Transforming the Government Digitally: Challenges and Opportunities

India is witnessing a great digital transformation today in all spheres of economy and society. Digital technologies are being deployed by both the public and the private sectors to increase efficiencies, transform business processes and deliver greater value to their stakeholders. The government has launched the ambitious Digital India programme with the goal of transforming the government and the economy using digital technologies.

How are these digital technologies going to impact governance in the coming decade? How are the existing business processes and public service delivery models going to change? What are the challenges to such a transformation? In this article, I examine these aspects with specific reference to the advent of the latest technologies such as cloud, big data, analytics, social media, mobile, automation, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Some of these technologies are rapidly becoming mainstream and are significantly impacting the industry and the way applications are being developed and deployed in various domains.

Some of these new technologies are already being used by the government to make the delivery of public services more efficient and improve the government-citizen interaction. For example, the Mobile Seva project of the Government of India has significantly improved access to public services by bringing a large number of them on the mobile platform. The Digital India programme has also made cloud as the platform of choice for many departments for efficient use of computing resources and quick deployment of applications. The government is also using social media effectively to communicate with the citizens and other stakeholders. MyGov.in platform is being used by many departments to solicit views of all stakeholders on various government programmes.

Can the other emerging technologies such as big data, analytics, automation, IoT, AI and robotics impact governance? The potential of these technologies to transform business models and bring new products and services is enormous. Industries in several sectors have already started using these technologies to increase efficiency, reduce costs and improve their customers’ experiences. For example, automation of repetitive and rule based tasks is causing a significant disruption in the information technology (IT) services industry causing fears of layoffs. Government processes can be reengineered to take advantage of automation to make the delivery of services more efficient and accessible. Similarly, robots can also be used to improve citizen interaction when people visit government offices for seeking information or availing services.

Big data and analytics are being used by a number of industries to generate new insights into consumer behavior and offer customized services. Government departments can also effectively use these technologies to analyze patterns in citizen demand for various services and tailor delivery mechanisms accordingly. Big data and analytics can also help the government in transitioning to a data driven and evidence-based policy environment to improve the quality of outcomes.

Internet of Things has the potential to lead to a truly connected world and enable real time responses to various events and situations. Missions such as smart cities can very effectively exploit IoT to deliver a truly seamless and connected urban infrastructure and improve the living experiences of citizens.

What are the enablers to such digital transformation of the government in future? There are four critical factors that can help the government in fully exploiting the emerging technologies to become more efficient and dramatically improve the quality of governance and delivery of services to citizens and businesses. First, the government must have a clear and long-term digital strategy aimed at taking full advantage of the potential of these technologies. The digital strategy must aim at end-to-end transformation of the entire business processes and not just the service delivery interface.

Secondly, leadership is critical to such a digital transformation of the government. Presence of leaders capable of understanding the full implications of the emerging technologies of the future and driving change within the organizations accordingly to transform business processes and public interface is extremely important. In India, this would require massive capacity building efforts at senior management levels across the government to prepare the leaders adequately. Government should also involve capable leaders from the private sector to drive this transformation.

Thirdly, achieving a government wide transformation would require massive capacity building and skilling of the government workforce. Presently, these capabilities are singularly lacking in government organizations despite recent efforts in this direction. Capacity building is required at all levels across the entire government and not just in the specialized units dealing with computerization.

Next, the government would also need to ensure that appropriate applications using the emerging technologies are developed and deployed effectively and used across various domains to derive the desired outcomes. This would entail creating and sustaining an organization wide digital culture and focus on change management to ensure that the entire organization is committed to digitally driven transformation.

Finally, such a massive programme would need the holistic involvement of all the stakeholders, in particular the citizens and businesses and the industry partners to succeed. The citizens and businesses, who are the primary beneficiaries, would need to enhance their digital literacy to take full advantage of a government wide digital transformation. The efforts being undertaken to make the citizens digitally literate under the Digital India programme augur well for such an endeavour in future.

What are the challenges that the government might face in making this transformation a reality? The key challenges include developing leadership and building workforce skills, finding adequate financial resources, addressing security concerns and developing a digital culture within the organization and amongst the stakeholders. The government would also need to put in place a suitable legal framework to drive the digital transformation. These challenges need to be adequately addressed to make this entire endeavour a success. The emerging technologies present a great opportunity for us to transform our governance digitally to make all services truly online, end-to-end, connected and integrated in the next decade. We must overcome the challenges in achieving this vision through strategic planning, devoting adequate resources, building capabilities at all levels, developing and deploying appropriate applications and involving all the stakeholders. We are the world leaders in IT and it is the right time that we take the lead to use these technologies for transforming the quality of governance in the country.

(The above article was originally published in the eGov Magazine in its July 2017 issue. It is available at: https://egov.eletsonline.com/2017/08/transforming-the-government-digitally-challenges-and-opportunities/).

Target Olympics: How to Win More Medals?

The recently concluded Rio Olympic Games have grabbed the attention of everyone in the country, not least because of the dismal performance by India, which won just two medals this time compared to the six it had won at the previous edition in London just four years ago. A lot has been written about the reasons for such a poor performance by our athletes. These include lack of world-class sports and training infrastructure, lack of adequate incentives for the players, sports not being a viable long-term career option for sportspersons, lack of a sporting and fitness culture in the country, infighting and indiscipline in the sports federations which select and train the players and poor oversight and management by the government.

Is there any hope for us to improve our performance and achieve sporting glory in the foreseeable future? When small countries like Fiji and Kosovo can win gold medals at the Olympics, why can’t we, a nation with over 125 crore population? We must realize that long-term and sustainable improvement in sports cannot be brought about by this once-in-a-four- year obsession with the Olympics alone in our cricket-crazy nation. It requires sustained development and promotion of a sporting culture in the entire population with specific focus on the school going children from where our future sporting champions would come. This needs to be matched with creation of quality sports infrastructure reaching right up to the village level to ensure that access to such facilities is widened and made more equitable. Instead of the overall size of the population, what is more important is how many people have access to quality sporting infrastructure. Unfortunately, the proportion of the population having access to good sports infrastructure probably does not exceed more than 15% in our country. Widening the participation, spotting the right talent at a young age and grooming them to become future champions hold the key to success in sports. This is the strategy that worked so successfully in producing champions in athletics in countries like Jamaica.

While the central and state governments need to play a critical role in creating the sports and training infrastructure across the country, the various sports federations need to play an equally important role in selecting and training the sportspersons. However, in many sporting disciplines, the federations are ridden by factionalism, corruption and lack of transparency with no proper focus on promoting the game. Reforms in the federations on the lines of the Supreme Court mandated reforms in the BCCI are long overdue. Such a move would help in addressing many of the current ills in the system.

Though the government has substantially increased the cash incentives and employment opportunities to successful sportspersons, sports are still not seen as a viable full time career option by many. This needs to change through participation by the private sector in providing suitable employment opportunities. To think that the government alone can provide employment to all of them is unrealistic.

Wider private sector participation also holds the key to rapidly improve sports infrastructure and groom the talented sportspersons. Suitable public-private partnership (PPP) models should be devised to allow the private sector to invest in creating quality infrastructure across the country. Specialised centres of excellence or academies in various disciplines should also be created through PPP model to groom the talented sportspersons to achieve excellence at international level. This approach is already yielding good results in a few disciplines such as badminton and squash. To achieve the objectives outlined above, the present level of investments in creating the necessary infrastructure and training and supporting the sportspersons in the country needs to be enhanced manifold. We cannot hope to win medals at the Olympics with the current level of facilities and support that we provide. While a substantial part of the enhanced investments have to come from the government, both at the centre and in the states, the private sector needs to contribute too in a significant manner. Hopefully this would happen once the participation levels expand and there is more focus on achieving success in Olympic disciplines at the international level. Britain, after its relatively disappointing performance at the 1996 Olympic Games where it won just one gold medal and a total of 15 medals, increased its investments in sports and training of athletes substantially through its national lottery programme. As a result, during the past two decades, its performance has improved dramatically with the country winning 27 gold medals and coming second overall in the medals tally at Rio. If we have a strategic action plan in place as outlined above, there is no reason why we cannot win, say, 10 medals at Tokyo in 2020 and more in the future Olympics.

(The above article was originally published in Deccan Chronicle on September 11, 2016. It is available here: https://www.deccanchronicle.com/sports/in-other-news/110916/target-olympics-how-to-win-more-medals.html)

Digital India: What Next?

A flurry of projects is being launched under the Digital India programme on a regular basis. Some of the major projects include the digital payments app BHIM, Government e-Market (GeM), Aadhaar linked e-Sign and digital locker, Mobile Seva, MyGov, Bharat Net, National Scholarship Portal and e-Hospital. Digital India is a very ambitious programme aimed at transforming India into a digitally empowered economy and knowledge society. It was approved in August 2014 with great expectations to usher the country in a new era of digitally driven growth and prosperity. How has the programme performed in its nearly three years of implementation and what lies next for it? What mid-course corrections, if any, can be made to enable it to achieve its desired outcomes in the future?

Digital India is centered on three key vision areas. The first element of the vision is to provide digital infrastructure to every citizen and create access points for delivering digital services. The second vision area focuses on providing access to government services on demand. The third vision area focuses on capacity building and empowering citizens so that they can become active participants in a digitally driven economy. The programme covers nine pillars of growth areas which include broadband highways, universal access to mobile connectivity, public Internet access programme, reforming government through technology, electronic delivery of services, information for all, IT for jobs, electronics manufacturing and early harvest projects.

The achievements under the programme have been noteworthy though the full impacts of the projects are yet to be realized. Under the Bharat Net project, optical fibre connectivity has reached over 75,000 panchayats, covering about 30% of all the panchayats. Government data centres and wide area networks have been established in almost all the states. Over 3 lakh common service centres (CSCs) to deliver government and business services have been established across the country. These CSCs cover over 1.72 lakh panchayats. The government has keenly pushed JAM (Jan Dhan, Aaadhaar and Mobile) to ensure financial inclusion. Aadhaar enrolment has crossed 112 crores while the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) has shown promising results in schemes like scholarships, PAHAL, public distribution system, MGNREGS and the National Social Assistance Programme. The Mobile Seva project has brought about a transformation in delivering government services through mobiles. Both Digital Locker and the MyGov platforms have over 40 lakh registered users.

Though the projects under Digital India have made a good beginning, it is clear that they are yet to achieve their desired outcomes considering the large population (especially in rural areas) and geographical expanse of the country. How can the programme achieve its full impact within the targeted timeframe? It must be realized that the penetration of e-governance services is still low in the country due to lack of ICT infrastructure and low digital literacy. Lack of local language support is also an important barrier. Further, the full potential of the mobile platform for delivering government services has not been realized and new technologies for enhancing the effectiveness of the applications, such as data analytics, Internet of Things and GIS, have not been exploited fully. The performance has also varied significantly across the states.

What can be done to enhance the effectiveness of the projects under Digital India? We must aim at enhancing the reach and impact of the projects with focus on rural areas and economically weaker sections. For this, the projects must aim at increasing both their scale and scope. While the scale involves enhancing both geographic reach and number of transactions, scope implies that the applications be made end-to-end involving completely paperless, faceless and cashless transactions. Mobile must be made the default access mode for applications to enhance reach and coverage and local language interfaces must be seamlessly integrated. The digital locker ecosystem must be expanded and large scale digitization of records initiated to make all transactions paperless. Similarly, for making all transactions faceless and cashless, Aadhaar should be made the primary mode of authentication and payments. The network of CSCs must be increased to cover every panchayat. We also need to focus on cybersecurity to ensure that our electronic infrastructure and transactions are safe and secured. Institutionally, all states and union territories must be brought on board as key stakeholders in implementation.

To truly enhance the reach of Digital India, we must develop digital villages and digital markets. A digital village would focus on connectivity and applications to provide services digitally in villages, such as tele-health, virtual classrooms and skilling and capacity building. A digital market would help in integrating the rural economy at regional and national levels and bring better remuneration to farmers and artisans.

Ensuring that every citizen is able to benefit from Digital India would require massive efforts at capacity building, especially in the rural areas and amongst women. Government and private organizations also need to enhance their capacities manifold at all levels to deliver their services digitally.

Digital India is transformational in its vision. However, we need to ensure that it reaches each and every Indian to truly achieve this vision.

Use JAM to Deliver Smart Services

With the launch of the Digital India programme in July 2015, a lot of expectations have been created in the country with regard to faster and more efficient delivery of electronic government services. Indeed, e-governance is one of the key pillars under the programme with the objective to ensure that all possible government services are delivered electronically in a seamless and end-to-end manner with comprehensive government process reengineering to make delivery simpler, paperless and more efficient.

How can this objective be achieved? In the current model of e-governance, almost all the services are being delivered by various government departments and agencies in silos through standalone applications with lot of duplication and little process reengineering, though there are some notable exceptions. The government websites and applications are also mostly not mobile compliant which makes it very difficult for mobile device (phones, tablets) users to access them. Online authentication of users and online payment of fees are also often missing. Payments to beneficiaries under various government schemes are also not made directly to their bank accounts except for some schemes. In short, most of the electronic services currently are not end-to-end.

To address this issue and make the e-government services really smart, the JAM trinity comprising the Jan Dhan Yojana bank account, Aadhaar platform and mobile phone can be used as the foundation for all e-government applications. JAM will help in making electronic services completely end-to-end by allowing a user to avail a service fully electronically without any need for physically visiting the concerned government office for submitting any identity proofs or supporting documents. How can this be accomplished?

First, all e-governance applications must integrate the Aadhaar platform for online authentication within their applications. This will eliminate the need for people to submit any physical identity and address proofs. With the recent approval of the Aadhaar bill, this platform has been provided a legal footing to allow it to be used for delivering a wide range of services. With over 100 crore Aadhaar numbers already issued, this step will go a long way in eliminating a lot of paperwork and hardship to the people.

Secondly, all e-governance applications must also incorporate the mobile platform for delivery of their services through mobile phones and tablets. With mobile penetration at a much higher level in the country than access to computers and internet, it is imperative that all electronic services are also delivered through mobile devices for greater accessibility. Already, the national Mobile Seva platform of Government of India has shown its utility by integrating the applications of over 2000 government departments and agencies across the country with its mobile based services. This must be extended to cover all e-government services in the country.

Thirdly, all the schemes where payments are made to the beneficiaries must incorporate bank account information in their applications so that money is transferred directly to their accounts. The bank accounts should also be linked to the Aadhaar platform for ease in authentication and payment as has been done for the LPG scheme. Various subsidy and pension schemes can all be transformed in this manner so that the benefits can reach the eligible beneficiaries directly without any hindrance or delay. This transformation will also yield substantial savings to the government as all the duplicate and ghost beneficiaries can be easily eliminated. This will also help in making all the financial transactions cashless and electronic.

In addition to the incorporation of the JAM trinity, some other measures are also required to make the services really smart. These include undertaking comprehensive process reengineering before introducing IT in governance, delivery of services through a cloud platform to avoid duplication in creating ICT infrastructure and applications and ensure that the ICT resources are efficiently utilized, incorporation of an online payment gateway, use of a digital locker to store and share government issued documents in electronic form and use of Aadhaar linked digital signatures to provide legal validity to the documents as per the IT Act. Already platforms for online payment, digital locker and Aadhaar linked e-sign have been created and made available for use by the departments. A national cloud platform is also readily available to be used. The main task now is to get all the government departments and agencies across the country on board these platforms. The recently approved e-Kranti or the National e-Governance Plan 2.0 framework of Government of India under Digital India incorporates all the above elements and holds great promise in ushering in a new era of smart services in the country. All the concerned stakeholders must utilize this opportunity to make the lives of citizens and businesses easier by making their services truly ‘smart’.

MSMEs: Prime Drivers of Make in India

Make in India is a very ambitious programme launched by the Government of India to transform the country into a global hub for manufacturing. The goal is to raise the share of the manufacturing sector in the economy from the current level of 16% to 25% by 2025. It targets 25 sectors of the economy ranging from automobile and aviation to textiles, tourism and hospitality. The government has taken a number of steps to achieve this goal including promoting foreign direct investment in new sectors such as defence, railways and medical devices and launching a number of sectoral programmes such as Digital India, Startup India, Standup India, Skill India, Smart Cities, etc.

Can the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) serve as the drivers of this programme? MSMEs have been recognized the world over as the prime drivers of innovation, economic growth and employment generation. In India too, the MSME sector is a vital part of our economy with over 6.30 crore enterprises providing employment to nearly 12 crore people. Over 99% of these units are in the micro sector with investments of less than Rs. 25 lakhs in plant and machinery. The MSMEs in the manufacturing sector, comprising around 1.97 crore units, produce over 7000 products, contribute over 7% to India’s GDP and account for around 45% of the total manufacturing output and over 40% of exports. In some sectors, such as auto components, leather goods, textiles and garments, engineering items and gems and jewellery, Indian MSMEs have acquired global competitiveness. Thus, MSMEs have great potential to enhance the manufacturing sector’s contribution to our economy. How can this potential be realized?

At an operational level, MSMEs face several challenges that need to be addressed to make them more competitive and efficient. These challenges pertain to five main areas: access to finance, availability of skilled labour, access to quality infrastructure and latest technologies, and forward linkages to markets. Access to credit at reasonable interest rates without collateral remains one of the foremost challenges that affect the operational viability of MSMEs. Recent schemes such as the Credit Guarantee Fund Trust for Micro and Small Enterprises (CGFTMSE) and the Mudra Yojana to provide collateral free loans aim at easing the access to credit for this sector. However, access to collateral free credit remains a major issue for a large number of MSMEs due to non-uniform implementation of the schemes. This needs to be addressed immediately.

Availability of skilled labour is another critical need for this sector. The country can reap the demographic advantage of its young population only when skilling of the working age people is taken up on a massive scale. Programmes such as Skill India aim at addressing this requirement and MSMEs are expected to benefit from this programme in a big way.

Access to quality infrastructure is another major area of concern that needs to be addressed to reduce the cost of operations for the MSMEs and make them more competitive. Internationally, cluster development approach has been shown to be the most effective in providing both soft and hard infrastructure to this sector. These include common facilities such as effluent treatment plants, utilities (water, power, communications, etc.), access to technology, research and development (R&D), testing centers, markets, finance, upgradation of skills, etc. Though we have adopted this approach in a large number of MSME clusters around the country, we need to further enhance our cluster development strategy in line with the international best practices. In addition, specific schemes for encouraging innovation, improving quality, R&D and upgradation of technology by the MSMEs would be very helpful in making them internationally competitive.

Access to markets is another critical area of concern for this sector. Recent initiatives such as the new public procurement policy mandating that all central ministries and PSUs procure at least 20% of their annual purchases of products and services from the micro and small enterprises and the new Defence Procurement Procedure for promoting domestic manufacturing of defence products with a focus on MSMEs are aimed at addressing this concern. However, developing export competitiveness and access to global markets remain formidable challenges for the MSMEs that need to be addressed through specific long term strategies.

Developing a vibrant startup ecosystem in the country is vital to the success of Make in India. We must recognize that holistic success of Make in India depends not only on domestic manufacturing but also on indigenous design and development capabilities. Though India has the third largest startup ecosystem in the world, a large part of it is focused on the emerging technologies space. We need to devise specific strategies to promote innovative startups in design, development and manufacturing.

A number of factors relevant to the success of programmes like Make in India are captured in the overall ‘Ease of Doing Business’ (EoDB) parameters in the country. India has shown a remarkable improvement in the latest EoDB ranking by the World Bank, rising 30 places to be ranked within the top 100 countries. However, more steps need to be taken to address the challenges that the MSMEs face in the country as noted above. The MSMEs are well poised to exploit the huge opportunities that programmes like Make in India have opened up in the country. We need to provide a supporting policy environment to make them realize their potential.

(The above article was published in Deccan Chronicle on April 16, 2018.)