10 Ideas for e-Governance

Here are 10 ideas for e-Governance that I think would be beneficial to the Government of India today: 

1.Tendering system of the government that is used to allocate tenders for construction and procurement. Incorporate an open bidding platform for interested parties for government contracts on the lines of Fed Biz Opps in USA: https://www.fbo.gov/ Incorporate business ranking and evaluation methodologies such as CMM to ensure quality is not compromised for cost in government contracts.

2.Public Distribution System (PDS) for the distribution of food grains, vegetables and fruits could be augmented with a supply chain management system that tracks inventories and prices at various points in the supply chain and identifies wastage from unused food, hoarding at various points in the supply chain and sources for sudden spikes in food prices at various points of time.

3.Infrastructure Monitoring System that monitors the utilization and safety of critical national resources such as highways, airways, railways, power grids, etc. The goal here will be to identify supply bottle necks and eliminate them by adding more capacity where bottlenecks happen.

4.Build a network of government suppliers and agencies (consumers) that can interact in real time to understand the needs of the government through shared access to critical information on operations of various government agencies. Eg DELL COMPUTERS builds strong supplier relationships through a web portal called valuechain.dell.com. This leads to an agile supply chain that can respond in real time to the customer and business requirements.

5.Micro-finance portal for farmers and women: Build a web portal that makes micro-finance loan applications accessible to all farmers and women through web based services on smart phones and Aakash tablets. The scope of this portal could include other financial services such as farmer’s insurance, pension schemes, etc.

6.Health services portal: Build a web portal to deliver health services to the citizens over the internet to remote and inaccessible areas. This could include consultations, health check-ups and also prescriptions for good health practises.

7.Online payment of fines for violations of rules: Violations of traffic rules, cleanliness rules and other civic rules that are liable to a fine should be recorded online instantly and fines collected should be recorded instantly. There should be an option to pay the fines online through a central fine collection portal.

8.Bio-metrics based database of criminals in the country: Every person who has a crime recorded against him / her should have his bio-metrics such as finger prints and eye scans recorded in a central database along with the criminal and personal histories.

9.Web portal for exercising the Right To Information (RTI) Act: Instead of going through a labyrinth of government offices to get an RTI filed, validated and exercised, there should be a single web portal where citizens can exercise their RTI privileges.

10.Web portal for tracking government projects: A web portal should be built to find status of all government projects in execution, their funding status, funds used, expected ROI (Return On Investment) and the constituencies benefiting by the project. The portal should also state timelines for completion of the projects and whether the execution is on time or behind schedule. Reasons for delays should be made available. This portal could be used as a project management tool by the government agencies as well.

Technology enablers: Cloud computing, access to high speed internet, smart phones, tablet PCs and other computing technology. Enterprise Architecture models such as TOGAF and DODAF could be used to develop such e-Governance systems.