UPSC Articles
GOVERNANCE/ SCIENCE & TECH/ POLITY
Topic: General Studies 2,3:
- Executive and its functioning
- e-governance- applications, models, successes, limitations, and potential
- Awareness in the fields of IT,
Digitisation of Government Financial working
Context: A case for three-phase transition to mandatory digital payments, accounting, and transactions for government proposed by the CAG under a new project and law called DATA (Digital Accountability and Transparency Act)
What are the goals of DATA?
- The starting point is mandatory and common data standards for all entities receiving government funds in all forms of funding
- The endpoint is a single searchable website to ascertain total government funding by element and entity
What steps are needed to make DATA a reality?
Covering the distance between these needs three elements:
- 100 per cent end-to-end electronic data capture: All receipts and expenditure transactions including demands, assessment, and invoices should be received, processed, and paid electronically.
- Data governance for standards across all government entities: Data standards are rules for describing and recording data elements with precise meanings and semantics that enable integration, sharing, and interoperability.
- Technology architecture that must ensure that all IT government systems should conform to a prescribed open architecture framework (for instance, IndEA) while ensuring robust security and maintaining privacy.
What are the advantages of DATA?
- Long Overdue reform:
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- The Union budget grew from Rs 197 crore in 1947 to Rs 30 lakh crore in 2020 and total government expenditure may be higher than Rs 70 lakh crore.
- But the form and manner of keeping accounts have more or less remained unchanged since Independence
- Reduce errors
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- Manual transactions and manual payments often lead to manually entered data at different stages in different databases on different systems which makes to unreliable & vulnerable to errors
- DATA ensures Business continuity (electronic records cannot be lost or misplaced like files or paper records) and an incontrovertible audit trail
- Enhance transparency & accountability
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- It makes all government revenue and expenditure data electronic, machine-readable, granular, comprehensive, purpose linked, non-repudiable, reliable, accessible and searchable.
- It will enable legislatures to draw “assurance” that each rupee due to the government has been collected, and each rupee has been spent for the purpose it was allocated.
- Addresses the problem of siloed IT systems
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- Government computerisation has often mechanised manual processes rather than “re-engineered processes”.
- This has created siloed IT systems with individual databases that lack modern data sharing protocols, which DATA tries to solve
- Addresses concerns of fiscal data
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- Due to siloed IT systems, fiscal data was being
- Incomparable – as basic as salary expenditure across states
- Obscure – large expenditures booked under omnibus head called other
- Non-traceable – actual expenditure against temporary advances drawn or funds drawn on contingent bills
- Misclassification – grants in aid as capital expenditure and bookings under suspense heads
- Due to siloed IT systems, fiscal data was being
- Enables the use of cognitive intelligence tools
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- DATA will provide with huge information which will enable tools like Big Data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning to use it for policy making
- This in turn will support the establishment of budget baselines, detecting anomalies, data-driven project costing, performance comparisons across departments.
- Cost efficiency
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- Bad behaviour currently costs the RBI Rs 4,000 crore in bank agency commissions because many parts of the government do not use the RBI’s free e-kuber system
Connecting the dots:
- Justice B.N Srikrishna Committee recommendation on Data protection