View: The need to look at India’s technology agenda in a holistic way

By Raj S Joshi

The Covid-19 crisis presents an opportunity for bold reforms, not just in infrastructure, regulations and local economies, but also in governance. And this can be implemented via a strategic view and push to use information technology (IT) in governance.

This not only means using our technological prowess, but also the need to take a wider view of state and central functions, sharing best practices among states, Centrestate cooperation, and a drive towards making governance more efficient, effective and accountable.

As a term, e-governance has been mostly used in India for citizen service deliveries at central and state levels with a focus on activities rather than on outcomes, except for examples like passport services. Many states like Karnataka, Gujarat, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh have made good strides in some areas.

But most states have suboptimal systems. Most services like healthcare, vehicle licences, industrial approvals, law and order, electricity and water are delivered by states. Their e-delivery is manifested by poor website designs and user navigation, less focus on smooth user experience, improving high page load times and errors, patchy multilingual features, inadequate data and IT systems security, lack of robust architectures, integration of related services, etc.

A comparison of healthcare websites for Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra was conducted and gaps were clearly visible. Lack of interoperable data has been a problem in the battle against Covid-19.

Data-gathering exercises conducted once in every 10 years are inadequate in today’s times for policymaking, and are prone to being used as political fodder. Citizen services delivery data can be standardised and made reusable across India for policymaking more effectively in real time.

If granular data of workforce in the informal and formal sectors, through their use of government services with an architecturedriven approach, was available, one could have modelled and foreseen the plight that migrant workers continue to face during lockdown. We need to plan bold steps, like defining key strategic projects at the central level in customs, ports and national transport systems, agricultural markets and public distribution systems (PDS) integration, defence, education, telemedicine, legal services, etc.

Key outcome goals can be revenue increase, leakage prevention, contract process efficiency, turnaround time and cost control. We need to leverage principles of enterprise and data architecture, reuse IT systems across states, set cybersecurity standards, interoperability, artificial intelligence (AI), an outcome and key performance indicators (KPI)-driven approach and, over time, link to financial devolution formulae.

This will also help drive the adoption of key technologies like AI, blockchain, 5G and Industry 4.0 where India has been performing below potential, especially for a country of its technological prowess, population and its data, goods and services tax (GST) network and JAM (Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, mobile).

Our blockchain policy is currently crypto-centric, lacking balance with the smart contracts paradigm. Poor health of most telecom companies has impacted India’s 5G plans. Industry 4.0 is yet to reach most of the manufacturing sector. Mistrust remains between startups and government. There is an urgent need to look at India’s technology agenda in a holistic way. The ongoing Covid-19 damage control exercise may be the best time to start it.

(The writer is former member, National Working Committee of Electronics and Computer Export Promotion Council)