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National e-Governance Plan:
Vision, Challenges and the Way
Forward
The National e-Governance
Plan (NeGP) is the most significant initiative taken in India during the last
decade to mainstream ICT
in governance at both central and state levels
E-governance in India owes its origins to the inhouse development of
applications during the 1970s and 1980s in defence, economic planning, census,
tax administration and elections. Subsequently, massive efforts were made
during the 1980s by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) to connect all the
district headquarters in the country through
a VSAT network. However, all these efforts were mainly government centric
with the primary objective of exploiting Information and Communication
Technologies (ICTs) for automating internal government functions. Citizen
centricity with a focus on improving delivery of services to the citizens was
not the primary goal during this period. In the late 1980s, a few computerization
initiatives in the government started making an impact on citizen services.
The most prominent among these was the computerization of the passenger
reservation system by the Indian Railways (Ramani, 1991). E-governance during
this period received a major thrust with the launch of NICNET in 1987, followed
by the launch of DISNIC that aimed at computerizing all the district offices in
the country (2ndAdministrative Reforms Commission, 2008). During the 1990s, several
government departments at both central and state levels launched projects aimed
at deploying ICTs for improving services to citizens. Initial attempts were
made by some government departments during the latter half of this decade to
use the World Wide Web mainly for providing information to the citizens. Several
states, particularly the southern states, achieved significant successes in
using e-governance to improve delivery of services to the citizens during this
period. This trend continued during the early years of the last decade with several
states across the country implementing citizen-centric e-government projects.
However, these initiatives were isolated and fragmented due to lack of adequate
and integrated ICT infrastructure reaching down to the block and village
levels, lack of comprehensive backend computerization, lack of connectivity,
and lack of adequate capacity at all levels of government to efficiently deploy
ICTs for improving the quality of governance. The National e-Governance Plan (NeGP),
conceptualized in the early part of the last decade, aimed at addressing all
these deficiencies.
