'E-governance not a technology fix'

By Our Staff Reporter

BANGALORE, FEB. 23. E-governance will not work in a system that is ``based on mistrust,'' Mr. T.N. Seshan, former Chief Election Commissioner, has said.

From filing an FIR (first information report) at the police station -- for which the inspector seeks his superior's permission -- to the larger issue of reducing corruption in the country, a whole range of issues had to be addressed before e- governance could be contemplated, he said.

In its present form, e-governance was being equated to computerisation. ``E-governance is not a technology fix,'' and there was more to it than mere computerisation of various processes, Mr. Seshan said.

He was speaking at the inauguration of a seminar on ``e- governance and convergence,'' here on Friday. The seminar was organised by the Department of MCA (Masters in Computer Applications), Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad.

There were several factors that had to be addressed before e- governance would really work in India, he said. Today, e- governance was so fashionable that the people who were trying to implement it in government departments had ignored the fundamentals, Mr. Seshan said. ``We are headed to make the `largest possible delegation of decision making to the lowest possible intelligence,''' he said, referring to the fact that computer software applications would process things such as income tax returns. At the same time, the robustness would be missing from the (human) system that implemented these decisions, he said.

``There is no effort to train the government machinery from the Deputy Commissioner all the way down to the peon,'' he said. There was no system in place to do this and some interested officers pick up the skills on their own initiative, he said.

Mr. Seshan told the students of the institute that it was useless to look for ready-made (technology intensive) solutions. What was important was to ``learn to learn,'' he said.

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