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E-governance Standards Committee mooted
A `UNITED Nations for E-Governance' is on the anvil. With the first draft ready for publication by March 2003, the World E-Governance Standards Committee will focus on providing "a collective pool of reports where knowledge can be shared along with development of new technologies that would be required to address e-governance issues and implementation".
India is a viable partner for the Standards Committee given the e-governance success stories like the Karnataka Bhoomi programme for computerisation of land records and Andhra Pradesh's e-Seva initiative. The U.S.-based Sandhill Systems (SS) has already initiated discussions to rope-in leading Indian State governments in the global e-governance standards body.
Currently SS is spearheading the formation of the World E-Governance Standards Committee in partnership with Intel and Microsoft. The responsibility would be handed over to the worldwide web consortium once the momentum of the e-governance programme accelerates.
"India needs to consolidate its priorities and communication to the public with greater collaboration between the State and the Union administrative bureaucratic machinery. Along with India, we are seeking the support of the U.S. Government in this project," Krishna Srinivasan, Executive Director-Sales and Marketing and Vice President, Sandhill Systems, told The Hindu
While India spends nearly 2-3 per cent of its budget on e-governance, the U.S. has allocated $52 billion in 2003 for various e-governance initiatives including government-to-citizen and government-to-corporate programmes.
Challenges
Some hurdles however need to be surmounted before the global project takes off.
In the Indian context, some of the key issues include establishing a trust level with the public, bureaucratic challenge, providing a common citizen identification system akin to the U.S. social security system, and a comprehensive taxation system.
"These challenges are not specific to India alone, even the U.S. faces them. The U.S. Government has mapped an action plan for e-Government to tackle some of these issues. For instance, e-authentication initiative aims at building mutual trust to support widespread use of the Internet between the Government and the public," Mr. Srinivasan said.
On the global front, the Standards Committee will have to face operational problems like multiple languages and multiple currencies. Moreover, a common form would provide a convenience factor both to the Government(s) and citizens while reducing paperwork. The Submission Server (patent pending on technology) developed by SS allows the bureaucracy to offer a common form module. This can be customised to provide programme specific set of documents. The Server accepts data from multiple devices including faxes, paper and e-mails.
In the case of public scepticism on protection of privacy provided by the electronic submission of forms, a new e-Authentication initiative has been identified. This would break down the `trust' barrier. Already implemented by the (U.S.) Federal Government, the application would address authentication security, privacy and electronic signatures requirements of the e-governance programme. The solutions are built on top of the citizen's security number using `trusted-broker technology'. Meaning personal information cannot be accessed by un-authorised personnel as the server would not store this information.
Implications
Benchmarking of service levels provided by the government(s) and systems integrators in administration and implementation of various e-governance projects will heighten the benefits of `IT for the masses'.
Public inconvenience in dealing with bureaucratic red-tapism has been curtailed due to online submission of forms. However form applications authored by document vendors like Microsoft and Adobe are not inter-operable as of now. The World E-Governance Standards Committee with the support of these vendors would aim to provide `interoperability'. Sandhill Systems is also working with Microsoft and Intel around the Submission Server architecture for online form processing and the next step: device independent submission.
Preeti Mishra
in Bangalore
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