Citizen-Led Participatory E-Governance Initiatives: An Architectural Perspective

Abstract

There are many successful information and communication technology (ICT ) initiatives in India, oriented towards rural development, with a focus to address specific issues of rural citizen. National e-Governance plan (NeGP) recognizes the potential of ICT interventions and plans for suitably selecting important and successful ICT initiatives, with an objective to include them as missionmode projects for scaling up. Another objective of NeGP is to provide a portfolio of services to the citizens through common services centres (CSC) integrated with e-government backbone to not only set up a good e-governance system, but also to establish a support structure. NeGI plan outlaY is Rs. 12000 crores with the mandate to complete the mission in next three years covering 100,000 CSCs and involving 600,000 villages. This provides an opportunity to look into the strategic issues in rural e-govemance. E- governance initiatives are mostly mooted by government administration, non-governmental organization (NGOs), cooperative as well as private sectors. Like any ICT project, e-governace projects call for “usability and user-centred design”, since the ultimate beneficiary is the “user”. The similarity between users in “rural development initiative” and that of a “business process initiative” is that the uesr ultimiltely ends up using the technology, and it is imperative that technology needs to be accepted. But the real task is to create a “demand-driven , citizen-led ICT initiative for the rural sector” , Mostly, pilot projects are based on sheer innovating frameworks, either through a development agency or through bureaucratic set-ups to support governance issues. Many frameworks are incubated with active support from government and funding agencies. While innovation is essential for any model to be accepted, it is important that projects need to move out of “incubators” and translate its success through transformation from “supply-driven” concepts to “demand driven” and sustainable process improvement imperatives. Scaling up of ICT initiatives is also another issue that requires support from users. However, in the Indian context, ICT acceptance and its uability in rural area are not easy. NeGP critically recognises these issues while embarking on such an enterprise level action through CSCs. E-governance architectures are also being conceptualised. In this paper, we discuss a possible process view related to e-governance architecture ,with due emphasis on citizens' participation and their contribution to the architecture, leading to sustainable information systm plan ning and implementation strategies. We also narrate a case which supports this view of e-governance architecture for scale-up.