1 billion Indians adopt e-transactions in 2 months

The ticker on the website that counts transactions done electronically by citizens with government entities has changed gears. In October, this ticker on etaal.gov.in, which aggregates all e-transactions from 1,500 government and allied websites, hit a landmark: one billion. It had taken eight long and painstaking years.

On December 26, in just 55 days, it doubled that count. More and more Indians are using the internet to, for example, pay water bills, file income-tax returns, query the government using RTI (Right to Information Act), inquire about barley prices in a mandi or validity of a piece of land for commercial use. These are among the 31 ‘mission mode’ projects the ministry of information technology outlined in 2004-05 as part of a National E-Governance Plan.

The ticker suggests progress. “It (one billion transactions) is a significant achievement,” says J Satyanarayana, secretary, ministry of electronics IT. Adds Tanmoy Chakrabarty, head of global government industry group, TCS, which is the most active among Indian IT companies in doing work for the government: “Its attests to the fact that e-transformation of India is on its way.”

But several experts, while acknowledging the advances, question the scale, sweep and speed of that transformation. “The government has been at it for almost a decade now,” says Guru Malladi, partner, government services, Ernst Young (EY), a consultancy. “E-governance transactions have touched a milestone, but we have a long way to go.”

Part of that distance is about including more government services, reaching more parts of the country, bringing more citizens on board, and retraining the bureaucracy to re-imagine service delivery. Part of it is about what really is true e-governance. The government defines 14 mission-mode projects, out of the 31, as “complete”.

But the delivery capabilities of this set span a wide range. It houses the MCA21, an online platform that allows companies in India —about 300,000 at last count—to remotely file their financial and shareholder information for regulatory purposes.

It also houses Passport Seva, which lets citizens apply for a passport online, but still requires them to queue up with a printout of their form at a passport office and go through the offline process.

The head of strategy of an IT services company that does work for the government bristles at such diverse interpretations. “E-governance is just lip service at present,” he says, on the condition of anonymity. “These are e-governance projects in a broad sense. But for true e-governance, a lot of processes need to change—like tendering, time to award a contract, the lack of a CIO kind of role to champion technology projects in government.”

Quantity Versus Quality

At present, the person in charge of defining the targets and pulling the strings, as much as he can, is Satyanarayana, who concedes to shortcomings. “We have control on quantity, where we know in real-time how much is happening. But the quality that is not there in all services,” he says, defining quality as the number of physical visits and ease of use online. “Last mile is a problem in India, and this is reflected in e-governance as well,” adds Raghupathi CN, vice-president head of India business unit, Infosys, which implemented e-filing of income-tax returns.

Satyanarayana implores assessing as much on how far India has come as on where it needs to go. “We are coming from a situation where there was no certainty of work being done or any time-frame,” he says. “From that context, it’s a huge improvement.” Adds Neel Ratan, executive director, eGov, PricewaterhouseCoopers India: “Even in a combination of online-offline mode, service delivery is far better compared to five years back.”

Any adoption of e-governance entails work on two fronts: configuring the front-end (how citizens access a government service online) and reconfiguring the back-end (digitising government processes).

Part of the reason for this half-way house are the file-based, legacy systems that are now going online, argues Rajesh Janey, president, India and Saarc, EMC, which offers data storage and information security services. “When you automate an existing project, you have to deal with legacy. Hence, services like passport are not entirely online,” he says. “But the Aadhaar card (unique identity number) is completely automated as it was a greenfield project.”

According to Malladi of EY, while elimination of physical processes will not happen in a hurry, biometrics will be key in the next phase of e-governance. “Biometric-enabled devices, which authenticate a user by linking up with their Aadhaar identity, will help reduce the need for a visit.” Adds Janey: “It requires a habit change, which is underway. Younger users will shape the future direction of how government services are delivered.”

Satyanarayana sees completely online delivery of services at least a decade away, partly because of the low penetration of the Internet and the small user base. “The aim is to reduce visits and reduce time to offer a service, and both are happening,” he says. For those without Internet access, he cites the example of e-districts, which involves citizens walking into government centres and availing of e-governance services. At present, about 102 districts have such centres. “These will reduce visits and improve quality of service for things like death and birth certificates, land, income, domicile, nativity certificates, payment of taxes, challans and utility bills,” says Satyanarayana. “By end-2015, the exercise will be complete.”

Land Hurdles

According to the ministry of IT, out of the 252 categories of services originally planned, 197 are being delivered online. However, many are purely in the realm of information dissemination rather than transactions. A good example is land records, for which there’s been a clamour to put records online and enable transactions. According to Satyanarayana, this was one of the first initiatives in the e-governance space: in 1996, termed CAARD (computer-aided administration of registration).

“In 15 months, it was scaled to 240 sub-registrars,” he says. “Later the idea of dematerialising came: do to property what was done to physical shares.”

Several states, including Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra, have tried taking land records online and enabling transactions—registration and transfers—but without success. “Land in demat form was tried in Nizamabad district in Andhra Pradesh in 2006, but was abandoned,” says Ratan of PwC. “The project was ahead of its time.” Land records go back 200 years. Historically, three departments have worked on the same piece of land— the revenue department, the records and registration department, and the survey department. “It’s not an integrated process, but working in silos on the same piece of land,” says Satyanarayana. “Efforts made to digitise them in parallel have had mixed success, but integrating the three is more complex because of unclear titles.” Small changes are underway.

For example, in Andhra, when a property is sold, a trigger is sent automatically to the revenue department. In Haryana, two programmes started last year are digitising records and transaction details.

Government Champions

Typically, from the time a proposal is made, an egovernance project takes two years to be contracted to an IT company. “The government ends up with dated technology and the seller finds it tough to stick to the quotation given two years ago due to currency volatility,” says the IT strategy head quoted earlier.

“The challenge in e-governance is sustenance of teams that oversee the projects,” adds Chakrabarty of TCS. “Officials change midway, creating delays, including in payments.” TCS was the project lead for MCA21 (now with Infosys) and Passport Seva. TCS designates only 5,000 of its 300,000-strong global workforce to its 160 government clients.

According to Malladi, the IT ministry is only line ministry in this matter. “An official in the agriculture department may not have any incentive to heed to the IT ministry.” In order to change this, besides a CIO-type of functionary, he recommends making e-governance part of the chief minister’s secretariat. “This will reduce bureaucracy and give e-governance an institutional push,” he says.

Satyanarayana admits HR is a “weakness” in implementation. “We had a committee under Nandan (Nilekani, head of the Aadhaar project) to make recommendations on e-governance, one of which is to create an institution of CIO in all ministries,” he says. “This is on fast track. Hopefully, by this fiscal end, we will recruit a CIO, from within or even outside.”

A CIO could speed up implementation, but true e-governance—with complete online transactions, as in Australia or Singapore— will take time. Says the head of strategy quoted earlier: “When comparisons are made, it’s often said India is bigger and is like many countries within one,” he says. “That’s an excuse. The whole idea of technology is to take away the scale, to manage it. If you are large, all the more reason to accelerate to use more technology, e-governance.” That ticker can go faster. Much faster.

1 billion Indians adopt e-transactions in 2 months