The Peoples' choice for e-Gov

Cell phones have been eagerly embraced by the Indian public. Earlier confined to the urban elite, cell phones are now being used by drivers, plumbers, masons, carpentors, in fact, all persons who move during their working day. Cell phones are no longer luxuries for the rich but a cheap and cost effective communication tool for the working class.

Latest figures issued by the Telcom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) show that growth of cell phones has increased dramatically. Total number of cell phones overtook total number of fixed line phones in the last half of 2004. During the month of July 2005, increase in number of cell phones was almost 10 times that of fixed line phones-2.45 mn compared to only 0.27 mn new fixed line connections.

Presently, growth in cell phones has largely been confined to urban areas.

SMS Route to e-Governance
Cell phones using SMS are already being used for e-Governance. Information on railway bookings and air flights (Jet Airways) can be obtained through SMS. Private operators are bringing out new schemes every day for getting information through SMS on diverse subjects ranging from share prices and availability of cinema tickets to cricket scores and popularity ratings.

SMS is ideal for communicating small amounts of precise information. A concrete example will illustrate how SMS works. A person whose car has been stolen wants to know the status of the police case and whether the car has been recovered. He will actuate a program resident on his cell phone which will ask him to key in the registration number of the car. A menu will then be dislayed with a choice of FAQs out of which he will choose

Whether car recovered
Status of case

The cell phone will then send a coded SMS to the service provider who will interact with the police data-base and send the reply, also by SMS.

West Bengal Police Wide Area Network (WAN) connects all police stations in the state. Criminal cases and Missing Person information is recorded on computers at all the police stations and kept in a central database. Much of this information is in the public domain and is not sensitive or confidential in nature. Making this available to the public would definitely be a big step forward for e-Governance. A private service provider can be asked to develop and service an SMS based program to provide this information to the public. Revenue raised through the large number of SMSs generated by the scheme will finance the project, at no cost to the government.

Similar applications can be developed for providing relevant information on the entire gamut of government activities, starting with:

Missing person information,
Missing vehicle information,
Law & Legal procedures,
Property rules & regulations, landlord-tenent relations,
Motor vehicle registration & Motor tax,
Traffic violation fines,
Status of land records,
Railway and airline bookings.

National e-Governance Plan
The government of India initiated an ambitious Rs 12,000 crore National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) about two years back with the ultimate aim of making all government services accessible to the common man through a one stop shop mechanism.

The central government will be implementing e-Governance projects relating to Income tax, Passport and Immigration, Central Excise, Pensions, Citizen ID, Banking and Insurance. The State governments, on the other hand, will deal with state subjects such as Land Records, Property Registration, Agriculture, Commercial Tax, Police, and Transport.

States will also develop, together with private enterprises, State Wide Area Networks and State Level Data Centers (to house common secure data to serve a host of e-Governance applications) and one lakh Common Service Centers (information kiosks).

Massive Infrastructure Required
Full fledged e-Governance will require the citizen to have a computer with an Internet connection; preferably broadband viz with a minimum speed of 250Kbps.

Though entry level computers are now being marketed for as little as Rs 10,000 and Internet and broadband are spreading, their availability, particularily in rural areas, is still very poor-far behind countries like Korea, Malaysia and China.

The SMS Advantage
Cell phones using SMS will immediately give e-Governance to the public. Sufficient infrastructure already exists in urban areas. With the TRAI plan of 250 mn phone lines by 2007, giving a teledensity of one phone for 6 persons in rural areas, it should be possible to extend e-Governance to cover the remotest areas, within 2 years.

Cell phone SMS is a low cost option. Entry level cell phones costing approximately Rs 2,000 are already much cheaper than computers and the possibility of a Rs 1,000 cell phone is being discussed. Cell phones send a coded SMS which is very short and cheap and will not clog communication channels.

Moreover, SMS will complement and extend the reach of broadband. SMS will be used to get answers to some FAQs and detailed interaction can then follow using conventional computers and Internet.

SMS to Create Full e-Governance
Man is a creature of habit, and unless compelled by incentives (or disincentives), avoids change. This reluctance to change has to be factored in while introducing new technology, specially where the technology is for the masses.

SMS will accustom the public to using digital devices. Once they start using SMS, they will want to graduate to computer-Internet. This will encourage them to acquire computers and become computer literate and will motivate them to change their work habits and working culture to progress to full-fledged e-Governance.

The Government will no longer have to persuade the public to use e-Governance facilities. Public demand for e-Governance will precede and even finance the growth of these expensive facilities, much in the manner of cell phones, which have grown because the common man wanted them.

Peoples' Choice
The people have already given their verdict and chosen the cell phone as their gadget of choice for entering the digital world. The government must respect this choice and make programs for enriching e-Governance content on cell phones.

The remarkable growth of TV and cell phones has been largely public demand driven and has depended a lot on private enterprise. e-Governance will also be a resounding success if it is demand driven and the Government leverages the tremendous enthusiasm and innovativeness of private enterprise to develop cell phone based programs to spread e-Governance.

Ajay Prasad, The author is the former Director General of Police, West Bengal

Page(s) 1