Personalized Governance

Governments have been typically department oriented. So much so that a tribal, pregnant, handicapped woman, who should get social benefits from at least four different departments, ended up getting benefits from no department at all.

This situation happens as it is near impossible for the targeted citizen to understand how government functions, how departments interact and how to approach the departments. Therefore, it is near impossible for the vulnerable sections of the society to actually receive the benefits that they are supposed to receive.

Under this context, how can we redesign the government to ensure that the government is citizen centric and provides personalized governance on a proactive basis. 

Non-Tax Fund Generation for Governments

Governments have been focussing on Tax as a primary source of fund generation. Because of the nature of taxation, there are severe issues in the two primary kind of taxes – the direct taxes and the indirect taxes. There has been many discussions on how indirect taxation distorts the economy and how direct taxation is discriminatory in nature as many are outside the purview of direct taxes.

However, as we move into an era of ever expanding demands on the government to deliver, the pressures for fund generation has been spiralling up. This has been accentuated by voters’ comparisons between the private sector’s ability to deliver personalized services to a large number of people versus the Government’s inability to do the same.

An interesting outcome of such a dynamics is the ability to transform the government from a primarily Tax Oriented Government (TOG) to a Service Oriented Government (SOA), and in the process, unlock very significant economic values that are trapped in various kinds of physical and non-physical assets that are owned by the government.

This is the journey towards the Next Generation Government (NGG).

Next Generation Governance is an evolutionary step towards a more efficient, inclusive and participative government through adoption of a set of new trends in business models, operational models, financial models and technological models for achieving Outcome based Governance

Economic value is trapped in assets such as spaces, impact zones, monopolistic data and ability to create wealth by marrying appropriate policy with capital, in a manner that private sector is not in a position to do. Unlocking the economic values through a combination of appropriate policies and development of a Service Oriented Administration will unlock the economic values of these Government owned assets, leading to creation of very significant non-Tax revenues.

A significant percentage of the GDP of an economy can be expanded by the unlocking of such tangible and non-tangible economic assets

SMAC Driven Policy Making

http://www.livemint.com/Politics/bebH4at07MCmsvcT8cr7WM/Government-to-give-egovernance-a-SMAC-push.html

The government is firming plans to set up departments that will govern the use of social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) technologies as part of its efforts to drive the next phase of e-governance.

The Government has  come up with a package of ideas, which together is called EGP (e-governance programme) 2.0, or e-kranti. The information technology (IT) ministry is working with the states and some ministries in the Union government to adopt a set of procedures to grapple with entire suite of SMAC technologies.

“The government is the repository of the biggest ever data. There have been 2.85 billion transactions—double the size of the Indian population—between the government and citizens since last year. This underscores the need for analytics.

Mobility too is important since about five million people are being reached daily both by the federal and state governments through mobile programmes, including those in healthcare and education.

The IT ministry is also working to develop new cloud-based delivery models. The government has created a policy for cloud in May last year. Government launched the first phase, creating the cloud environment in their datacentre based in Delhi, with about Rs100 crore invested in it.

India has been surprisingly adept at adopting technologies as they emerge. India is one of the leading countries in use of statistics by the government for policy making. However, the Government has evolved to a stage where they don’t need to depend solely on statistical data for decision making. Given the proliferation of e-governance and other large systems that may reside outside the government, such as banks and telecom companies, we have significant direct data. Using analytics on this data gives the ability to provide personalized governance as well as help us have analytics driven policymaking.

As an example, the government can check the number of tourists in a particular area by merely checking the visitors location registry of telecom companies. This data would be invaluable for disaster management.