|
|
Amita Singh
|
ICT represents the new constellation of power relations. On one hand it has helped the emergence of a civil society unguarded and free of territorial boundaries, hierarchies and power allocations and on the other hand created enough need for the government to reveal its cards.
ICTs for the community
The launch of Digital Repository by the Department of Administrative Reforms, Personnel and Public Grievance at the beginning of this year has been preceded by an intensive research and assessment of good governance practices in the country. For the first time in the administrative history of India the task of evaluation of public service delivery was undertaken in a more holistic manner by involving non-interested parties into the process of
assessment which took cognisance of not only government bureaus but also their delivery mechanism, strategies and communicative skills to reach out to people and communities in a manner which made them more entrepreneurial rather than dependents.
The task had been a formidable one considering the vast number of resurgent civil society participants in the task of governance. It demanded the participation of researcher in this upsurge as well as prudent exploration of the direction which most new innovations in governance practices were being driven to arrive at. The role of new Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in these micro innovations of governance was a force to reckon with even though it was a very small constituent of the whole process of transformation. It enabled communities to reinvent living together in contrast to splitting apart in the process of global reforms and rediscover and rearrange their indigenous associations for income generation purposes. These micro-bondings were almost at the verge of extinction due to their gradual supercession since independence by one powerful and omnipotent bureaucracy created out of miscalculations of developmental State. ICT was helping communities to fill those pathological gaps in deliberative democratic systems so that change could be sustained on a long term basis. But most important of all ICT was unintentionally refining and naturalising community cultures towards a common human agenda free of caste and communal divides. This was possible as local people stood before one computer as a public service provider and found it quite irrelevant to explore the background of this small pressure group asking for common services from the government. It increased understanding in various ways as this crowd improved inter-personal communication.
It was revealed that ICT impact upon local people was different from that of other technologies adopted by government in earlier times. Its ability to draw people at one place due to its visual effect, incite debates on local issues which ordinary people found relevant, its usage not being dependent upon crude and time consuming training to all because kiosks could be manned by just one such trained person picked out from the community itself and lastly an argument which many in the West may find difficult to agree with, is that women took to this technology relatively faster than what they could to other technological systems.
Its larger participation and wider interdisciplinary mode of scholastic exchanges, ability to voice the marginalised, seeking global mandate on issues of human concerns and aiming to draw the policies inside out are features which constrain the monolithic State and the bipolar world. Most of all it provides a justification for reforms which inhibit the application of public choice tools in policy formulation, implementation and evaluation which allows politics to bypass or suppress real need structure of society.
ICT represents the new constellation of power relations. On one hand it has helped the emergence of a civil society unguarded and free of territorial boundaries, hierarchies and power allocations and on the other hand created enough need for the government to reveal its cards. Thus ICT became almost an indispensable tool to the governance agenda which arrived when globalisation knocked out the leviathan bureaucracy stuck in stagnant waters of development. The rise of ICTs can be attributed to the global failure of the three developmental decades of United Nations, the sixties, seventies and the eighties due to widespread corruption, distorted markets, deficits in trade yet it could also be called a Siamese twin to global capital which continues to spread global market culture in developing societies like India. However the gains far outpace the cost through its prudent management which some governance practices across Indian districts described here have been able to demonstrate.
ICT is redefining bureaucracy within the framework reinvented by New Public Management (NPM) reforms pushed and promoted by the Fifth Pay
Commission in 1997.The resultant techno-domain of governance, commonly known as e-governance, can be called one of the biggest post-war challenges to bureaucracy. To overcome the failed administrative exercises of peoples participation, preventing socio-political exclusion and achieving dispersal of
services this new informational tool was raised as a panacea for all evils of state. Its ICT component embedded in e (electronic) and the post-neo classical rephrasing of the role of government in governance explains the domain of its activity and devices for its application. It bridges the uncertainties flashing like Frankenstein threats to human survival which characterise global society as a risk society. Issues of choice, welfare and
distribution have largely become a matter of information. The celebrated e-governance applications both in terms of its role as a seductress catwalking the alleys of traditional bureaucracy who are too awestruck to react to its ire and also as a whistle blower for the civil society in colonial slumber and critical tolerance to state. In all respects it is a development which cannot be ignored without being suicidal. The increasing spread of techno-fanatics, vendor freebies and digital luddites in administration and academia gauge a clear view about the changes which ICT applications are bringing about in the larger frame of governance.
Governance has been amiss or apparently disavowed in the frame of Indian administration since independence. While this was partly due to the detachment of administrative research with Anthropology and Geo-Economics it was also due to the sacrosanct Weberian model which kept the State centralised and closed for perceived fears from the Indo-Pak border activities. However this had been one of the prime reasons for the systematic failure of all Five Year Plans and for which country had to pay a very heavy price in terms of burgeoning deficits in economy. Thus even though the democratic State aspired for participation and partnerships these activities were reduced to rituals for policy implementers who could thereby form an impermeable layer of administrators controlling grassroots like a medieval mafia.
ICT applications in grassroot administration acted like a borer into the steel frame making it porous and accessible. It invoked a new hope and spirit of participation which was more visible in economically weak and remotely placed regions as they had been written off after the failure of Integrated Rural Development Programmes in the nineties. Few startling experiments in Bundelkhand region of Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Godhra (Gogumba) in Gujarat suggest the enormous potential of this new technology in transforming grassroots. However, urban areas such as the Ahemadabad Municipal administration by setting up Lok Sewa Kendras have also witnessed a revolution in the direction of transparent administration and increased accountability of District administrators besides ensuring a speedier service delivery to people. For women in backward but culturally versatile regions like Bundelkhand in MP and Barashat in West Bengal (WB), ICT provided a more broadbased round table for increased communication as a result of which a shimmer of hope emerged and gradually with the support of Self-Help Groups (SHGs) and NGOs became a determination such as the kind of we shall overcome was generated . As people brought down these traditional divides of Indian society a new resurgence for entrepreneurship surfaced in this otherwise apathetic regions which led to a reduced role for government agents and a compelling demand for information.
Peoples participation
For the researchers of the sixties who had somehow become skeptics to the adoption of technology, ICT cleared the smoke for them. Three stage transformation was visible; Under the first stage The agreeable government of the state such as the Chief Ministers acceptance to speed, transparency and visible government . One could divide states into three categories on this point. The first category of states are the Changemakers such as Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Gujarat governments which allowed their bureaus to transform in accordance with local needs. They made appropriate changes such as the indispensable need for learning local dialect even by higher officers of Central Services, creating infrastructure for implementing State Wide Area Networks in making each and every officer accountable and connected to the service delivery chain. These governments also discovered some officers of aptitude to innovate in providing such services. In Madhya Pradesh, the Gyandoot programme opened vistas for district administrators to react to public needs. In Gujarat the name of Ms. Jayanti Ravi is a synonym for the popular Mahiti Shakti programme in Godhra which could help the district bounce back to normalcy immediately after the riots and blood shed of communalism. These states are also known to be open to rational partnerships and collaborations with private parties in technological programmes. The success of Ahemadabad experiment can be attributed to Nalin Bhai, a US trained patriotic engineer who feels for Gujarat more than the profits which accrue to him. Government is also the motivator for absorbing or enticing middle or senior age category personnel into designed training programmes through a method of incentives. Both these states have
attracted a larger chunk of bureaucracy into computer savvy moulds.
The second category of states are the leapfroggers. These States have been very swift in making top level changes in the form of IT committees such as those formed in Haryana like the Secretariat for Information Technology (SIT) or IT Prism or rationalising the bandwidth and connectivity systems but the rest of the bureaucratic pyramid was kept out of these changes. In the ultimate it brought FDI but no change for an ordinary citizens life. This is despite the fact that Haryana State Wide Area Network (HARNET) was established for data, voice and video transmission and dissemination for inter department connectivity, multi-user and multi-service facilities, video conferencing, file transfer, e-mail, on-line application processing, query and response. This resulted into a collapse of some of their most publicised e- governance programmes such as Naidisha or e-Health.net or e-food.net. While Gujarat could transform their health services to poor by a simple common Mahiti Shakti or Municipal Reform programme, Haryana could not
improve their health services even in their one city Gurgaon which has FDIs from the twenty top IT investors in the country. In such governance systems where democratic bodies such as Panchayats and Municipal Corporations are willingly kept closed to public e-governance becomes a fashionable fad rather than a change agent.
The third category of States can be referred to as Laid back States and there is no guessing about Bihar and Uttar Pradesh falling in that category. Most of these common terminologies of ICT applications are foreign to bureaucrats in strategic positions also.
Thus, after the need for an agreeable government comes the second stage of transformation to decentralise bureaus into more entrepreneurial groups of public-private partnerships. Developmental Alternatives (DA) in Madhya Pradesh, Abhyudaya in Sanitation Programme of Porba Midinapore (West Bengal), Change Initiatives in Barashat (West Bengal), Kudumbshree in Trichy (Tamil Nadu) to mention a few were able to attract local people through their advocacy campaigns on a purely need based top priority demand. NGOs inspired a new drive for talent hunt in music, street plays and handicrafts. Indigenous entrepreneurship found a way in the rather elastic programmes of NGOs. DA through its TARAkendras in the backward regions of Bundelkhand was able to expand a simple service delivery shortcut programme through a Microsoft funded programme for poor women to a wide spectrum of employment generation programmes such as paper making, electricity generation through stems of locally available Besaram shrub, cloth making, dying and pickle making through local products. Interviewing few local women revealed that they worship this TARAkendra more than their deity Ram (placed in Orcha village where TARAkendra is functioning from) as they starved whenever through some bureaucratic problem the Kendra is not able to function.
NGO in short has provided a market ( TARAhaat) for their locally prepared products. Similarly Abhayuday of the Rama Krishna Mission in Purba Midinapore has branched out to a market of indigenous technology for clean drinking water or water filters made out of locally available products, sanitary items and soak pits, bricks etc. Both in Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal and also in Karnataka and Gujarat ICT reforms have been preceded by a decentralisation drive of Panchayats and Municipal bodies. In States where this is missing like in Haryana after the shrinking of Panchayat bodies by amendments made in Haryana Acts in 1999 and 2003, ICT applications have been reduced to metropolis rituals.
The third stage of transformation is the need for regulatory changes to meaningfully penalise non-implementation of ICT reforms such as the failure of local offices to deliver services given in Citizens Charters. For this these charters have to be clear and rationally explainable such as those in Bangalore Municipal Governance and Ahemadabad reforms. Citizens Charters have divided services into one day governance and the more than one day governance. Against each service is mentioned the number of days required to deliver this service.
A few hours stay in the office of Ms. Thara the District Magistrate of Ahemdabad explained the functioning of Intractive Voice Response System (IVRS) system and its ability to keep the bureaucrat in continuous check of its people asking for services in all local offices and tehsils. At the end of the day all one day services have to be delivered or reasons given for not being able to do it. The additional monthly arrangement of a video conferencing where local people even of the BPL (Below Poverty Line) families could communicate directly with the Chief Minister of the State and the Chief Minister would in front of them depute a bureaucrat to solve the problem within the deadline given appeared like a revolution and more so because it was not the Indian Administrative Services (IAS) personnel running this programme but people who had very low literacy levels and belonged to BPL families mostly from the tribal regions of the States. This has carried a career threat to local politicians who have survived by whipping up communal sentiments in their constituencies as it was found in Tikamgarh tribal regions spread around Betwa river and saal forests. The inaccessible collectorate of the District is now obliged to provide Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe/ Other Backward Classes (SC/ST/OBC) certificates within a day and also enable a poor youngster to earn through a Driving License which was a torturous human ordeal in the pre- TARAkendra days. The whole layer of middlemen, rent-seekers and lethargic bureaucracy has been wilting under the pressure of ICT reforms wherever they are implemented thoughtfully and thoroughly backed by ethnographic studies of society and rural appraisal systems.
Conclusion
Three important constituents of a sustainable governance reform is that they should be need based, emerge out of local innovation and backed by political will. ICT reforms require and indicate the need for a progress on these fronts. Technological growth arrives only through readjustments made in favour of few special interests which may strive to take the state along in their mission. The increasing spread of techno-fanatics, vendor freebies and digital luddites in administration and academia gauge a clear view about the changes which ICT applications are bringing about in the larger frame of governance. Only a committed governance research can enable ICT as a facilitator to sustainable reforms in this country.
Author: Amita Singh is Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.
|
