E-governing India

In all the din created by the plethora of exit polls, a very important aspect of the current round of elections has been missed: all voting will be done through electronic voting machines, and once the actual process of counting is begun, it will take just 4-6 hours to declare the results of the entire country of over a billion people!

Contrast this with the well-publicised faults with the outdated system of punching holes in ballot papers that cost Al Gore his election in the US, and you realise just how far India’s progressed in terms of using technology.

But it’s not just in the election process where there’s a big change happening, even areas not normally associated with high technology are coming up with ambitious computerisation projects that are changing the lives of millions.

At a conference on large e-governance projects organised by consulting firm SKOCH, railway ministry officials made a presentation on some of their plans, and some of them were truly amazing. Did you know that the reservation system performs reservations for 6,75,000 seats and berths every day (during peak season this goes up to around a million), and that the system responds to any reservation transaction from anywhere in the country within two seconds, 365 days a year, with a 99 per cent uptime?

Indeed, with a major effort on the website, you can now book your tickets on the Net and, very soon, even download your ticket details onto your printer at home/office, and just walk into the train with this and some form of ID like a driver’s license!

A presentation by customs officials at the same conference was even more impressive. At 23 customs offices across the country, the official said, you can file your documents online, and figure out the status of your approvals even before your cargo hits the country’s shores — does your cargo have to be physically inspected, what is the duty to be paid, and so on, all these details can be checked by a series of clicks.

The customs’ website, not surprisingly, gets 1,00,000 hits a day with importers and exporters logging on to file or check something. With over 95 per cent of all paperwork filed in this fashion, the number of processing steps has been cut from 18 to 6 for imports and from 15 to 5 in the case of exports.

And, yes, since it is the computer that assigns import cases to different appraisers, the scope for discretion is automatically reduced.

Like any other journalist, I was naturally sceptical, but had to eat my sneer when HCL Infosystems Chairman and CEO Ajai Chowdhry said that the new system allowed his firm to file bills electronically and get clearances the same way, and that he was able to begin work using imported components from Singapore within just a few hours of them landing in Chennai!

Huge e-governance projects (in the olden days, they used to be called just plain computerisation projects!) like this, whether we know it or not, are affecting the lives of millions every day.

Had it not been for the on-line solutions (the demat facilities and electronic sales/purchases) offered by National Securities Depository Limited and the National Stock Exchange, the cost of transactions would never have come down from 2.5 per cent (remember the broker commissions in the early 1990s?) to a mere 0.2 per cent today.

And there was no way that the earlier manual system could handle the daily volume of shares transacted shooting up from Rs 400 crore in 1991 to a whopping Rs 50,000 crore today.

Believe it or not, computerising of cases in various courts helped reduced the pendancy (a polite term for cases not getting decided for decades) from 1,20,000 to 22,000. Once the cases were computerised, they could be classified under various points of law, and then it took just one judgement to dispose off thousands of similar cases.

Today, in most high courts, cases are assigned to different benches by the computer, and status of various cases (when is the hearing, before which bench, etc) can be seen online. The National Informatics Centre (NIC) is now trying to do the same in civil courts as well.

An even more ambitious project, and one that touches a lot more lives, is NIC’s AGMARKNET, a network that links up the major mandis in the country to provide information on 300 major commodities. Seven hundred and fifty such mandis have already been connected, another 2,000 will be connected in the next two years, and the balance 4,000 or so in another 3-4 years.

Unlike ITC’s unique e-choupal, of course, AGMARKNET doesn’t allow farmers to sell their products on it as yet. NIC, which is in charge of the project, is trying to fix this. For one, it has tied up with fertiliser cooperative IFFCO to provide the service at 28,000 kiosks across the country, to ensure that farmers, as opposed to just traders in mandis, have access to the information.

Also on the anvil are related services like Fishnet (for information on fish products), Seednet, Fertnet, Lisnet (for information on soil types and nutrients), and so on. And, AGMARK and commodity exchange NCDEX have tied up for a pilot project in Rajasthan which, apart from buying directly from the farmer, involves private warehouses, certifying agencies and so on.

In fact, the benefits from such large e-governance projects are so obvious that most state governments have fairly ambitious plans to scale up their existing projects.

Enthused by the dramatic rise in property tax collections after its Sarita project made registering property very easy (in Mumbai, property registrations rose 27 per cent in 2002 thanks to Sarita), for instance, the Maharashtra government has begun work on SETU, a single window system for issuing of all licences and permits in the state. Scaling up land records projects like Bhoomi, similarly, are on the anvil.

Not all of these projects, it is obvious, will work. To that extent, thousands of crores will be wasted. But if there’s one thing that will change the way governance is done in the country, it’s e-governance. Fortunately, for whatever reason, the process is beginning to take root.