[Reader-list] News Items posted on the net on Multipurpose National Identity Cards-51

[Taha Mehmood]

http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20070709/technologysabha200705.shtml

E&Y / Future of e-governance

09 July 2007

Future promise of e-governance

Future promise of e-governanceThe next five years will see
e-governance going beyond transactions to do much, much more.

Sunil Chandiramani

Sunil Chandiramani, Partner, Ernst & Young talked about the future of
e-governance. He started off with a quick recap of what has been done
to date. India has transformed significantly over the past few years.
If you look at the country today you see change enabled by ICT. NeGP
has been a comprehensive "programme" of the GoI & has gone a long way
to leverage capabilities and opportunities presented by ICT to promote
good governance across the country. Addressing the audience, he said,
"Each of you has played a key role in transforming organisations."

He went on to declare that on a scale of 100 the change that we have
seen so far is just 10 percent. The next five years will see much
more. Focusing on some key areas could accelerate the speed of
implementation of NeGP—multi-purpose, secure, authentic, unique
national citizen identity database; Greater harmonization of
initiatives between the centre and states; equitable partnerships with
the private sector; accelerated rural connectivity; building common
storage and processing capacities between or amongst the states and
the centre to optimise investments and cost of maintenance; capacity
building and change management as well as delayed projects and
accelerated costs – monitoring and evaluation.

Chandiramani posed a provocative question: "Do we restrict
e-governance to transactions or do more than that?" He went on to
state that there are a lot of projects that can be enabled with
technology that go beyond transactions.

With regard to a unique national ID, there is duplicity of efforts
today. Several identification databases exist for citizens both at the
central and the state levels. At the central level there are the PAN
database (the database itself is also prone to duplications, with some
people holding fraudulent/ multiple PAN IDs), Voter ID database,
Ration cards and National Identity cards. At the state level you have
the driving license (no common database exists, some states issue
biometric cards, other simple paper based cards). None of these
databases link together to form a single cohesive, comprehensive
citizen identity database.

An initiative in this direction is the new MNIC (Multipurpose National
ID Card which gives hope for a unique identification of every citizen.
A pilot has been launched with distribution of 3,000 ID cards in
Narela village near New Delhi. During phase I it is expected that the
Ministry of Home will distribute two million cards in six months and
Phase II will cover the entire population. There's also the Unique
Identification Project which is in its concept stage to define an
algorithm to combine multiple identities of a citizen (such as driving
license, ration card, election card etc). Is there a possibility to
synergise these two efforts with common storage and processing
facilities.

Moving on to why projects fail, often the participants fail to work
out the benefits that the citizen gets. A lot of projects talk about
computerisation and what they will do but benefits to citizens are
missing.

Lack of support at grass-root level can scupper a project as was the
case with Gyandoot, a project aimed at establishing an intranet for
the Dhar district in Madhya Pradesh, which would connect kiosks across
the district and facilitate access to government services and
information. The project failed when the district level e-champion of
the project moved out; his successor did not have adequate interest in
keeping the project alive.

Successful efforts are not replicated. You find one state completing a
project successfully only to find five more working on similar
projects. Several states are rolling out IT infrastructure under
different projects such as SWAN, NICNET, National data banks, state
data centres.

Partnerships with private enterprises in a manner that the government
likes can help reduce costs, while raising quality. Government control
remains while the speed of execution rises. NSDL is an example of PPP
in action.

Depending on how the country does, five years from now rural
connectivity could mean the difference between success and failure.