Rise of E-Governance

E-Governance in its present form and coverage has seen several levels of evolution both in concepts as well as applications. Notwithstanding a serious impetus provided by advent of internet, E-Governance has its origin to a systematic thinking on developing certain performance yardsticks for the government departments, particularly, with respect to the Information Resource Management (IRM) and its various nuances. That E Governance was truly a response to make the government departments more efficient than mere technology is well established by the sequence of events that unfolded. In this paper, an attempt has been made to trace the rise of E-Governance from its early days and deliberate on various issues that came by as the momentum picked up. In India, there was no such event where concern to improve public services was linked to performance of government departments and institutions. However, that did not prevent E-Governance to make its presence felt though in a very limited scale and coverage. The initial E-Governance efforts in India were more sporadic attempts on the part of some enterprising/IT savvy government officers/IT professionals. Gyandoot, the celebrated community E-Governance, of Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh was not part of any planned IT policy of the State. It was conceived by an enterprising and technology savvy district collector. The GIS based system of tracking police control room vans at Gautambudh Nagar of Uttar Pradesh, was nothing but a creative experimentation by a technology savvy police officer. Nevertheless, the success of these early isolated attempts truly made the foundation for subsequent growth of E-Governance. The National Informatics Centre (NIC), set up in 1985, quickly grew into as an application service provider and it could collaborate with many State governments as well as Central Government Departments and institutions to roll out many E-Governance initiatives. The advent of WWW made it possible in all government departments and institution to have their websites and portals. Today, there is hardly any government institution where EGovernance in some form or other is not practiced. The trend that is evident is increasing focus on efficient delivery of services as well as process re-engineering. The story of growth of E-Governance in India may not be same as that of USA or Europe but nevertheless one can say that E-Governance in India is not a mere hypes, it is very much real and for government departments, it is no longer an option Governance has preceded with several levels of evolution in concept and applications of IT in government. The early phase is mostly devoted to issues relating to information Resource Management (IRM), Strategic Information Management (SIM), performance yardsticks in terms of Best Practices. At this stage the broad strategic issues related to information Management by the government departments. The second phase saw the rise of the World Wide Web and a whole range of issues connected with the management of WWW_ design of websites, assessment and evaluation of websites, a new public information model based on WWW etc. Then came the third phase, i.e., E-Governance which led to issues relating to organization, legislations, accountability, security, reliability,participation tools.