E- Governance
E-government refers to the delivery of national or local government information and services via the Internet or other digital means to citizens or businesses or other governmental agencies. E-government is a one-stop Internet gateway to major government services. E-government facilitates provision of relevant government information in electronic form to the citizens in a timely manner; better service delivery to citizens; empowerment of the people through access to information without the bureaucracy; improved productivity and cost savings in doing business with suppliers and customers of government; and participation in public policy decision-making. E-Governance refers to how managers and supervisors utilize IT and Internet to execute their functions of supervising, planning, organizing, coordinating, and staffing effectively.
Information and Communication Technologies can enhance the transformation of work culture by serving a variety of ends, better delivery of government services to citizens, improved government interactions with business and industry, citizen empowerment through access to information and participation for decision-making and more efficient government management. E-Governance is not meant only for introducing or using technological tools, it fundamentally strives to bring about a change in mindset and work culture to integrate government processes and functions to serve the citizens better. Governance relates to safeguarding the legal rights of all citizens, an equally important aspect is concerned with ensuring equitable access to public services and the benefits of economic growth to all. The present article is describing various aspects and future prospective of E-Governance in Indian scenario.
Rajasthan government‘s focus is to use ICT to deliver e-Government that is better equipped to respond to the enhanced aspirations of its people in terms of 24×7 availability of quality government services. The aim is to enable a paradigm shift from the government-centric system to a citizen-centric system of governance, while improving the level of governance within the government departments.
The ICT infrastructure in Rajasthan are:-
State Data Centre (SDC)
Secretariat Local Area Network (SecLAN)
The Rajasthan State Wide Area Network (RSWAN)
Common Service Centre (CSC)
e-Mitra
e-Kiosk
Different fields of e-Governance are:-
G2C – Government to Citizen , G2C are those activities in which the government provides one-stop, on-line access to information and services to citizens.
G2B – Government to Business ,here the government deals with businesses such as suppliers using the Internet and other ICTs.
G2G – Government to Government G2G deals with those activities that take place between different government organizations/agencies. Many of these activities are aimed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of overall government operations.
Government to Constituents (E-Democracy) E-democracy refers to online activities of governments, elected representatives, political parties and citizens for democratic processes. This includes political or current affairs discussion and online consultation between representatives and their constituents.
E- Commerce
The evolution of e-commerce is traced back to 1970‟s with the emergence of internet. E-commerce was developed for the business community in the early 1970s to facilitate processing high volume and high value transactions electronically. Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) was the first business-to- business (B2B) application.
Subsequently, internet added a prodigious new dimension to e-commerce. The power of the internet as a global access was realized with the arrival of the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1994. Never in the history of mankind has a popular innovation spread as fast as internet. United States (US) has been considered the leader in the application of e-commerce.
The quick spread of internet in US can be gauzed from the fact that it took 16 years for telephones to be used by a quarter of all US households and 133 years for the cell-phones to be so widely used, but Internet has made similar penetration in less than 5 years.
By 2006, the digital economy has overtaken the traditional economy in U.S. So far only 8 per cent of manufacturing sector in US is applying e-commerce and, thus, remaining 92 per cent have yet to realise its benefits.
Further, e-commerce in US is taking place more in the service-oriented activities than the product-oriented ones. This is because of the fact that no two products are the same. But, services have a commonality that
makes maxim for more general applicable whether it is hospitality or airlines, transport services, banking, reading of books and alike. After its fast debut in US, e-commerce is rapidly spreading beyond US boundaries and is growing speedily global. Numerous e-commerce success stories abound in Europe.
The origin of e-commerce in India coincides with the introduction of Internet connectivity in the country in 1989. As such, e-commerce in India is in its infancy. Historically, Rediff-on-the-net, one of India‟s leading online services, set up India‟s first e-commerce on August 13, 1998. Then, India entered the age of e-commerce the day the government deregulated the Internet Service Provider (ISP) policy in November 1998.
Since then, there is no looking back and the country is proliferating in Internet. The rate of growth of penetration of Internet has been spectacular. It took radio 50 years to have 50 million owners. Tele Vision (TV) 16 years and personal computers 17 years. But it has taken Internet only 4 years to reach that figure after the invention of WWW and browsers.
Till now, Internet penetration in India is about 0.5 per cent of the population against 50 per cent in Singapore. Nevertheless, India is fast emerging as the largest country for registering domain names in the entire Asia-Pacific region. According to the latest dotcom index for the year up-to February 2000, India occupies 11th place in it after US. UK, Korea, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, China, Spain and Italy.
Presently, India has nearly 35 ISPs in various stages of operations. Added to these are 187 more ISPs granted licences. The popular ISPs already providing access to internet in the country are the Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL), Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL). Satyam Online. BT Internet, Intel India, Max India, Quark, HCL
Perot, Infosys, Future Divices and Dishnet. Satyam Online, India‟s largest ISP mega corporation got over 1, 15,000 subscribers across the country.
As of March 31, 2000, there were 7.5 lakh Internet connections in the country with 3.2 million Internet users. According to Forrester Research, over 27 million households in India will access the Internet by 2003. National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), the apex body and Chamber of Commerce of India‟s software-driven IT industry, has recently released findings of its survey to evaluate the E-Commerce scenario in India. As per the findings of the survey, the total volume of e-commerce transactions in India was about Rs. 131 crore in the year 1998-99.
Out of this volume, about Rs. 12 crore were contributed by retail Internet or business-to- consumer transactions and about Rs. 119 crore were contributed by business-to- business (B2B) transactions. The figure for the year 1999-2000 was estimated to reach Rs. 450 crore.
Here, it is significant to note that India‟s experience in e-commerce transactions is compatible with that of US and other countries where percentage share of B2B remained much larger than that of Business-to-Customer (B2C). This implies that businesses are more willing and able than individuals to use e-commerce technology.
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