Recently i read an article in "The Hindu" in which a house maid,who recently lost her husband,filed an application for Rs.200-a-month allowance in the taluk office under Vidhawa Vethana — the Karnataka Government’s social security scheme for widows. She was shocked when a government official demanded a bribe of Rs.150. When she offered Rs.50, the official shot back that he was not a “beggar!” Of course, he is! What else can he be? Before this, disgracefully,nurses in a government hospital in Bangalore demanded Rs.100 to 200 each time they shifted the housemaid’s husband, who was in severe trauma, on to the hospital bed! It is a disgrace that no one is spared from the cancer of corruption and moral bankruptcy.Public outcry against corruption is increasing but the impact is minimal. However, there appears some promise of reducing corruption through Information Technology-enabled services. IT is not a panacea but there is potential to minimise harassment of the kind the housemaid faced.
Andhra Pradesh government(To say correctly,Chandrababu naidu)introduced the concept of eSeva in 1999.It is an interesting insight into the impact of IT-enabled government services.eSeva is a public-private partnership programme to provide one-stop services,such as bill payment, and issue of licences, birth/death certificates, etc., to citizens. The actual delivery of services is done through private franchisees compensated on the basis of the volume of transactions. The incentives are structured to provide service with courtesy and minimal delay. Of course,eSeva is still a long way from reaching all the citizens. However, its progress since 1999 has been remarkable. Over 61 million transactions have been processed through eSeva centres. It is believed that eSeva has improved service delivery and citizen satisfaction,and reduced corruption.The lesson is that there are opportunities to reduce corruption by reengineering and digitising government processes, minimizing direct contacts between the government and citizens, establishing appropriate controls and audit, institutionalising transparency and accountability, and privatizing government-citizen interactions with appropriate incentives and controls.
There is a business jargon “Don’t automate, Obliterate”.Firms should obliterate the existing ways of doing business, simplify processes, eliminate non-value added tasks, and innovate to improve speed, quality, and service. Simply automating the existing inefficient processes with IT provides no meaningful productivity improvements.On similar lines, to reduce corruption in government services, we need to eliminate unnecessary government-citizen interactions! The potential for corruption increases when there are face-to-face interactions.Electronic interaction can obliterate them and leave a trail for potential audit. But the focus should not be on IT itself, but on how the government carries out various activities,i.e processes. IT is a means and not an end in itself. Research suggests that the value from IT comes mostly from process improvement and incentive alignment. Thus governments may need to give more importance to processes than to IT itself.Complex processes with enormous paperwork increase the potential for corruption.The more the paperwork and number of steps, greater are the opportunities for brokers (consultants?!) to step in to get any work done in government offices. Some of these brokers are hand-in-glove with officials and become conduits for organised corrupt practices.Performance metrics have less meaning since blame is passed on to others.Further, recognising the inefficiencies or potential loopholes, private citizens may themselves become party to corrupt practices.
One of the greatest benefits of IT is enforcing queue in the system. A well-known political scientist once said queues inherently represent equality and when people do not perceive equality, they break queues. Sadly, people with money, connection, or power perceive others to be unequal and tend to break queues more readily! IT will force applications to be processed in the order of arrival. It can enforce multiple queues with different priority levels based on the willingness of applicants to pay a premium for the service. In a non-IT system, willingness to pay or accept payment is played out through bribes. One can debate whether government services should have different levels of priorities at all since the system will be inherently biased towards the wealthy.However when processes are simplified,controls may be compromised. Fortunately,digitisation enables us to enforce rules and bring transparency. If a case is not processed within a certain time, the system can automatically trigger a notification for higherups.What if the higher-ups are corrupt? The government can make the status transparent so that non-governmental organizations or the media can report delays.
In fact, citizens should be able to post delays and corrupt activities for the public to view. The government must provide a conduit for people to voice concerns, corruption, or compliments.Of course, corrupt citizens can use this conduit to abuse honest officials and, therefore, there is need for checks and balances.Controls and metrics are necessary and the government has an obligation to make high-level aggregate information public. For instance, a government dashboard for each organisation may publicly list the number of cases in the queue, average processing time and its distribution, and the number of delayed cases. Organisational leaders must be evaluated on these metrics. These metrics can be derived from the system automatically.So there is little leeway in tampering with data.
Need for political will and vision But the above is easier said than done.Even in the corporate world, a large majority of reengineering projects have failed for mostly non-technical reasons. There will be significant resistance from unions, governmental agencies, and powerful brokers who benefit from inefficiencies and have vested interest.Service transformation will impact power structure, employee morale and skills, departmental boundaries, job security, information control, and incentive structure.Therefore, much like in a business environment where top management support impacts the success of reengineering and IT initiatives, there is need for strong political will and vision to make this transformation.Of course, there are economic issues to be considered. IT is expensive to create and manage. Often, the focus is upfront cost in creating information systems. However,over 70 per cent of the life-cycle cost of the system goes into maintenance.
Furthermore,a large fraction of the population has no education or access to interact electronically.Thus, governments may run an expensive system to meet the demands of a small population and a parallel expensive, manual,and inefficiency-riddled system for the masses.In the short run, the cost will go up. Therefore,governments must pursue public-private partnership where the private partner will invest and share some risks and reach the citizens with appropriate incentives,checks and balances. This does not mean that the governments outsource social responsibility to the private sector. But this is a way to bring market efficiency and better accountability. It is relatively easier to address inefficiencies with private agencies than to deal with corrupt government officials.Further, privatising the actual delivery will eliminate the main source of corruption — that is, government-citizen face-to-face interaction.
இப்பொழுதுதான் படம் பார்த்த அதிர்ச்சியில் இருந்து (படத்தில் விஜய T. ராஜேந்தரை பார்த்த அதிர்ச்சியில் இருந்து ) மீண்ட முதல்வர் உடனடியாக மன்மோகன் சிங்குக்கு தொலைபேசி, இந்த படத்தில் ராஜேந்தருடன் ஜோடியாக நடிக்கின்ற அளவுக்கு தைரியம் உள்ள மும்தாஜுக்கு வீரச்செயல்களுக்கான இருப்பதிலேயே உயர்ந்த விருதை குடுக்க மறுத்தால், மத்தியஅரசுக்கு குடுத்து வரும் ஆதரவை வாபஸ் பெறப் போவதாக சொல்லி இருப்பதாக நம்பத்தகுந்த வட்டாரங்களில் இருந்து தெரிய வருகிறது.கூடிய விரைவில் இதற்கான அறிவிப்பை நீங்கள் எதிர்பார்க்கலாம்.
