Volume 17, No. 3, November 2007
Welcome to the third and the last issue of 2007. I must commend the work of our new editorial team of Nupur and Anuradha who have been very successful in getting several professionals to contribute articles for the newsletter. They have also changed the look and feel of the web pages carrying the news letter. This issue carries a mix of practical lessons on making e-government work; a conceptual piece on ICT enabled social transformations; potential of exploiting alternate ICTs; and interesting cases on ICT use by communities from Nepal and the UK.
There are many
areas where technology is beginning to create a social impact, at least for
the urban populations in developing countries. The richness of the content on
many informational and e-commerce web sites suggests that customers are taking
to the web for seeking information and transacting business. Although Internet
penetration is still limited in developing countries, absolute numbers of
Internet users are large enough in many countries to entice an increasing
number of content providers. Developing countries have yet to exploit the
potential of m-commerce and m-government even though the growth of mobile
telephony has been explosive in large countries in South and East Asia.
Reform in the way
Governments transact business in developing countries is still in a nascent
stage. Even with hundreds of conferences evangelizing the role of
e-government, the action on the ground is woefully slow in countries like
India, which has launched a large national program of eGovernance. Recent
impact assessment studies have shown that wherever projects have been
implemented successfully there has been some positive impact on cost of
access, quality and convenience for the citizens. In a presentation that I
made at the World Bank in Washington DC in September, I discussed the impact
of e-government on administrative corruption (i.e. proportion of users paying
bribes for legitimate services). An analysis
of impact of eight projects from three states in India indicates that out
of five agencies where corruption was a problem, bribes were virtually
eliminated in one and significantly lowered in two others. On the other hand
corruption continued unabated in two other agencies even after
computerization. No one argues that e-government is a panacea for many of the
complex problems such as corruption. However, it has a role to play in
improving the delivery of certain types of government services.
The bottleneck in large scale adoption of e-government is the willingness to reform amongst the politicians and civil servants. For example, the success of e-procurement in Andhra Pradesh has not prompted any other state to implement e-procurement. We hear that in Karnataka, the e-government secretary who was making vigorous attempts to take e-procurement forward was shunted out of his portfolio at the behest of some politicians. I feel that all those who are interested in seeing that the full potential of ICTs is realized have to think about new models of citizen engagement so that politicians can be made accountable. Technology can be an enabler in this process of creating accountability. Legislation on right to information has begun to empower ordinary citizens to question the actions of the Government. Many computerized delivery systems fight shy of putting out information on their own performance vis-à-vis their promised charter on web sites.