Mrs. Radha Chauhan
Principal consultant, Programme Management Unit, National eGovernance Plan
Department of IT, Ministry of Communications & IT
Government of India
Starting with district Aligarh and Saharanpur as a Joint Magistrate both known for its communal sensitivity, at a time when the Ayodhya temple agitation was at its peak , she progressively handled assignments that ranged from focused implementation of rural development schemes in districts to heading and leading the district administration as a whole.
As the Joint Secretary of Heavy Industries in the State Secretariat she was exposed to policy making perspective of industrial Development, and had the opportunity to tackle various issues and concerns that need to be addressed when industrial development needs to be spurred effectively.
As the Chief Development Officer (CDO) in Allahabad, she had the opportunity to work in the eastern part of the State which to a great extent was untouched by development of any kind. The abject poverty and all that it entails exposed her to issues that challenge an administrator and her capacity to deliver at the grass root level. Her assignment in the hills of Pauri Garhwal (Himalyas) as a CDO gave her a totally different perspective on the way governance is reached to the citizens in a geographically remote and difficult terrain.
Assignment as the DM Pilibhit enhanced her understanding and appreciation of issues relating to environmental protection (as the district had a massive reserved forest area) and she got distinction of running the National Literacy campaign successfully, apart from leading the district administration as a whole and as a team.
As the first lady officer heading the district administration in Bulanshahr, known for its aggressive and demanding citizenry and political richness, she was able to establish her credentials as a tough but sensitive administrator. Adult literacy and Universal immunization have been her areas of special focus and she was able to make a significant impact in the districts that she served.
As the Deputy CEO (second in command) in the now widely acclaimed twin cities of New Okhla Industrial Development Authority (NOIDA) and Greater NOIDA, she was part of major policy initiatives that had substantial impact on the shaping and modeling of the urban- industrial policies and its implementation in the State. There, she spearheaded and successfully launched the initiative that aimed at enabling an exhaustive and comprehensive ‘digital delivery’ of urban and municipal services to its residents.
She is presently on a contractual assignment with the National Institute for Smart Government (NISG) as a Principal Consultant to the Programme management Unit of National eGovernance Plan,(NeGP) Department of IT , Government of India.She is responsible for coordinating two national Mission Mode Projects under the NeGP - the ‘edistrict’ Project and the Unique ID project, both of which substantially attempts to address aspects of delivery of government services to citizens, on an ‘digital mode. She made presentations on these projects before august gatherings such as the Conference of the Information Commissioners held recently on 17th October in the Capital. She stresses that steering the national communication and awareness strategy for the overall NeGP initiative is an interesting part of her current job profile. Her association with the post implementation assessment of eGovernance initiatives across the country gives her tremendous opportunity to attempt completing the ‘learning loop’ on the subject of e-governance.
Given an opportunity she shall put in her best efforts to any endeavor that is entrusted upon her.
1. First can you please tell us about your department (Department of IT)?
Department of IT under the Ministry of Communication Information Technology (MCIT) is a National level nodal agency that is entrusted with guiding and steering the National E-Governance Plan (NeGP). The ministry is headed by a the Cabinet Minister and the department is headed by the Secretary, IT, Government of India.
2. Can you briefly tell us about NeGP and the Program Management Unit (PMU)?
The National e-Governance Plan formulated by the Central Government is a major policy initiative to lay the foundation and provide impetus for long- term growth of e-Governance in the country. The plan will be beneficial for all citizens particularly those living in rural areas, and has the potential to transform the socio-economic landscape of rural India. This would not only bring convenient services to the doorstep of citizens but would also empower them like never before. This will be achieved through the establishment of one hundred thousand Common Services Centers in six hundred thousand villages across India. These centers will be linked to the various government departments in the backend through broadband and internet enabled State Wide Area Networks (SWAN) and State Data Centers (DSC). The Plan also provides for the implementation of a number of Mission Mode Projects (MMP) at the Centre, States and integrated service levels to create a citizen-centric and business-centric environment for governance. Quite aptly, the plan also focuses on building capacities within the government, to handle such ambitious projects.
The vision of the National e-Governance plan is to
“Make all Government services accessible to the common man in his locality, through common service delivery outlets and ensure efficiency, transparency & reliability of such services at affordable costs to realize the basic needs of the common man”
Program Management Unit (PMU)
The objectives of the PMU are to help DIT assist the Apex Committee to drive NeGP through effective program monitoring and management; provide assistance in policy and strategy formulation; support DIT in implementing those projects and components of NeGP for which DIT is the implementing department; and augment capacity of various departments to enable them to implement their MMPs successfully.The roles and responsibilities in the various areas of the PMU are as follows:
Awarenes & Communication
The success of the plan hinges not only on accessibility and availability to the information and various services but also awareness regarding the program, effective branding of NeGP and finally develop a communication strategy that addresses the above two. As such the team is responsible for creating and implementing the strategy to achieve the following objectives - to build distinctive brand of NeGP to be utilized across departmental communications; to create awareness among citizens about the initiative & its objectives; to motivate stakeholders, with an emphasis on the point that NeGP is not about computerization or technology but about making interaction with government easier; and to create a demand driven atmosphere which would ensure the service delivery & its quality are met. The team will also create a set of communication guidelines that can be used by other ministries/departments to design their own communications plan.
Assessment
The Government of India is proposing to invest a significant part of its scarce resources in e-Government projects. However, even with its perceived potentials, e-Government projects are fraught with risks and the success rate across the world is not very encouraging. Given this scenario and the fact that e-Government projects are inherently complex, it therefore becomes imperative that a robust assessment strategy is devised for the existing e-Government projects that not only provides valuable understanding on individual projects but also provides for a backward integration into the process of project appraisal and capacity building. The team is responsible for creating robust assessment strategy that can be used to objectively assess e government projects.
Capacity Building
Keeping in view the enormous task of driving NeGP in line with the overall spirit of service orientation most states are inadequately equipped in terms of personnel and the skill-sets required to handle the host of issues involved. The capacity building guidelines take cognizance of the fact that different states are at different levels of readiness for e-governance and have different levels of aspiration. Capacity gaps are therefore not viewed in an absolute context but relative to the goals set out by the respective state government for itself. The role of the capacity building team at the program level is to provide leadership and vision including policy formulation, preparing roadmaps, prioritization, preparing frameworks and guidelines, monitoring progress, inter-agency collaboration & capacity management. This cell would identify and fill the huge capacity gaps, which exist in the departments at all levels, particularly at the levels of CIO’s, CTO’s etc.
Common Service Center
Common Service Centers (CSC) scheme will be the most prominent face of NeGP. As such, specific support is being provided for this scheme. The scope of support includes Identification of core components of CSC Scheme; Frame problem agendas related with application software, legal instruments, essential backend for CSC, critical RFP conditions, pace synergy in core infrastructure projects (CSC, SDC, SWAN); review and advise on project development document for CSC; review and advise on various aspects of CSC RFPs, state guidelines, roll out plan etc.; analyze service portfolio (G2C, B2C, C2C) based on needs of citizen and financial model; review and advise on structure of CSC scheme, IT and functional architectures; review and advise on proposals, MoUs and project specific deliverables prepared by NLSA or received through State Governments at DIT; and monitor activity wise deliverables and timelines mentioned in the contract of NLSA.
Infrastructure & Technical
This cell provides supports DIT in implementing those projects and components, which are direct responsibility of DIT – SWAN, SDC & CSC. The scope of work includes - Technical assistance for State Wide Area Network. RFP review and other technical related problems raised by States for establishing SWAN; Conceptualization of State Data Centre (SDC) project including preparation of technical and financial guidelines, technical specifications for SDC viz. physical requirements, network and security infrastructure, computing resource, storage requirements and certain non negotiable parameters for the SDC; working on various technological parameters that are essential for last mile connectivity; and assisting Technical Committee on Wireless (TCW) on various parameters that need to be considered while deciding wireless connectivity for the last mile.
Monitoring and Evaluation
The Program Management, Monitoring and Evaluation Unit of the PMU for NEGP will develop a comprehensive MIS at programme level and track the physical and financial progress of various projects. The cell will also serve as the knowledge repository and will provide and assist in developing and implementing a comprehensive framework for assisting these projects, to the extent that they fall under designated MMPs, with a central pool of support resources, to generate cross-project and cross-state synergies, avoid inefficient overlaps, and take advantage of comparative benchmarking based on common Program Management, Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Frameworks.
Project Finance & Appraisal
The cell will identify resources to provide assistance in project conceptualization, development and implementation to various implementing agencies. The cell would also appraise various MMPs to assess implementation methodology, overlaps etc.
Research and Development
Keeping in view the vast and diverse scope of NeGP, it is imperative that the issues related to technology, architecture, inter-operability, standards, security are appreciated and addressed. In order to gain a deeper understanding of these and other related issues, the R&D team in the PMU provides consultancy and research inputs in the areas of technical standards, e-Government enterprise architecture frameworks and quality and documentation that includes e-Gov quality manual, project management, conformance framework, SLA guidelines, etc.
3. What are your primarily responsibilities as a principal consultant at the project management unit?
I am at present steering two national initiatives under the NeGP; one of them is Unique Identity Number Project (UID).The project aims at uniquely identifying residents across the country and assigning a number that is used for identifying an individual across government, primarily for delivery of various services. This eventually, could nucleate in to a national ID project. The other project is the E-District project which is another MMP (Mission Mode Project) under the NeGP. Districts are the front-end of government where most G2C interaction and bulk of citizen centric services are delivered. As such, there was a felt need to improve this experience and enhance efficiencies of the various departments at the district level to enable seamless service delivery to the citizen. The project scope is to integrate various departments of the districts so as to provide seamless services to the citizens for successful implementation of e-districts, the redesigning of the existing processes and delivery mechanism to facilitate an efficient and effective service delivery structure, has been identified as a key activity. The objectives of the MMP include backend computerization to enable efficient delivery of government services and to proactively provide a system of spreading information on the Government schemes, planned developmental activities and status of current activities .Front ends under the scheme are only to be built at district, tehsil, sub division and block level, in the form of citizen facilitation counters. Village level linkage would be established through Common Services Centers (CSC) for delivery of services.
Along with these two projects, I am also guiding and steering communication and awareness campaign for NeGP. This also involves devising a national level strategy for each of the stakeholder for rolling out individual departmental awareness campaigns relating to their projects. Another interesting part of my assignment, relates to coordinating post implementation project ‘impact’ assessments by third party agencies. This exposure enables me to complete the learning loop of E-Governance and its various aspects and practices.
4. What are the global trends in e-government and what are the opportunities and challenges of e-government in developing countries?
Adoption of e-Governance is a highly complex process requiring provisioning of hardware and software, networking, process re-engineering and change management. To implement e-Governance program on a nationwide scale in a country like India makes the endeavor even more challenging. Although, a number of e-Governance projects have been undertaken through individual initiatives, for the first time a concerted effort is being made to implement e-Governance Plan on a nation-wide scale that will require buy-in from diverse stakeholders such as central ministries/departments, state governments, local government bodies, private sector and citizens. Achieving this mammoth task requires a new mindset that exploits the potential for creative and carefully structured public-private partnerships in this arena.
E-Government as of now has almost reached a certain level of acceptance across developing countries, where a digital mode of governance is seen as the only mode of effective and efficient delivery of services. The greatest challenge in a country like India faces could be very broadly classified in to two categories- the first will be the hard infrastructure that needs to be put in place so as to enable access to services to the individual in an easy and convenient manner. Here one would be tackling issues relating to connectivity, availability of electricity, networking etc. On the other hand, the softer part of issue that poses enormous challenge relates to building capacities within the government, process redesigning and reengineering, ensuring sustenance of the projects and in the long run the impact on the citizens.
“The challenge is to create leaderships at each level of governance that is enabled to envision objectives and goals clearly and ensures implementation effectively.”
The success of e-governance initiatives, ought, to, be judged by the benefits it brings to the common man. Are we applying e-Governance to the areas and sectors where conventional systems still cause a considerable amount of inconvenience to the citizens? Are we addressing the services that are most relevant to the common man, such as agriculture, healthcare and education services? As well as the full spectrum of services provided by gram panchayats and municipalities? How long will it take for us to tap the potential that ICT has shown in transforming police and judicial services elsewhere in the world?
We now have more than a decade of experience behind us, and we have seen very interesting and innovative projects in many parts of the country. But many of them remain localized successes. Are we doing enough to convert our small and localized successes into widespread, nationwide successes? We must design systems that go beyond small pilots – to achieve speed, certainty and consistently high quality in the delivery of services – along with comprehensive geographical coverage. On one hand, we have to acknowledge the transformation that is possible through e-governance and appreciate the excellent work that has been done to dramatically improve service delivery in certain areas. At the same time, however, we must also recognize that delay in bringing the same convenience to other areas and to the full spectrum of services provided by the government carries an opportunity cost. We must, therefore, ensure that all citizens, irrespective of which part of the country they are in, irrespective of whether they are in urban or rural areas, quickly get the benefits of improved service delivery through e-governance.
Use of ICT provides us a great opportunity to redefine our functions and redesign our processes. This opportunity ought to be utilized fully resulting in not simply automated but streamlined and transformed systems and address issues of standardization and integration of services so that the citizen or user of services will ultimately get a seamless set of services. Our projects must also be characterized by high quality of services and long-term sustainability the potential benefits of Information and Communication Technologies extend far beyond just improvement in the delivery of government services. If these technologies become widely available and affordable by the vast majority of our citizens, their impact will not remain limited to the services that are provided by the Government. These technologies can help people engaged in every sector to handle their current work in a better manner, bring those new jobs and business opportunities, and improve their ability to reach larger markets, forge better linkages, and provide them more effective mechanisms of commerce and lead to higher incomes and prosperity.
5. Imperative data show that majority of e-government projects in developing countries fail. What do you think is the main reason behind this occurrence and how do you plan to tackle it for Negp?
Our assessment of various e-Governance initiatives across a wide range, has very clearly and surprisingly shown that most of initiatives that have been implemented may not have achieved all the goals that is set out to do but what clearly emerged is that all of them have had a positive impact with varying degrees on the end user, the common man; and in significant number of cases the implementers to a certain extent have been able to appreciate the value of initiatives. I believe even a project that could be branded as a complete failure on all fronts provides great value for culling out significant learning’s for future references.
It needs to be appreciated that the traditional perception of ‘successful’ project should not be applied while assessing an e-Governance initiative especially in the perspective developing countries where our only option is to learn from our own mistakes for the next venture.
6. What are the change management issues in implementing e-government projects in developing countries? How can they be overcome?
The change management is a great challenge to this whole initiative where the outcome envisaged is a paradigm shift in goverence as we understand it today. There are varied perceptions and perceptions about what this change is likely to be at every level in the hierarchy that is delivering the services as also the understanding a common man has of what is being put in place in place of traditional govermence machinery. To create a vision and clearly send across a message from a level that is credible and at the same time fairly well up in the hierarchy to allay fears and threats as also what is the change that is expected within and without the system is the need of the hour. Once that stakeholders comfort level with the initiate is achieved it possible to drive the whole range of change management issues easily that would include BPRs to as simple as content development for capacity building.
7. What role can the public-private partnerships play in e-Government project implementation in developing countries? Finally, how optimistic are you about e-government in SAARC countries.
As you would see the NeGP lay a great emphasis on long term sustainability of a project and the progrmme as a whole .one main plank that it his is aimed to be achieved is through a sustain PPP model of implementation be to setting up of CSCs for delivering services or backend content development under e-District This has become an imperative for sustaining a project that looks at an aggressive service level and which the citizen is willing to bear in the interest of his convenience. Well, I am extremely optimistic, as the need has been accepted by all of us. Now we only need to address the ‘felt’ need.