XGN: A Game Changer in the Field of E-Governance.

Abstract

Touted to eclipse China as the most populous nation in this world by 2028, India requires a very robust E-Governance framework if it wishes to ensure that the benefits of E-governance penetrate uniformly into even the remotest sections of the society. Thus, the development of a standardized prototype for E-Governance with the potential for wide-scale implementation, replete with value propositions which consider every faction of India’s burgeoning population within its ambit, is imperative to further augment India’s strong resurgence in the global scenario. The eXtended Green Node (XGN), one of the cornerstones of Gujarat’s vibrant E-Governance policy, is one such platform which holds the potential to effectively “fit the bill” if tweaked appropriately to further enhance its appeal as per the pan-Indian perspective. The XGN project, jointly developed by the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB) and the National Informatics Centre (NIC), initiated operations in 2008 and has since not only received several awards but has also gone on to be considered as a paradigm shift in the domain of government process re-engineering. Deployed at all the offices of the GPCB, XGN has succeeded in obliterating a host of bottlenecks prevalent in the suite of services provided by the board to citizens, businesses and other government departments. The crux of XGN’s success lies in the fact that it completely extirpates the need for any physical movement of files in various government departments by including a complete vista of service/analysis resources in its website including the facilitation of consent/authorization applications, live tracking of waste-movement, E-transactions, etc. With its service currently extending to more than 54000 entities, the success of XGN in terms of concrete statistics is quite tangible, most notably with the average number of applications being processed yearly multiplying to approximately 5 times. XGN has found espousers in each and every section of the Indian polity, especially in Goa with the state migrating to the XGN model of E-Governance in 2012. In this paper, the policy of XGN has been analyzed objectively with a two-fold perspective prominent throughout: the drawbacks of the current structure and the feasibility of launching a holistic, tweaked version of XGN to suit the palette of a pan-Indian crowd. More specifically, this paper analyzes the potential of enhancing the host of services offered by XGN within the purview of E-waste management, and driving value by inculcating better standard operating practices such as GPS-based waste-tracking & more compartmentalized storage-recycling of hazardous wastes, thereby enhancing productivity. Finally, the paper undertakes a cross-functional study of the XGN model using the Strategy Diamond framework, proposed by Hambrick & Fredickson, to establish a systematic model for the same with a definitive scheme to enforce checks & balances at every step.