Volume 20, No. 1, February 2010
Welcome
to the first issue of the newsletter in 2010. Among others, this issue carries
articles that highlight the potential of ICTs to impact development (use of
mobiles for micro trading activities in Ghana and use of Internet kiosks for
e-payment in Kerala) and two articles which analyze failures of ICT projects
for development. The piece by Kentaro Toyama questions the hyped role of
access to information.
In
spite of numerous publications based on research on a variety of ICT for
Development projects, we find that there has been very little impact on
practice. A few simple home truths have been identified by many studies but
are often ignored in project implementation. In a recent study of the
e-District program in rural areas of Uttar Pradesh in India, we discovered
that the designers of the e-District application had failed to take cognizance
of the existing informal systems, that is, the reality of how services are
delivered on the ground. Perhaps a consultative design process would have
brought the informal practices to light. For example, when field officials who
are hard pressed for time find that it takes 50 seconds to affix a digital
signature on an electronic document instead of the 5 seconds it takes on the
manual form, they outsource the entire exercise to someone else by giving away
their electronic access rights. Therefore, I wonder if what we really need is
more research or greater dissemination, training and capacity building of
implementers.
There
are some aspects of e-government implementation which are still less
understood. For example, many countries are bumbling through the formulation
of very large and complex national initiatives. In India alarm bells have
begun to ring because the five year old National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) has
not yielded much by way of e-government projects on the ground. Some
infrastructure like data centers, State Wide Area LANs and Citizen Service
Centers have been established but there is no sign of online delivery of
services. Very little is understood about organizational mechanisms that are
required for coordinating the work of several agencies in the execution of a
large program. The coordination agency needs to ensure that projects are
designed to deliver significant benefits to all stakeholders, funding
mechanisms are such that resources are not wasted, implementation adheres to
identified best practices, and monitoring and evaluation ensure that time
lines are adhered to without compromising the outcomes.
The
ultimate test of a good national program, however, is that design and
implementation processes are streamlined so that projects can be scaled up and
replicated, but at the same time, innovation that seeks to harness the ever
growing power of ICTs is not stifled. I see a glaring example of how
innovation can be killed under the burden of a planned approach.
In one of my recent
editorials, I had written about Zero Mass Foundation’s (ZMF) solution
for pension payments in Andhra Pradesh using mobile technology. I recently had
a meeting with the team from A
Little World (ALW) and ZMF that has built and implemented the application.
I was disheartened to learn that the project may not survive. A number of
stakeholders admire the work done by ZMF but no one is willing to reimburse
the processing cost of Rs 5 per transaction – a fee that is most reasonable
in comparison to Rs 13 reimbursed for a less complex service offered through
Internet kiosks. There is either bureaucratic apathy in the lack of support
for the innovation or protection of a vested interest because the ZMF solution
is in direct competition with Internet kiosks – an approach to which the
NeGP has made a strong commitment.
However, this setback has not diminished the enthusiasm of the team. They continue to innovate, churning out a miniature pocket-sized set top box for video reception, a miniature projection system that can produce a clear 5 ft by 5ft image in a dark room, a light that is sufficient to brighten a room and can be operated for five hours daily for a month at a cost of just Rs 30, and a mobile phone with a special SIM card that can retrieve information from remote databases on the press of a single key and read that information aloud. Perhaps what keeps them going is the recognition that they have received from external agencies. For instance, ALW was recently named as one of the top ten innovative companies in India along with giants such as Infosys, Wipro and Bharti Airtel (Source: http://www.fastcompany.com/mic/2010/industry/most-innovative-india-companies).