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The National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) is a popular initiative launched by the Government of India to make all the government services available for all the citizens of the country while making use of electronic media. NeGP was developed by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) and also the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG). The government has given their permission for the National e-Governance Plan, and includes 26 mission mode projects (MMPs) and some 8 components, as of 18 May 2006. This is an enabler of the Digital India initiative, and UMANG (Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance)is also an enabler of NeGP.
What in general is meant by e-governance?
Electronic governance or e-governance, that today has been adopted by innumerable countries across the world and is widely prominent. In this quickly exaggerating and demanding economy such as India, e-governance is becoming quite a necessity. With this rapid growth of digitalization, there have been many governments across the globe for the introduction and incorporation of technology into governmental procedures.
Electronic governance or e-governance is best described in terms of the usability of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as per the government for offering and facilitating the services of government, exchange of information, interaction transactions, and the amalgamation of several stand-alone systems and services. If we say in some other words, it implies the use of technology for performing government activities and for achieving the goals of governance. With the help of this policy, the government services are now easily available to all the citizens and several ventures in a very smooth, productive, and transparent way.
Some of the major instances are e-governance comprises the Digital India initiative, National Portal of India, Prime Minister of India portal, Aadhar, filing and payment of taxes online, digital land management systems, Common Entrance Test, and so forth. E-governance can generally take place in some of the four major steps and types of interactions:
Government to Government (G2G)
Government to Citizen (G2C)
Government to the Businesses (G2B)
Government to the Employees (G2E)
As the 11th report of the Second Administrative Reforms Commission, that is titled "Promoting e-Governance - The Smart Way Forward", has established the position of the government that an expansion in the e-government was a necessary step. The ARC report got into the hands of the government on 20th December 2008. The report has also cited some prior initiatives just like sources of inspiration, comprise the references of the Singapore ONE program.
For pursuing this goal, the National e-Governance Plan was made and formulated by the Department of Information Technology (DIT) and the Department of Administrative Reforms & Public Grievances (DAR&PG). The program needs the development of an innovative application for empowering citizens to access government services by the Common Service Centers and it is also aimed at both the reduction in government costs and improvement in access to services.
Criticism the e-governance policy had to face
Some of the criticisms and the limitations associated with this policy were the lack of needs analysis, business process reengineering, interoperability across MMPs, and coping with new technology trends including mobile interfaces, cloud computing, and digital signatures.
What are the major objectives that E-Governance policy is focusing on?
Some of the major objectives of e-governance are as follows:
For supporting and simplification of government for the citizens of government, citizens, and businesses.
For making the government administration much more transparent and answerable while addressing the needs of the society and the expectations with the help of efficient public services and productive interaction between people, businesses, and the government.
For reducing corruption in the government.
For making sure about the speedy administration of services and the information.
For lowering any kind of complexities for ventures, offering immediate information and will enable digital communication by ex-business.
What are the problems associated with E-Governance?
Just as we know that the e-governance policy is having innumerable advantages like convenience, similarly it also has some kind of hurdles associated with itself. Some of them are as follows:
No management of computer literacy: India is yet known as a developing country and an enormous majority of the citizens are lacking computer literacy that is a barrier to the effectiveness of e-governance.
No kind of accessibility over the internet or even over the computers in some parts of the country is a major disadvantage of e-governance.
E-governance can also quite often result in a complete loss of human communication. And as the systems are turning more and more mechanized, there are fewer interactions that are taking place among people.
It has also given rise to the risk associated with personal data theft or any kind of leakage.
E-governance can also lead to a tax administration and the service providers can very easily make some excuses of not offering the service on technical grounds just like the way “server is down” or “the internet is not working” and a lot more!
Describing the E-Governance as per the Indian Context
E-governance in India is very exclusive, new and one of the recent developments! The launch of this National Satellite-Based Computer Network (NICENET) was done in 1987 and with this, the subsequent launch of the District Information System of the National Informatics Centre (DISNIC) program was set up for computerizing every district offices all around the country for which free hardware and software was given to the State Governments which were also provided with the requisite impetus for e-governance.
E-governance after all of this saw a great development along with the shoot up in technology. Today, there is a great number of e-Governance initiatives that are successful both at the Union and State levels.
In the year 2006, the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) got into formulation by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology and also Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances that had the major objective of making all government services reachable to every common man, that will ensure efficiency, transparency and the trustability of all these services at an affordable cost for realizing the most basic requirements of the layman.
The NeGP has been successfully able to enable some of the e-commerce initiatives such as:
Digital India
UMANG
Digital locker
PayGov
Computerization of records of land