Etaal.gov.in the Department of Electronics & Information Technology portal maintains a live ticker of the e-governance transactions that occur across the nation. As per the statistics presented here Goa’s position on the e-governance front is way behind most of the other states in India including Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, etc.
An array of e-governance project have been initiated in Goa in the last 15 years or so and crores have been spent on them. A whooping Rs 93.5 crore has been spent on public IT infrastructure in Goa in just the last two financial years ending 31st March 2013 (Source – Data Quest Survey Report 2013). In fact 644 rupees are spent per person by the Government in Goa over providing IT infrastructure. But despite all this, obtaining e-governance services in truly online mode is still a distant dream and efficiency and transparency in government offices a faraway mirage.
Some of the primary reasons for mismatch in this cost performance ratio are – replication of work, time wasted in reinventing the wheel, low back end integration with parent departments and non/delayed inclusion of digital signature and other emerging technologies.
Infogram, DCsuite, Taluka Suite, Mahiti Ghars, Lok Seva Kendras, State Data Portal, E-District, CCP e-governance Module, Bicholim Taluka e-governance module , MMC e-governance software and so on… each of these e-governance initiatives have many overlapping features. In addition to offering some department or area specific tasks, each one of these initiatives claim to issue common certificates like birth /death, residence, scheme application forms, NoCs etc . Different agencies are deployed by different government departments to do the same tasks and lakhs are spent repeatedly reinventing the wheel.
There are 86 Government departments in Goa running their own e-governance implementations. If common software modules, database structures and data would be shared by all these departments wherever possible through mutual understanding e-governance implementation in Goa would have picked up pace. With this, replication would have been avoided and time, money and other resources saved could be redirected towards designing systems at the next level of implementation of e-governance. If every government agency would link to generic services from these pools and build only those which are not already available a lot of resources would have been saved as of now and we would be much ahead in our e-governance implementation efforts.
The latest entrant on the e-governance horizon in Goa is the e-District Mission mode project (MMP) aims to do something similar. This MMP aims at planned integration of various existing e-governance initiatives and also electronic delivery of 26 identified high volume citizen centric services, at district and sub-district level.
Let us hope that at least one year down the line e-District MMP gets going and this continuous replication of work stops once and for all. Only then the path for next phase of e-governance implementation in Goa will be paved.
