No one currently dares to think about entering into current days politics. Although some people have good aspirations to develop the country with the help of politics, the other politicians are making them corrupt and almost everything is now polluted and corrupted in the country. This comment does not require any proof as everyone is watching news and are reading daily news papers. If the discussion goes on like this, it would become a very good topic to discuss without yielding any useful conclusion.
But as a citizen of India, I would always love to see some development going on somewhere. The success is without corruption, without any black money circulation, without wrong bill and wrong proof submission. But it has become very rare for a common man to see these things and if something happens like that it is really a magic, surprise and wonder to the people of India. It is like as if someone saw flying plates and UFOs in the sky. I feel it is the responsibility of the people while utilizing their right to vote. They should vote to the people whom they believe that the candidate would do some development to the constituency. But this won't happen as corruption starts here at election campaigns where the leaders start distributing money and liquor etc to the illiterates and low class people. This is the starting point of corruption and it continues until the next election. Again after 5 yrs, this cycle continues. So the starting point of corruption is in the hands of people and I would say that the common man is responsible for country to be like this currently.
My ideas for very good governance that leads to very fast development assume the following points
- The government strictly implements the below ideas and no one should change the rules and the CM is basically very educated, disciplined, strict and legal.
- I assume that the government starts at least one or 2 services below legally with full intention of doing good to the public. The others would automatically start to inculcate. The 'bad' tree grew till now because of a bad seed. These ideas are good seeds and I believe they would surely grow in to a 'good' tree.
- People would actively participate in the idea and implementation
- It is always impossible to implement good without discipline and strictness
- All the strictness and discipline is because it is assumed that people lost confidence and belief on the government, politicians etc and no one is perfect these days.
- I am also assuming that the ACB (Anti Corruption Bureau) is basically not corrupted and the ACB officials do work without corruption and with full enthusiasm. If not under job pressures, they would have brought so many 'black' politicians into light.
- I know if the ideas are started to get implemented, it is difficult as we would be facing many political, geographical, religion related problems but I strongly believe they are not completely irresolvable when your aim is development. They can be managed and resolved at each stage.
- Most of my ideas given below are meant to be implemented and explained keeping in mind that the geographical granule considered is a State but not a mandal or a district or country.
- After reading this entire document, someone can ask me "You explained these many methods and are criticizing the government. Why can't you take the problem on to your shoulders and fight against this?" My answer to this is "Yes, it is exactly what I did. I understood the problem and that's why I proposed the concept. And it should be collective effort of every one to fight against this."
Ideas
The basic idea is to make all the government processes centrally computerized and no pen or paper is to be used. I have this idea when I started my career as a software engineer but some time later I came to know this point has already been quoted by Nandan Nilekani.
Implementing strict attendance rules to the government employees and taking necessary action for any rule breaks.
The most important action that needs to be taken immediately is to remove the human intervention between the common man (we can say Government's customers) and the government employees. This would surely at least remove 95% of corruption all over. Some points on 'How' to do this are explained later on.
Whatever the major project/program/scheme/developments to the public introduced by the government that has more than Rs 1 crore budget allotted to them, should be publicized and all the transactions should be made transparent. That is all the money related transactions should be made available to the public and should be made transparent. Suppose a project takes 2 crore rupees of money, open a bank account for that and provide the account credentials open to the public (only read permissions) so that public can check every transaction. Whatever be the transaction that is made from that particular account, it should be remarked with the reason behind the transaction. All the bills and required proofs should be made open to the public and press as open proofs. This always builds the confidentiality on the government. I bet government would never take this initiative and it will surely surprise me if any of the governments till now took such initiative. If there are any concerns in implementing this initiative they should find other steps of resolution rather than not implementing this step. This would surely stop the black money circulation as well. I am really surprised to come to know that the current Indian black money levels at Swiss bank only are about Rs. 74 Lakh Crores.
As mentioned above all the direct interaction between the government officials whether it is RTO or registrars or police or whoever it may be, should be minimized. Take either the help of computers or take the help of anti corruption bureau by giving them more powers to act as third parties to act between the people who want to take the government service and the government employees. This action of putting some third parties between government officials and the people can also be outsourced to some external bodies established especially for this work. This creates employment as well. But this would not decrease the relation between the government and the people; in fact, increases the belief on the government as they are trying to prevent corruption.
Let me think in the bad politician's way and selfish manner. If I am running the government (take the present scenario) I would think like this (considering I am the current CM). "My opposition ate lot of people's money and land. And tomorrow after 5 years, I may not again become the CM or our party might not rule the state again. So let me make money as much as I can. Let me collect lands as much as I can. Let me make corruption as much as I can and let me cross my opposition's level of corruption during their tenure". Now, after the election the opposition rules the state and think in the same lines again. So finally the politicians and their families are becoming richer and richer and the common man is staying at his own economic level all through his life and continues paying taxes (feeding the bad politicians). Now my question is why can't they make win-win situation? I mean, Ok let them swallow some people's money and satisfy their thirst and do some good work like this of providing basic commodities and services to people. So automatically people start believing you and next time they will make you stand and again do some corruption & do development as well. You will be the permanent ruling party and you would be keeping on getting the black money. We as people will excuse the government if they do corruption but will always blame you(government) if you do corruption at the cost of development. This way of doing some good in bad is still very much better than that of all bad, at least now as after 61 years of the development that in terms of providing basic amenities like housing, clothing, healthy food, education, health, water, power etc being this much rich in natural resources and talent, is an offence that is worth punishable if there exists any punishment greater than death sentence. We are seeing a 10 year development in 61 years of independence. Sometimes I feel if British had ruled this country another 20 years, we would have become a well developed country by now. I don't know why the competition in earning black money is not shown in providing real development. They would introduce welfare schemes and very less amount of people would get benefited. Schemes should be something which solves the problems that are there in every class of people. Specialized schemes for specialized problems/classes of people is not shown anywhere.
There is also one important point that people should remember. It is not possible for the government, always, to approach you to solve your needs. We would always here some welfare schemes like "The Government approaching the people to serve them" which would never give a success always. The people should also go to the government and demand whatever they want. It is their right and responsibility. But most of the people might ask where to go and whom to ask for small problems. So we would adjust our selves. Why should we adjust? 'Adjusting' is one of the historical mistakes that we people are committing; other important historical mistakes being most populous, being illiterates etc.
Thus to implement such a good, disciplined & developed society I have an idea, as a software engineer, which integrates most of above ideas and implements in a single run. This would however require some time to materialize and would surely be a big success if given enough publicity. The government which implements this would surely, I believe is going to rule the state/country for long time unless they make a mistake.
Implementing ITIL standards and processes, treating Society and people as infrastructure – Utilizing E-governance and E-government to the fullest
For most of the people reading this article ITIL might be a new term. You can get complete information on ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) standards and processes over the Internet. The main concept behind these standards is to provide set of service support processes by managing and maintaining IT infrastructure of a company/corporation. The library is a collection of best standards for providing such services. Several management processes like Service desk, incident management, change management, problem management, configuration management, release management etc are part of these standards which I would not like to explain and go away into the technical details as if this is an ITIL article. The only reason I wanted to coin the term ITIL here is because I have got the below explained idea as I have worked on ITIL based support processes. As government is the biggest support provider to the people, I thought why the government can't implement these ideas with respect to people. Why can't the people be treated as infrastructure of the society (similar to IT infrastructure in ITIL) and follow the similar support processes in order to solve all the problems we have? The question made me think of the following idea. I am sure this is going to help but I am not sure about
- How many of these are implemented?
- Is this already implemented? (I bet not)
- How many people have already suggested the similar idea or individual parts of the concept? (I came to know about some)
- Why is this not implemented if someone proposed it?
As per one definition, E-Governance is a process of reform in the way Governments work, share information, engage citizens and deliver services to external and internal clients for the benefit of both government and the clients that they serve. The use of information and communication technologies in public administrations combined with organizational change and new skills in order to improve public services and democratic processes and strengthen support to public policies. There are some other terms like Right to Information act 2005, PPP, delivery models like GTC, GTB etc related to this but I don't want to go in much detail about them.
My concept of providing public services like the following provided by the government are all should be brought under one roof.
- Land Revenue
- Transport Related (license, permits and registrations)
- Public distribution services
- Utility bill payments
- Information about all government welfare schemes to different classes of people categorically
- Municipal services
- All common public requests
- Comments
- Feedbacks
- Suggestions
- Housing services
- Agriculture related services
- Youth services
- Animal Husbandry
- Excise and Taxation
- Education and Training related
- Labor and employment related
- Small savings related
- Others
If you have seen websites like http://suwidha.nic.in/ and http://esevaonline.com/, they are providing good services to the people. But what is the index that these are maximum utilized by the people? The rating 'utilization targets' is very low, I believe, when compared to traditional and conventional methods of utilization of government's services by the people. People are more inclined towards doing things manually rather than believing IT and websites. Why?
'Suwidha'is an online portal by Government of Punjab for providing e-services to the citizens and 'e-Seva' is another similar portal that provides services by the government of Andhra Pradesh for providing services to citizens. But these portals mostly provide information on 'How' to utilize government's services but not provide services directly online. There are many processes that can be made online/computerized/self-serviced and several others which need direct interaction between citizens utilizing services and government officials, can be modified so that the interaction is avoided or monitored. But this is not happening. Also there is no belief and confidence in people that if you utilize any existing services in these portals today, tomorrow they will again say that is not valid and you should not do like this.
Also for your information there is one good website which provides ONLY information http://www.india.gov.in/ .
Thus these "information providing" portals are very less utilized and many people does not require all this information except for exam writing purposes and for general knowledge.
Necessity and Design of a new portal – that can provide a change
Thus I feel there is a requirement for an integrated portal that provides all the services, information and take suggestions & feedbacks from, the citizens. I am listing down all the points related to such a portal that provides services.
- The government forms a special body for maintenance of the portal under the IT department of the government. This team is structurally big as it deals with the portal that is being accessed by the complete state.
- The development of the portal should be given to a well qualified software developing company in order to have quality. The contract should be made in such a way that the company provides and acts a third level support when the government's portal team fails in resolving an issue.
- The government should also form a call center namely "Government's Service Desk (GSD)" and the team selected for this service desk should have all the knowledge about government's services and can give information about every action/utility in the portal.
- All the service processes of each department should be computerized and very well organized as per process internally and should be transparent or linked to any other department unless it is there in the process.
- The access to this portal is provided to each and every citizen of the state or can be provided in groups as in the cases of families or charities or old age homes etc. Each and every citizen irrespective of any criteria should be given a unique identity number. This is called National Personal Identity Number (NPIN). This concept is not new and is already being followed in many other countries. This can also be termed as "Social Security Number" or "National Citizen ID". This concept is also being supported and addressed by Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam in one of his speeches and in National Campaign for Eradication of Terrorism (NCET). In his words "Implement National Citizen ID card for all the transactions with the Government services, Business services and private services at the earliest". The ID should be given personally based on several factors and all the details with respect to each ID should be stored in a database. To be clearer, at the end of this task, you will have a database that contains as many ids as the population of a state. You will also have all the information like who is the son of whom and the current address along with permanent address etc. So if you know any NPIN, then it is possible for the portal admins and government to track out complete history of the individual. Based on the NPINs each citizen is provided with a password and the user should use these credentials to logon to the portal for getting serviced by the government. I know it is a very difficult task but to remove this "bad" tree which has its roots many hundreds of feet down into the society, we have to take up this difficult step. After all, population explosion is the parent of all the problems in the country and we have to bear with it.
- All the above information can be well utilized by literates who can access the portals on their own through different ways but illiterates will have a problem of how to use the portal and how to access it. To solve this problem, there are a couple of methods. One is to use the GSD, by giving a call to them and provide their NPIN and can get the required service done. The other is to use the kiosk centers maintained by the portal team at different place mainly at places where illiteracy is more.
- Issuing NPINs should start right away from cities and should expand to districts, towns and villages. As this process takes longer time to complete, it should be done with greater effort and force. Brainstorming by big heads in the government will result in deciding on the process of how to assign NPINs.
- Publicity is an important criterion for the successful working of the portal. This should be publicized from the point of concept creation and start of implementation, in every nuke and corner of a state through every means describing the advantages.
- The process of how this portal is the most important aspect. I will explain this taking an example. Consider license issuing mechanism in transport department. A person named X wants to have his car license issued. He has a NPIN/password issued to him. Normally the process is to take the LLR first and then after 1 month the original license by showing his driving skills in front of the break inspector. For this X logs on to the portal and selects the 'License Issue' under Services -> Transport Department hierarchy. He selects the option for booking slot for LLR exam on particular day and time. He will be acknowledged with a ticket reference number. In the background, a ticket will be created automatically with all the required information and will be dispatched to the appropriate RTA officer in the location. The RTA officer should acknowledge the ticket with the help of the ticketing tool. On the booked day, X approaches the portal kiosk and attends the exam. If he completes the exam, the ticket will be updated automatically with success or failure and the next course of action. From the user perspective, the ticket looks as if it's a service request and from the RTA officer's perspective it looks like a ticket on which he should respond within the agreed levels of SLAs (Service Level Agreements). If the RTA officer does not respond in time or does not acknowledge the ticket at each step, he is said to cross the SLA and action point is noted automatically against the RTA officer. After 1 month, X goes to the test ground by booking the slot and when he gets his turn, (system displays his name to start) he would start driving. The inspector on the other hand would always be standing in front of a camera and the camera should be placed so that the driving path should be covered in the video so that when X drives along the path, there is a proof that he drove the car and also there is no interaction or talks etc between X and the break inspector. The break inspector instantaneously updates the ticket and the ticket would be dispatched to the license generating queue from generation of license and posting it to the user's address. Consider a scenario where X drove the car well but he was rejected and asked to again perform later, he can update the ticket explaining his grievance and can escalate it to higher official with the help of GSD. On the whole, this particular ticket of issuing license to X is to resolve within agreed levels of times called SLAs and also there is an SLA for each queue or officer to respond. Any excessive deviations from SLAs would result in severe punishable actions against the government employees. Thus this would create a win-win situation.
- Thus all the government service process which requires no direct intervention with the government officials can be designed to be made online. And all the service process that requires direct contact between government officials and public can be monitored using cameras etc so that the work gets done.
- In most of the processes, the person X requires to submit certain proofs such as address proof, identity proof etc and these need not be handed over directly to the government officials. Drop boxes can be arranged in front of every government office so that the packet that contains all the required documents for the specified request can be dropped mentioning the ticket number. At the end of the day, a person collects all such received packets and correlates them to the corresponding ticket and finally acknowledges the ticket.
- Also care should be taken that while assigning the NPINs to each individual. It should be seen that the details of particular individual are collected at very high granularity. What are the services that a particular individual has already been provided by the government, his/her photo, photo copies of educational qualifications, what welfare schemes can he be covered under etc should be collected at the time of assigning NPIN for future use.
- Thus by this point of time, one should get an idea about the portal and should have understood that NPINs and ticket/service request numbers are important for the successful implementation of the idea.
- Going further into details, consider another scenario. For example, a street light has aged out and should be replaced. The municipality people will normally come for round checks (assuming) for every 1 week and in the worst case, there is a probability that there is no street light for 1 week. If this is causing huge inconvenience to the public, who should hold the responsibility? Is it the government? Is it the municipality? Is it the public? This portal gives a solution for such scenarios. Using the complaint feature of the portal, a person X who is a resident of the street logs a complaint. This complaint is recorded as an incident (complaint) with a ticket number and is assigned to the respective department of the municipality. The concerned officer raises a change (Request for Change) based on the incident received to change the bulb. When the change is done, he closes the change and at each step an update is given in the incident. Once the change is complete, and if the service is satisfactory, the incident would also be closed by X. Else it can be escalated. As mentioned, each and every such request/complaint/feedback/suggestions/tickets are strictly monitored for satisfactory SLAs and if any SLA breaches happen, strict action should be taken against the concerned individual. After all, governments are for the people. Thus as mentioned above, this requires a separate wing in the IT department of the government. This portal team should know each and every point about the government, its contacts, its structure, and its procedures and should be having higher levels of control to take necessary actions against every misleading activity by any one or SLA breaching by an officer.
- Feedbacks about the system should be taken with the help of surveys and probing questions etc regularly and necessary changes should be made to the processes and systems.
- Integration of the service flow will always help us in getting analysis, reports in different views in a very fast manner. Every variable can be easily analyzed and necessary action can be taken.
- Unlike the current grievance recording sections of various government websites where they are not at all cared to be taken into consideration, the grievance section of this portal is backed up by the concept of SLA and punishments. So everything is acknowledged and the response to the public will be good.
- There will surely be protests from the government employees regarding several aspects because of the discipline and strictness in the implementation. It should be left to them to work in this environment and work with real motto of serving the public or just leave the job.
- There will obviously be more and more service requests and complaints as time progresses when the portal gets fully publicized and popularized, which the current strength of the government employees cannot handle. So there is a need for new recruitments. Thus the employee levels in the government sector automatically increases.
I have explained lot of things and implementations in the post but now I am getting a doubt whether any government dares to implement this idea? I know there are lot other concerns that I left out in this article but sitting together with the learned and with days of brainstorming, all of them can be sorted out for sure. But I seriously bet if any government going to implement this. I don't know and I am not sure but I can say one thing. If any government starts implementing this, I am sure that they will rule the state for longer times, if properly implemented and utilized.
Properties & Advantages
- This is 24*7*365 portal along with the service desk. So public can login at any time and submit their request to the respective departments.
- Each request can be processed speedily when compared to conventional service provisions.
- This puts an end to the Corruption, bribery and black money.
- Improves security of the nation because of the NPIN
- Employment levels increase and attraction towards government jobs in the youth.
- The bad dies and the good cherish.
- Proper circulation of money and this improves economical aspects of the state. More people will be crossing the poverty line towards positive side.
- I agree it's a bit costly and more difficult to implement initially but once done, it has more and more long term benefits for the future citizens.
- Public issues and problems can be resolved efficiently
- Grievances to be handled efficiently
- Confidence towards government gets increased in the public along with a good opinion.
- All this is going to happen when there are more decent and educated in the people forming the government.
