Context: E-governance holds the promise of improving local governance, but only if we pay attention to the basics. The article talks about the significance of E-governance in improving local governance.

Key Issue

• As Urbanization in India is accelerating, the importance of effective governance and service delivery by city governments becomes central to the well-being of Indians.
• The country plans to design smart cities, where digital systems enable the use of data generated by people living and working in the city itself, in order to continuously improve the functioning of the city.
• A smart city requires good data for informed decision-making.
• The only reliable way to get good data is to design ‘smart systems’ that generate such data by default.

A smart city is a network of smart functions and departments. Given the complexity of Indian cities, and the various entities that are involved in their governance, this should be done one step at a time. More precisely, one function at a time, then one department at a time, finally building up to the city as a whole.

Digitisation

• There is a five-level framework for assessing where a given function, department, or city stands in its journey of e-governance.

The framework sees how the department has been able to apply digital technologies across three domains in order to work more smartly. The three domains are:

• Processes
• Human resources
• Citizen-centricity

Even the most advanced e-governance systems stand on the foundation of a simple behavioural change, i.e, going digital.

• Records kept on papers instead of being stored digitally creates scope for errors and manipulation.

Suggestion

To ensure digitisation, a combination of expectation-setting and incentives must be introduced. These are

Transition period: Administration should adopt phased targets to adopt new tools. It should also provide training to the employees for their effective use.

• For eg: In Andhra Pradesh, for instance, ULB employees reported saving an average of 11 hours every week after a digital system was adopted.

Citizen Centric: Changes should be done keeping the citizens in mind. It should be citizen-centric.

Collaboration: Collaboration should be there between various government departments and with non-governmental partners as well — to create a virtuous cycle of co-creation, learning, and efficiency.

• Adequate technical support and education for employees is necessary during the transition. In implementing such changes administrators must ensure that e-governance is not reduced to an exercise in performance management alone.

Road Ahead

• Digitisation leads to richer datasets that will bring various departments in a city to collaborate with each other to create a virtuous cycle of co-creation, learning, and efficiency.
• Thereby, smart cities emerge from organic collaboration between departments, employees, and citizens, who are simply looking to do their own jobs more effectively.