Day 44 – Q 3. What are the most serious impediments for the success of e-governance initiatives in India? Examine.

Demand of the question:

It expects students to present clear facts and data regarding the serious impediments for the success of e-governance initiatives in India. 

Introduction:

India being a developing country needs to fill the socio-economic objectives with effective governance of the government. In the context of Indian economy, every sector is being impacted by e-governance. 

Body: 

Govt. of India has launched the initiatives of e-governance; providing all services electronically as much as possible. Govt. of India launched several projects in support of e-governance, like e-seva, smart govt, digital India, e-kranthi and etc. Each of these projects seems to be benefitting the citizens to a greater extent. In spite of this process, yet, there are some impediments regarding success of e-governance.

Serious impediments for the success of e-governance initiatives in India:

• Trust: It is the emerging challenges of e-governance. Trust can be defined regarding users of new software and trust of the govt. former aspect implies that users of any type of software or technology must be confident, comfortable and trusting of it
• Another very important aspect related to trust of govt. Nowadays, citizens using e-governance services, trusting the innovations of e-governance to some extent. Furthermore, there might be some fraudulent activities done by any other entity for the sake of finance, valuable info and even about personal information, etc. Besides, in govt. offices, dept. valuable info sometimes left out or missed; it definitely erodes trust about e-governance among all classes citizens of the economy
• Digital divide: Even in the era of science and technology, there is still huge gap exists between users and nonusers of e-govt. services. In fact, in India, majority of the masses, who living below poverty line and they deprived of govt. services. In contrast, some portion of people are immensely using the e-services of government . However, this gap needs to be made narrow, then only ,the benefits of e-governance would be utilized equally.
• Tampering of E-Governance system: As soon as the system is compromised and privileges are raised, the classified information of the E-Governance mechanism becomes very much susceptible to illegal adjustments.
• Disclosure of E-Governance Information: In case of the compromised E-Governance system, the undesirable information disclosure can take place very easily.
• Denial of Service: In this technique, attacker can perform Denial of Service (DoS) attack by flooding the E-Governance server with request to consume all of its resources so as to crash down the mechanism
• Funding is the foremost issue in e-Governance initiatives. The projects that are part of the e-governance initiatives need to be funded either through the Government sector or through the private sector.
• The delivery of Government services through the electronic media including EDI, Internet and other IT based technologies would necessitate procedural and legal changes in the decision and delivery making processes.
• It demands fundamental changes in Government decision management. The employees need to be delegated more authority. De- layering of the decision-making levels leads to re-engineering and appropriate sizing of the decision-making machinery.
• Use of local language: The access of information must be permitted in the language most comfortable to the public user, generally the local language. There already exist technologies such as GIST and language software by which transliteration from English into other languages can be made.

Following steps are needed to be taken up to tackle these challenges:

• National Citizen Database which is the primary unit of data for all governance vertical and horizontal applications across the state and central governments. 
• Based on National Citizen Database, an e-Governance framework across the nation with enough bandwidth to service a population of one billion.
• Connectivity framework for making the services to reach rural areas of the country or development of alternative means of services such as e-governance kiosks in regional languages.
• A secure delivery framework by means of virtual private network connecting across the state and central government departments.

When government started launching many initiatives for e-governance; it has become one of the emerging economies due to its potentiality of Information and Communication Technology. Till now, govt. has implemented various initiatives with different projects (Digital India, e-kranthi, etc).

However, digital divide between urban and rural, poverty, illiteracy, security and cost of implementation, etc. each of these issues and challenges are posing serious concern to the success of  e-governance.

Conclusion:

Hence, if these challenges are addressed carefully then it will not just only help to achieve better success for e-governance but also will ensure improvement in  governance processes and outcomes with a view to improve the delivery of public services to citizens. The resultant benefits are less corruption, increased transparency, greater convenience, revenue growth, and cost reductions.