IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Once the required approval for conducting trials is obtained, the companies can also submit research data online to the country’s drug regulator Drug Controller General of India (DCGI), seeking marketing approval for their drug.

Four months after it promised to put in place an e-governance system to enable applicants to track the status of building plans submit for approval, the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA) on Tuesday said the system would be introduced by month-end.

The Minister in charge of CMDA, Parithi Ilamvazhuthi, disclosed this during an interaction with builders, architects and real estate developers to discuss steps to simplify the process.

These are the findings of a study on ‘Impact Assessment of e-Government projects’ by Prof. Subhash Bhatnagar of IIM Ahmedabad. The report was released on Wednesday at a two day workshop jointly organized by the IIMA and Department of Information Technology, Government of India. The primary objectives of the workshop is to share the findings and learning from the impact assessment study, and to identify a new set of mature e-governance projects that could be assessed in the next phase.

The proposal comes in the wake of the popularity of mobile phones and the already existing infrastructure of mobile telephony in the country. There are 200 million mobile phone users in the country in contrast to about 36 million internet users, according to industry sources. “There are different channels of delivery and access of government services and we are not confining ourselves to the internet,” said a senior government official.

Presenting the national-level best fire service award to Bajpe Fire Department at Bajpe Airport, he said the complete computerisation of bill payment, electronic data exchange will help both agencies and passengers to pay online.

The process of computerisation of records and system for disposing of the matter at government offices was being carried out in full swing.

Despite the slowdown in IT spending by different verticals, spending by the Indian government in 2009 has led to momentum in the marketplace with vendors realigning their plans and strategy for this segment. This momentum will be carried forward in 2010 and 2011. IT investments in the public sector make this a high potential space for IT vendors.

Government buying cycles are fundamentally very long and projects that have been in the discussion stage for three to three-and-a-half years are getting finalized now. This slow decision-making process along with bureaucratic factors adds to the issues that IT vendors face while doing business in this vertical.

He was speaking after inaugurating an `online tax payment and dealer point registration system' in the Transport Department at the state secretariat here.

"E-governance is must for good governance. The new facility would save time and enable dealers to deposit tax online and get their registration number from their offices itself," the CM said.

“Perhaps, they did not like ‘transparency and accountability,’ or perhaps, our mindset is such that we derive pleasure from moving paper files,” Haroon said. The minister agreed with the observations of PAC Chairman Jam Tamachi that lack of coordination, interest, and professionalism were the main problems afflicting government departments.

However, he also said that it was too early to say whether it would actually be a part of the plan or not, and to what extent that role would be prevalent. “But as people start using IT as a service such as software, data centres and all other means, which are all bundled together, cloud computing is also proving to be a fairly attractive model in India. First, many people may want to use ‘pay as you go’ model and that generally appeals to the Indian economy,” he added.

While there is a plan to identify beneficiaries, I wonder what such a proposal will mean once the Unique Identity Project led by former Infosys managing director Nandan Nilekani gets going.

In a dream-like scenario, I would think the database for one programme can be matched with another and benefits or funds required transferred almost instantaneously.

Prior to 2006, filing and registration of documents by companies, which is a statutory requirement under the Companies Act, 1956 was done manually. This rendered the whole process inefficient since it involved a lot of paperwork . The MCA-21 initiative (simply standing for 21st century reforms) was aimed at enabling electronic filing of these forms. However, the ministry feels that there is still a lot of room for improvement and hence has once again teamed up with Tata Consultancy Services, for ushering in a newer version of MCA – 21.