A few years ago the Government of India took an important decision instructing all its arms to invest three per cent of their budget in building information and communication technology capacities. That is an investment of several thousand crore rupees in ICT every year, a level of resources that could have created a useful ICT infrastructure by now. However, what we have on ground today are a multitude of experimental applications, pilots and demonstrations. These are neither an efficient nor scalable basis for the integrated transparent governance structure needed by the citizens of our country.

Too many experiments and pilots
Currently there are a large number of initiatives across the nation to use the power of ICTs to transform the citizen-government interface. These have been started at various levels of governance – in districts by enthusiastic collectors, at departmental levels by interested officers, at the state levels by chief ministers and at the central government by some progressive ministers. These developments have been sporadic and uncoordinated, nurtured by a learning-by-doing culture, have lacked a strategic sense or defining leadership, have not been supported by the requisite experience base and have resulted in a large number of experiments that duplicate and remain at a prototype level accomplishing less than, what may have been possible with a well defined strategic framework.

The large number of experiments being carried out has created an impression that we are well on our path to using ICTs for modern governance, much ahead of other developing countries. International awards and recognition have added to this feeling.

Uncoordinated developments
Development of ICTs in the industrial countries shows that pioneering experiments are an important part of the learning process. They also show that the value of the benefits is commensurate with the level of investments, time and care taken to design and test the systems and the attention devoted to metrics developed to measuring and achieving success. This needs clear roadmaps, organisational structures and an understanding of how these will evolve as the technology changes.

Scattered experience
These experiments have their merits and need to be encouraged and allowed to go on at the individual and pilot levels. They show-case successes and bring the developers of similar applications together to learn from each other and can help create some innovative solutions from time to time. However, it also needs to be recognized that existing experiments and their size and stage of development may not be able to add much value because these are linked at best and not adequately linked to organisational structures capable of translating them into something concrete.

Consolidate
What is needed is to create a national framework to consolidate the gains of these initiatives and to develop a national strategy for e-Governance followed by a roadmap to reach the goals agreed in an acceptable time frame. This process of developing the national strategy and its follow up should be carried out in parallel with all other experiments going on in the country. Adequate funds will have to be made available to make these happen and to strengthen institutional mechanisms to carry the process forward.


Setting standards
Currently, the e-Governance framework in the country includes multiple bodies at various levels with few standards, procedures, guidelines etc to analyze, plan, prioritize, develop, operate and maintain the infrastructure. The National Informatics Centre and the Department of Telecom and various state level Departments of IT complement the Central Department of Information Technology. However, there is no coordinating body that can have a unified view of what e-Governance is or should be, what should be our strategy to connect the citizen and the state in the various interactions the citizen has from cradle to grave. Without that unified view it is unlikely that an efficient organisational and investment structure can be created that can evaluate and monitor the initiatives, measure the benefits thereof and take the country forward to a transparent, low transaction cost delivery of services to the citizens and further strengthen the foundations of governance and democracy.

Justification is easy
There are several reasons for embracing ICTs for governance. However, just one, viz. lowering the transaction cost of governance, can alone more than justify any reasonable investment in ICT. It has been demonstrated that even in a rather sub-optimal setting using computerised processes on top of the existing archaic process can reduce the overall transaction cost for the government as well as for the citizen by an order of magnitude. An example frequently cited is delivery of a certificate that is mandated by the state to a citizen using computerised means. Full mechanisation of e-Governance processes would yield even greater savings.


Comparing the comparable
It is generally believed that India can develop information systems at a fraction of the cost of developing them in the industrial economies. There is no reliable data to show that it is indeed the case. The comparisons are usually not valid as the two systems may have entirely different capabilities, robustness, scalability, operability, standards etc. Just as the difference between the price of a product that is satisfactory and the one that is best in any segment is an order of magnitude, the same is generally the case with ICT based solutions. In fact it is the normal rule that what the rest of the world can do after moving up the learning curve may not always be replicable in our environment for any less. If we cannot make cheaper products in any other modern sector, there is no valid reason to believe that we will be able to do so in the area of ICTs. It can be argued that the industrial economies can lower their cost of development, operations and maintenance of ICT based systems. However, that is not quite the same for developing economies as much of the efficiency reside in moving up the experience curve.

Scaling for a billion
In a nation of more than a billion people we need to create more than a billion records. Given that from cradle to grave a citizen may have over two hundred points of interface with the state and it may increase with our capacity to look after our citizens better, we need to create a governance infrastructure that can capture more than 200 data types for each citizen. It must also allow for that data to be used at various levels of governance. The same data may be accessible at the village level or the block, sub-division, district, division and the state levels and may be available at the centre for planning as well. In other words, we need to avoid of cost of duplication of data, generally a very high cost, cost of integration across levels and systems, simplify the systems and deliver what is needed.

Unified data, multiple applications
In other words, there will be one data structure that is common to all. There will be various applications that draw on the same data. They reside in multiple places as mirrored but as a single unified structure. And these run on the hybrid but unified platform of operating systems and networks. Then the result is available much like a utility where the end-users draw as per their need at a given price.

Learning from infrastructure sector
While it sounds simple and is eminently doable, it requires a different way of thinking about the issue. Consider that the nation has invested close to a $100 billion dollar in utilities, the replacement cost of our railways infrastructure is about similar, we do not have comparable roads but simply connecting a fraction of the country by expressways is slated to cost over $10 billion and connecting every village by any kind of motorable road will raise it by an order of magnitude. Comparing internationally, investments in utility, telecom, roads and railways to reach every citizen costs nearly in similar order. And these countries have learnt to invest in ICT as well to the same tune. Considering that simply creating a biometric ID system for all travelers and citizens in the US has been allocated a budget of US$ 10 billion should open us to appreciate that managing information has its costs and its only by recognizing that we can achieve the quality that we consider acceptable.

Rs 500 per citizen can do IT
Learning from the experience of very large systems that transact several million data per day and store more than 100 million pieces of data with more than 50 entity types in the system, it is reasonable to assume that in very large systems one should plan to invest at the rate of $10 per record of 100 data points and above for creating the application and supporting technology infrastructure. These investments are required over a five year period and will normally incur a maintenance cost at the rate of 15 percent of investments to remain useable in the ways originally intended along with the increasing number of data, technology updation, enhanced security requirements over a period of time.

In other words, with a planned investment of approximately USD 10 billion dollar over a five-year period and a maintenance budget for the times to follow the nation can be ready with the following:

• A complete data structure representing ALL citizens’ needs of relating to the government from cradle-to-grave
• All the applications and modules that will be required from village level to the national level and every level in between
• All hardware and networking and operating system needs to support the above
• All necessary security – of data integrity as well as protection against its tampering as permitted by the state of the technology at the time
• An organisational structure that will be able to maintain and operate this infrastructure
• Ability to respond to the needs of governance readily and ability to interface with any future needs
• The cost of delivery to the citizens lower than will be the case if they continued to be delivered the way practiced as of now (2004)
• The cost of citizens to get the data lower than has been the case so far.
• A capacity to assist other developing countries in getting their governance using ICTs right at lower cost
• A capacity to plan better, reach the citizens better, greater transparency, a more skilled government workforce
• An ability to cut down on developing sub-optimal, duplicate, unusable systems and thereby effect savings that alone can justify investments of this order

Once we have accomplished the above, we can plan to maintain and update as well as respond to the new needs that may emerge by virtue of raised expectations and our ability to deliver on them by :

• Spending up to 2 percent of GDP on governance- including e-Governance.
• Spending up to 2 percent of the budget on e-Governance

The beginning though must be made with creating a national strategy for utilising the power of ICT to cut the cost of governance, include every citizen in the governance process, make the system transparent and responsive and strengthen the development infrastructure and decision making process.

This draft concept note has been proposed for discussions and comments from the public, and i4d readership. Please send your views, comments, ideas and strategies for implementing this proposal to Mr. Satish Jha.

CMCs global movers and shakers

At the start of 2001, there was still only one Community Multimedia Centre prototype - at Kothmale in Sri Lanka, where a small telecentre had been added to the rural radio station. By October of that year, the first African CMC opened its doors in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Today, there are over 40 pilot CMCs in developing countries in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean which have or have had direct UNESCO involvement. Some 75 more are being developed by UNESCO in scale-up projects: 20 each in Mali, Mozambique and Senegal, 15 in Cameroon. Other partners now setting up CMCs include IICD in Burkina Faso and IDRC in Senegal. The German development bank KfW has begun a pilot CMC project in Mali, as the basis for eventual scale-up there. So the solitary prototype has led to the emergence of a widely used generic model in a relatively short time. Many international partners have been involved in this process, most of them within the framework of the Global Knowledge Partnership. The Swiss and Belgian governments, UNDP, ITU and other partners have supported CMC creation. Some partners, including AMARC, OneWorld.Net, APC and Radio for Development, have supported the development of the MultiMedia Training Kit or MMTK, a set of open access, workshop-ready training materials available on CD Rom from UNESCO or on http://www.itrainonline.org/itrainonline/mmtk/. Others, such as the NIC, have developed software tools such as the community browser eNRICH. Countless partners at the local level keep the CMCs going on a daily basis. All of this illustrates a core truth of ICT4D – no partner can go it alone and the more effective the partnerships, the better the chance of success. UNESCO is keenly aware that the success of its flagship CMC programme is in reality the success of the partnerships it has generated. Stella Hughes CMC programme coordinator UNESCO