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.

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.