Possible e-Governance Manifesto for Delhi Elections

People-centric e-Governance

Reduce Discretionary Power, Reduce Corruption

·      No scheme or regulation without e-governance to support the implementation

·      Analytics driven policy making to avoid biases due to vote-bank politics

·      All government files will be created and managed online, with all file notings kept public

·      Maintaining corruption heat-map by department online, based on SMS  feedback from citizens

Many regulations and schemes are passed without much intention of actually implementing them properly on ground. The outcome of such regulations and schemes is that the benefit rarely reaches the intended sections of the society and is usurped by middlemen and corrupt politicians.

It is therefore imperative to implement e-governance solutions for every new scheme and for every new regulation, such that the targeted sections of the society get benefited.

Hence, if regularization of colonies is done, it should be preceded by a system of identifying all existing residents and publishing their information online, along with maps of what they own and their photographs. This would ensure that their rights are safeguarded such that land-mafia, supported by corrupt politicians, does not usurp the newly regularized properties from these underprivileged sections of the society.

Similarly, data analytics will be used to determine policies such as the usefulness of the BRT, discriminatory and monopolistic power tariffs, effectiveness of government schools etc.

Governance

Day to Day Functioning

Many government decisions are taken, hidden from public scrutiny. The decisions and the files are kept away from the public and the rationale for taking the decisions are never discussed in public.

From petty decisions that inconvenience the public, such as replacing perfectly good paving stones every 6-7 months without any reason, and the old paving stones being left behind carelessly on the road, leading to accidents, especially of 2-wheelers, are matters of criminal negligence.

To prevent such arbitrary decision making, Delhi Government should put all working files online, along with the file notings.

Delhi government should also put up a website for reporting arbitrary civil works such as re-paving perfectly fine roads, replacing paving stones, digging up newly laid roads, water not available, unauthorized constructions, squatting on pavements etc. Each complaint will be tracked with a complaint number and will be brought to a logical conclusion.

Corruption Heatmap

Very often, some departments are known to have significantly higher corruption levels. Each department and its offices will be given code that will be prominently displayed at that office. Citizens who believe the department to be corrupt and/or had a corrupt office to deal with, can send an SMS with the department code to a certain number.

Departments with the highest such SMS’s will be marked with red and those with the lowest such SMS’s will be marked in green and other departments that fall in between will have a shade of colour between red and green, depending on the number of complaint SMS’s that come in.

Such a system will help in reducing the overall corruption envelope of governance.

Police and Security

Security of Women and safeguards from police excesses

The weaker sections of the society are the ones who are worst affected by poor security and poor policing. In many cases, the citizens are more afraid of the police.

Therefore Delhi needs to bring the following two key systems:

·           Create a Pre-FIR system where citizens can enter their police complaint from any cybercafé or smartphone and would then merely need to go to the police station to convert the pre-FIR into either a formal complaint or an FIR, based on whether the offence is cognizable or non-cognizable. This would reduce the harassment of ordinary citizens who faces trivial issues such as reporting of lost phones, reporting of road accidents etc and who have to end up being in a police station for hours

·           The statistics of how many pre-FIR’s are converted into FIR or complaints would give an indication of the responsiveness of the police, especially for the weaker sections of the society.

·           Create a system by which a low-cost electronic device can be worn by women that can be triggered to alert a special rapid force to respond to the help requested by the woman.

·           The special rapid force will be provided by a helicopter for effective response and for even following moving vehicles if necessary

·           GPS-tag all known sexual offenders and violent criminals so that women and children can find if they are in the proximity so such offenders

·           Similar systems will be provided to household help who can report abuses by their employers through such systems.

Make Delhi a Safe Delhi, a Vibrant Delhi

Free Business and Educational Software and Cloud Computing

To support small businesses and students

We all know that technology is critical for the success of businesses. However, the software and computer costs are prohibitively high for such businesses.

Delhi Government should provide Free and Open Source software to such small businesses to make them competitive and give them access to public computing resources to reduce their hardware costs.

Similar Free and Open Source software will be provided to students to help them be prepared for the jobs that demand basic knowledge of computers

e-Benefits

Panel Discussion on e-Benefits at GovernanceNow

http://govnext.in/speaker.php?speaker_id=173

Focus on outcome is absolutely necessary


ICT can help implement social welfare schemes in many ways. Today it is required in almost all sectors of social system like health – reserving 25 percent beds for the people from economically weaker section, to check if they actually get the bed or if it is used at all. Other social sectors include education. We must also ensure that if human resource mapping is happening. Then there is food security, ensuring if  food through public distribution system (PDS) is reaching the beneficiary. If people do not have food security, there will be no social welfare. Then there is cash transfer system for pension and scholarship. These all are part of social welfare schemes.

Role of middlemen and leakages in the delivery system are major challenges in the implementation of these schemes. However, IT can be used to overcome these challenges to a large extent. We need to develop models which can support such schemes. We need to find people who will be involved in it and we will have to see if they have been trained properly.
Where are technological models, or the larger business models? We have to work on solutions like installing screen readers for illiterate people or many such differently-abled people.

We need to find solutions – both technological and financial. Such models need to be put in place and we also have to ensure if outcomes are really been delivered. The focus on outcome is absolutely necessary. Focus should also be given to beneficiaries and to ensure that leakages are stopped. ICT can play an important role here.

The good part is that the problem has been recognised and the vision has been laid out. Now we need to develop a system which can proactively recognise beneficiaries, which can actively check further leakages. For affordability, we must have a say in some core technologies as well.

Concept of Digital Colonization introduced to the Malaysian Government

Concept of Digital Colonization introduced to the Malaysian Government

Technological Sovereignty Revisited

Published in eGov Magazine

Details of related event at http://c-dep.blogspot.in/2013/11/national-conclave-on-technological.html

Technological Sovereignty

Dr Jaijit Bhattacharya
President, Centre for Digital Economy Policy Research;

Sovereignty is one of the cornerstones for ensuring the security of the country and ensures that India as a nation can stand up to pressures from other nations. Sovereignty is critical to ensure our economic independence. As India moves into occupying the space of an IT superpower, the ability of the ICT industry to provide the requisite technologies reliably to the military, needs to be significantly enhanced. The issue is compounded with the fact that India has a feeble presence at the high stake tables of IT standards. IT standards have become one of the preferred tools of developed economies to extract undue economic benefit from emerging economies. Given that India, as of now, appears to have limited presence presence at the global forums on international IT standards, we appear to be abdicating our responsibility to secure our IT industry as well as IT usage. This situation has very deep implications on our defence preparedness.

The Strategic Implications With the lack of control over the technological layers, defense institutions will be challenged to protect the nation from Cyberwarfare. More importantly, military hardware itself could be subject to intrusions and control by adversaries, thanks to the increased “intelligence” of the equipment.

Given that tactical thrusts on the ground need to be backed up with complex supply chain which are increasingly dependent on critical information infrastructure such as Railways Signaling, telecommunications network etc, the entire Military strategy could be threatened by compromising the critical information infrastructure which has non-authenticated ICT components.

With the same “ICT intrusions”, the Financial Infrastructure of the country can be brought down, impacting the ability of the military to sustain a conventional warfare.

The impact on Network Centric Warfare is also obvious.

Thus it is imperative that we move towards an ICT & Electronics and Cyber (ICT&CE) ecosystem profile which provides greater control over the ICT layers to the military strategists.

The Tactical Implications
The tactical implication of lack of Technological Sovereignty on ICT is even more severe. The saying that “but for a nail, the war was lost” holds absolutely true for role of ICT in tactical engagements.

Compromising the supply-chain, command and control systems, financial systems, Operational Control systems will have devastating tactical implications, arising out of not having control over the ICT layers.

Industrial Ecosystem
A military can be as strong as the industrial ecosystem that backs it up.

In the modern warfare, ICT industrial ecosystem plays a critical role to ensure continuous supply of the latest ICT tools to support defense preparedness.

It is quite questionable whether India’s ICT Industrial Ecosystem has the wherewithal to provide uncompromised ICT tools to the military. This issues needs to be addressed through systematic policymaking and through carefully crafted institutional mechanisms.

Way Forward
India is growing as an economy and as an IT superpower. However, from a defense pre-paredness perspective, one is suspect of the layers of ICT&EC going into the ecosystem and the purposes for which these layers are actually operating.

India has limited sovereignty over these layers of ICT&EC that are going into defense preparedness. It is imperative to address this lacuna. India has the potential to develop the critical technologies and provide the technological sovereignty required to have credible defense preparedness.

One of the policies that may be leveraged to develop Technological Sovereignty is the defence offset clause. Under the current procurement
norms, India has a policy for 30% offset on defence procurement. This creates an immense opportunity for domestic manufacturers and service providers. More importantly, this also creates an opportunity for developing domestic IPR to take benefit of the 30% defence offset policy. However, in order to do so, it is critical to identify the roadblocks that prevent domestic manufacturers from tapping this enormous market, which also includes a fickle tax regime that prevents having a long-term view of the market. It would also involve identification of institutional mechanisms to facilitate partnerships of global military ICT providers with domestics manufacturers to enable the procurement process The first step in this process would be the identification of institutional mechanisms to facilitate domestic entrepreneurship.

However, such a step would require conceptualization of facilitating policies and institutional mechanisms to accelerate the process of Technological Sovereignty in ICT&EC for Strategic purposes.

Service Oriented Administration (SOA) and Next Generation of Land Records

India has been vigorously adopting an ambitious e-governance programme for over a decade now. The focus of many of the e-governance programs is to increase government tax revenues and to reduce cost of governance.

Given that governments have a monopoly over large amounts of data and information, and given the advances made in ICT adoption, there is an opportunity for the government to add to its sources of revenues significantly by moving to a paradigm of “Service Oriented Administration” or SOA. The monopoly of the data owned by the government can help the government, in collaboration with private sector partners to, provide such services to the citizens that were hitherto impossible to provide and for whom there is no equivalence in the existing brick and mortar setup of the government.

There are many such services that could be provided through the concept of “Service Oriented Administration” or SOA, that would lead to significant increase in government revenue as well as enhance economic activity in the country.

One of the first such SOA initiatives that would arguably have the highest impact on the citizens could be Next Generation of Land Records that could be implemented through a Land and Property Exchange System (LAPEX). The basic concept of such an exchange is that if stocks worth crores of rupees could be traded online with absolute security and privacy, why we can not trade land and property through a similar online system. Of course, the analogy between stocks and land is not the most straight forward, given the complexities involved in land and property records management. However, these differences are not insurmountable. An online Land and Property Exchange would open up the land and property market by bringing greater liquidity through enhanced visibility to available properties and greater visibility to potential buyers.

It is a well known fact based on many a studies that any improvement in land and property management would have a significant impact on the GDP of the country. A LAPEX would bring in enormous efficiencies in the system and would be a win-win proposition for all stakeholders. States such as Karnataka, which already have a highly evolved set of land and property management systems in place, are well poised to take this next step. Such an initiative would allow citizens to buy and sell land and property online. Given that Government of India has facilitated the setting up of Common Service Centers (CSC’s) in rural India, the benefits of a LAPEX will be highly pronounced in the rural areas where rural citizens can trade in land on the LAPEX through the CSC’s.

Government of Karnataka already has finely crafted IT systems for managing the current process of land and property management. This starts from the ‘Mojini’ computerized system for managing pre-mutation property sketches in rural areas and UPOR ( Urban property ownership records) for managing property ownership records ( along with it’s map) in urban areas, to ‘Kaveri’ for managing the deed registration and stamp duty collection, to the internationally acclaimed ‘Bhoomi’ for effecting the mutation of the property. Given this strong base and given that a considerable number of records are already “cleaned up”, it is an incremental step to setup LAPEX. Such an exchange could be setup on a public-private partnership basis with no investment from the government and with the potential to earn hundreds of crores for the government through the service charge levied from the citizens.

The system would be an optional system, wherein citizens can use the traditional mechanism of land and property dealings or could use the LAPEX, where they can divide their property, find a buyer or seller, register their sale deed and perform the mutation with only a single visit required to the government office at the end of the entire process. Moreover, pre-mutation sketches and Record of Rights can now be kept in a secure, authenticated and digitally signed format in a USB drive and can be traded 24X7.

In addition, it is also important for the government to grant (a) apriori right to owners to sell properties where government has no objections, (b) apriori right to buy to citizens who qualify to buy under the government rules and regulations such as eligibility to buy agricultural property and (c) automatic mutation of property after a certain waiting period. Such granting of apriori rights would make investors more comfortable and would open up the land market and thus result in additional 1.2 % increase in GDP (pl quote mechanize report)

Adopting the above process changes would result in emergence of a property record system which would make it reasonably easy for transition to  the Torrens Title System or more popularly called as a the Title based system as compared to the current Deed based system that involves registration of deeds and the need to have a chain of authentic deeds to prove ownership of a property. t. The proposed LAPEX would virtually create the Central Registry of clean property records which is one of the important component of title based system proposed by  Robert Torrens as part of the Torrens Title System.  The transition to the title system, as and when the land laws are amended to provide for the same, would be fast and less painful, thanks to the LATEX coupled with new processes proposed in Karnataka , which would create cleaner property records.

LAPEX along with the above process change from the government would create an explosion of land and property traded in the state. This will also lead to an enormous increase in the value of land and property in the state, thus significantly increasing the state GDP.

The time is opportune for the government to move into the next gear of e-governance adoption and for moving into the paradigm of Service Oriented Administration. India is a leader in IT and by adopting SOA, India can also be a thought leader in e-governance. Such a step would not only increase the revenues of the Government and benefit the citizens, but it would also help industry by allowing them to transparently buy large tracts of land for industrial and infrastructure projects. It would also help the IT industry in “exporting” the service to other countries in the world. Given the complexities of land and property management and given the criticality of land for infrastructure development of the nation, LAPEX is absolutely essential for faster growth of the nation.

Views on NDTV on possible curbs on Social Media by Election Commission of India

Views on National Digital Literacy Mission

http://www.hindustantimes.com/photos-news/Photos-Business/digitalliteracy/Article4-917769.aspx