Too many pilots

President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam has done well to stress the need for greater use of innovative information and communications technology (ICT) solutions for improving the delivery of public services.

Pilot projects in various parts of the country have clearly demonstrated the enormous potential of e-government in reducing the harassment of citizens and corruption.

The Bhoomi scheme in Karnataka, for instance, allows over 10 million farmers to obtain instant access to land records from computer terminals across the state. Earlier, they had to trudge to various government offices, wait in queues, and grease palms.

The Citizen's Information Centre (CIC) project in Assam saves ordinary people days of travel time to the district headquarters, often across turbulent rivers during the monsoon, to obtain simple documents such as birth or caste certificates.

These requests can now be emailed from a mandal-level CIC to the government office concerned, where the request is processed and emailed back to the centre rom where a certified printout can be procured.

While the benefits of ITC's e-Choupal venture have already been well documented, another effort to leverage ICT to benefit rural India is Ashok Jhunjhunwala's rural kiosk.

The IIT, Chennai, professor's kiosk, costing around Rs 50,000 apiece, is aimed at helping villagers use remote medical diagnostic facilities to get their animals treated by vets sitting in towns.

Farmers can also obtain advice on what to do with their crops after shooting pictures of the same using webcams at the kiosk. At the national level, online filing of customs documents at 23 centres has reduced paperwork by 95 per cent.

A survey of 21 e-governance projects by consulting firm Skoch discovered that corruption had fallen significantly in almost all cases.

In the case of Bhoomi, the Public Affairs Centre in Bangalore found that while two-thirds of non-Bhoomi users had to pay bribes to get their land records, the figure was a mere three per cent in the case of areas where Bhoomi had been implemented.

If few people have any doubts about the benefits of e-governance, the problem is that such projects have not really been rolled out on a truly pan-Indian scale.

Bhoomi, for instance, has been followed by similar projects in several states, but each one has come out with its own model. In several districts, such as Kalyan-Dombivli near Mumbai, citizen facilitation centres allow people to make payments for several government services (electricity, water, et al) at one place and within 10-15 minutes.

Yet, there is no indication that the idea will be spread all over the state quickly.

One reason why pilot projects are not being scaled up quickly to cover entire states or even the whole country could be the costs involved. Also, while efforts in a small area can be implemented with the help of just one or two committed government officials, when it comes to scaling up to a larger geographically area, e-governance projects tend to face the entire weight of opposition from vested interests.

Perhaps it is time to create an e-governance minister at the centre who can champion the cause from a national level. But it would be equally worthwhile for all projects with a public service delivery component to compulsorily include an ICT component.

The UPA government wants to launch new programmes for the poor, including employment guarantees. E-governance is the way to go. At the very least, it will ensure that more of the money intended for the poor actually reaches them.