Towards Sustainability of e-Governance
Without exploring and repeating the sustainability parameters which most studies on e-governance have already analysed such as access, affordability, institutional reforms and indigenisation, this chapter looks into the strength of the public sector depar
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Towards Sustainability of e-Governance
4.1 The Challenge of Sustainability of e-Governance Most countries in the Asia-Pacific have launched mega e-governance programmes. South Asian countries have been late starters in e-governance, but they have come up with some of the biggest and most complex of e-governance programmes such as India’s ‘National e-Governance Programme’ and Bangladesh’s ‘Digital Bangladesh’. As these mega projects pick up, there is a big challenge for these countries to sustain them in a manner that more people are able to access sites of governance and are able to get relevant information which can be downloaded with speed and continuity. If more and more people access the Internet, they need to have IP addresses, and if the government intends to quench their thirst for information, the stored data should be readily available within departments and with all institutions of people. Authenticity and surveillance can be maintained when the government manages data with appropriate analytic skills applied for stored data. Much of what we call sustainability is the ability of governments to manage timely transition to higher technology and provide undisturbed e-governance to people. When researchers analyse these programmes, they are either looking at affordability, accessibility or capacity issues even though managing transition in a cost-effective manner is the most potent requirement. Most people do not realise that every new registered user over the Internet occupies space, and the global shortage of this space is already a policy concern. Once these mega schemes of e-governance start working to their optimum, countries may have to create more spaces and more IDs. How can a country obtain this as these are technologies with developed nations, and how would this be regionally distributed and what would the cost be? The work of government does not end by preparing a mega project of e-governance but how to sustain it as it advances. The progress from IPv4 to IPv6 is reflective of government’s seriousness towards sustaining e-governance. Similarly, e-governance needs to have a good storage space for retaining institutional memory. For example, if X seeks a loan from a public sector bank, a single-window system can work appropriately if the computer can show a history of his transactions, A. Singh, A Critical Impulse to e-Governance in the Asia Pacific, DOI 10.1007/978-81-322-1632-2_4, © Springer India 2013
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credit bureau report of his credit history and liabilities along with assets. If all this information is to be collected without the e-governed departmental network, then the process would take nothing less than 2–3 months to enable the bank to sanction the loan. The constraint for retaining institutional memory is the storage space. However, nobody questions the government on its provisioning of ‘Big Data management’ and ‘Cloud Computing’ which provide customised local storage and Internet storage spaces, respectively, for the data produced by de
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