E-governance; Success Story and the Way Ahead

A recent New York Times article described how a fisherman working off the coasts of Kerala used a cell phone on the seas to obtain and compare information about spot market prices for fish at Cochin and Quilon (85 miles apart). This fisherman thus netted an additional $1000 in annual income. e-Governance has thus started reshaping our society in ways unimaginable just even a decade ago. In spite of all thar we have achieved or are achieving, several formidable challenges remain. Almost as many Indians are below the poverty line and illustrate as the entire population of India in 1950. We have entered the next millennium, therefore, with a great challenge. In this context e-governance can be used as a strategic tool for reforming Governance and Improving the quality of services provided by the government to its people.
e-Gov has accelerated the development of India, the various initiatives taken by the government and private bodies in realizing the same, the challenges ahead and how in future it can be tapped to reach a developed country by 2020.


Our society is now being reshaped by rapid advances in information technologies—computers, telecommunications networks, and other digital systems—that have vastly increased our capacity to know, achieve
and collaborate. Entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, and politicians are now advancing views about how India can
ride the IT bandwagon and leapfrog into a knowledge-based economy. Imagine an illiterate farmer in a
remote village in Madhya Pradesh sitting at a desktop wired up to the WWW through a small VSAT link
powered by a small power generator by its side and surfing away to glory, downloading invaluable information about weather forecasts and sowing trends or even checking prices for Soya beans at the nearest
government-run market, or even on an International commodities exchange. E-governance is thus citizencentric governance that covers all of its services and respect everyone as individuals by providing personalized services. It is aptly an effective government that delivers maximum value for taxpayers’ money (quick
and efficient services).
If the benefits of IT have to reach the common man, it is obvious that the common man should have access
to IT services in the remotest part of the country. With the convergence of various forms of information
delivery systems, such as TV, Radio, Newspapers, Telephones, PC and Internet, into one unified environment, it is now becoming possible to enable common man to have access to IT services. The present level
of such facilities in the country as given below is, however, highly deficient in enabling reach of IT services to common man.


It's been said that the only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. Those of you reading this room are well acquainted with this truth. The very character of cyber technology and the Internet age has been defined by those who have gone beyond what is seen, who have tested
the limits of the possible and in doing so have enriched our society and transformed our way of life. Our
computers have connected us as a nation, as a people and as a global community in ways unimaginable
even just a generation ago.  And it is this type of connectivity that also defines our vision of nation’s development. However, the function is always more important than the format. When governance is good, e-Governance can increase its effectiveness manifold. And if governance itself is poor; it does not help. It
rather magnifies how poor that governance is. As academicians and researchers, our sole objectives would
not have been to make money. We would have tried our best to change Governance first and then implement e-Governance. Otherwise we would not have hesitated to withdraw from the projects even, without
caring much for our consultation fees. For global and local private bodies; it has become a gold mine as
they know it too well that e-Governance without basic good governance would fail. And that means more
and more assignments, and unending projects which will be paid by all Indians for many more years.