Tuesday, November 2, 2010

E-Governance And E-Infrastructure In India In Trouble

E-governance in India has been a big flop show despite various media reports. There are numerous reasons for the failure of e-governance in India. The chief among them are lack of insight among the policy makers, lack of management, lack of transparency, lack of accountability, absence of public participation, etc.

Naturally, there is almost no development on the front of e-infrastructure in India despite wasting thousand crores of public money. The only achievement in this regard is achieved on governmental and bureaucratic papers alone.

Take the example of e-courts in India. Till the month of November 2010 we do not have even a single e-court in India. Similarly, we do not have an online dispute resolution (ODR) model that can strengthen the dying arbitration system of India.

Take another example of the unique identification project of India or Aadhar project of India. The UID project /Aadhar project is neither supported by any legal framework nor it is technologically sound. Even there is no guarantee that Nandan Nilekani led unique identification authority of India (UIDAI) is capable of managing the cyber security and data security of the data and information collected by it.

Since 2006, the ICT trends in India have been showing the inadequacies of the ICT policies and strategies of Indian government. As per the ICT Trends of India 2009 provided by Perry4Law and Perry4Law Techno Legal Base (PTLB), Indian efforts for streamlining use of ICT have further degraded from 2008. The year 2009 saw some major ICT pitfalls and bad decisions were made by the Indian government. Overall the year 2009 can be said to be “Blunder ICT Year” of India that was really bad for "Human Rights" of Indian netizens.

Even on the front of modernisation of police force in India, there have been many lapses. On the front of Internet banking, Indian online banking infrastructure is at grave risks of cyber crimes. This is so because on the one hand the home ministry is imposing a foolish level of encryption use upon Indians whereas the department of information technology has already killed the cyber law of India. By making almost all the cyber crimes bailable, India has given a green signal to cyber criminals all over the world to exploit Indian cyberspace.

On whatever e-governance or e-infrastructure project we may look, we can only find dejection and failures. Corruption, lack of transparency and lack of accountability is killing all e-governance and e-infrastructure projects in India.