projects into components/ activities
  • Planning each activity in detail
  • Allocating resources, both human and financial
  • Commencement of activities as per the plan and continuous tracking
  • Need-based mid-course correction

Monitoring and Evaluation

  • Monitoring of e-Governance projects should be done by the implementing organization during implementation in the manner in which project monitoring is done for large infrastructure projects.
  • Evaluation of success or failure of e-Governance projects may be done by independent agencies on the basis of parameters fixed beforehand.

Protecting Critical Information Infrastructure Assets

  • There is need to develop a critical information infrastructure assets protection strategy.
  • This should be supplemented with improved analysis and warning capabilities as well as improved information sharing on threats and vulnerabilities.

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