Challenges in e-governance

Over the years, many e-governance initiatives have been undertaken by various State Governments and Central Ministries to make all government services accessible to the common man in his locality, through common service delivery outlets, and ensure efficiency, transparency, and reliability of such services for a common man. Although there are many improvements and innovations made in e-governance services but yet in today’s global context, e-governance services must respond proactively and it should be more agile. 

There are large numbers of barriers that hinder the potential working of e-Governance. It could be different languages, IT illiteracy, population, lack of integrated services, lack of confidence, etc and it has often complained that the government schemes remain confined to papers and even if they are implemented there are no proper sources that can guarantee the proper working on the ground. Many e-government websites and applications particularly those which are established and operated by governmental agencies, are still not broadly used by the country citizens as they lack qualitative working. To find any solution for the e-government problem the key is to start with a valid model or viewpoint. Let's discuss a few among them:

Traditional sectors: Agriculture

There are many e-governance services implemented in the agriculture field like Kisan Call Centers, SMS Portal/mKisan Portal, Gramin Krishi Mausam, Kisan Suvidha App, etc. One of the facilities provided in Kisan Suvidha of the agriculture department is that farmers can upload photos of pest infected crops and the government experts would tell what the problem is and what the remedies the farmer can adapt for are. As with this case, thousands of related queries arrive on a daily basis and there aren’t enough people to answer the queries manually. As a result, many questions go unanswered and farmers lose their faith in the system.  In this scenario,  if there exist some auto checking intelligent algorithms which can work over a large pre-existing database with different disease/pest infected crop images and can give complete description including the cause of the disease, pesticides which can be used to treat, precautions could be taken for future yield, etc, then it will increase the overall functioning of the e-governance application and eventually will improve the country’s economy.

Social sectors: Clean India

The social sector plays a vital role in India's economy which includes education, health, water supply, sanitation, poverty, etc. E-governance services under this sector include Clean India initiative such as the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) which was aimed to build 10 crore toilets. To make sure that these toilets are actually built, the government has built a mobile app where a government functionary will have to go to the toilet site, click a photo of the toilet and upload it to a central server. 10 crore toilets at different locations mean 10 crore photographs and if the government is presented with this huge collection of photographs then it is highly impossible to check each and every photo personally.

It becomes very difficult for the government to conclude if photos show a complete toilet or half-built toilet or whether the authorized beneficial has uploaded it or some random person has uploaded it from the unrelated location. These problems demand an intelligent system to process each of these 10 crores photographs and generate an alert whenever the photograph is not that of a completely built toilet which is in use or the same beneficiary has not uploaded multiple photographs, then the practice of entering wrong information will go down and the actual functioning toilets will be on the ground instead of papers.

Financial sectors: Economic Revenue

India is one of the fastest-growing service sectors in the world with many software services and with an annual growth rate of 184 billion in revenue in the Final Year 2019. This is the fastest-growing part of the economy. There are many e-government services under the financial sector like e-filing Income Tax Return under the Directorate of Income Tax, Government of India, 2008. In April 2017, the IT department has unearthed a "refund scam" in Chattisgarh identifying 3,000 employees of Bhilai Steel Plant(BSP) and South Eastern Coal Field Ltd (SECL) who all have manipulated online I-T returns to claim for higher refunds. Same as above there are many employees who give wrong details to claim higher returns resulting in tax evasion.  If there exists an intelligent agent-based system that can detect fraud in the e-filing of corporate tax returns by employing pattern recognition over a large volume of pre-existing filed tax returns and rule-based analysis of tax regulatory codes, then it will help definitely help to avoid tax evasion.

Medical sector: e-health

Ministry of Health Family Welfare (MoHFW) has undertaken various e-Health initiatives for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare system.

* National Health Portal: It was launched on 14th November 2014, single-point access for authenticated health information for citizens, students, healthcare professionals, and researchers.

 * NHP Voice Portal: 24*7 toll-free helpline which provides information related to various issues of Health, Diseases, Lifestyle, First aid, Directory services, Health program.

 * National Health Portal Directory Service: It is android based mobile app supported by National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) providing Blood Banks, Hospital Locator details, etc.

Through the initiation of e-governance in health care, automated information management tools like Electronic Medical Record (EMR), Electronic Health records, computerized prescriptions are getting implemented. But still, the e-health scenario is in the unsatisfactory condition in the country due to the large geographical size, increase population density, poor nutritional status, diversity in food habits, and much more. Doctors in the majority of hospitals that provide e-health services take the additional burden to fill up the data in the systems. They follow the manual process of filling the data which sometimes results in the delay of the services; as a result, people still pay a visit to hospitals rather than using e-health services as they lack trust in the electronic reports generated. The present situation demands more efficient information storage and retrieval. Automated information management tools like web-based libraries, CME, Electronic Medical Record (EMR), Electronic Health records (EHR), and computerized prescriptions, stored over a large database can be used to provide the e-health services more efficiently.

Educational Sector: National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education (NP-NSPE)

In the field of educational improvements many major steps such as Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Saakshar Bharat scheme, Jan Shikshan Sansthan, etc, have been taken by the government but would anyone will be able to learn if he/she is having hunger as his companion? Classroom hunger affects children’s ability to learn and grow. To solve this challenge, Akshaya Patra began operating its Mid-Day Meal Programme in 2000 under National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education (NP-NSPE). The major objectives of Mid-Day Meal as issued by the government is to first improve the nutritional status of children in classes I-V in Government, Local Body and Government aided schools and second is to encourage children, belonging to disadvantaged sections(community), to attend school more regularly and help them concentrate on classroom activities.

To make this process much easier government has developed a Mid-Day Meal mobile app for effective monitoring of daily and monthly mid-day meal data. MDM in charge of the school uses his credentials to send the daily attendance against meals consumed pupil count through the app and the higher authorities at Block, District, and State level use web portal for monitoring of daily as well as monthly data transmission by all the schools falling under their jurisdiction. But, the functionality of this app fails at the time of evaluation and performance of the MDM scheme. This did not meet the checking of the timely availability of grains, the good quality of grains, hygienic cooking, and regular supply of LPG, etc. Data analytics on the related data in this sector can bring promising results. The attendance from the school can be used for calculating foodgrain allocation to the schools. By keeping track of the number of LPG issued and used, future predictions on LPG requirements can be made using machine learning algorithms. Data analytics can play an effective role in bringing the transparency in educational sector by eliminating the different intermediately levels.

Impact of  bringing Data analytics and Intelligence on e-governance

There are at least three ways in which data analytics and intelligence will impact government agencies. First, it will enable government employees to be more productive since the technology can be used to automate many tasks. AI allows computers to take significantly more complex tasks such as extracting meaning from raw data, recommending medical treatment, searching for patterns, discovering new insights, making predictions, and interact with people, machines, and the physical environment.

Second, it will make a more responsive and agile government. AI will enable intelligent agents to work in different ways like online chatbots that answer citizen’s questions, real-time fraud detection systems that can monitor tax evasion, and virtual assistants that can synthesize feedback from citizens.

Third, it will allow people to interact more naturally with digital government services. Good leverage between the data and analytics will customize the e-governance services according to the needs of citizens which will increase citizen participation.