Living in Britain, I've always been sceptical of public sector IT projects. If you'd like to know why, you need only monitor the progress of government efforts to move NHS paper medical records onto a national computer network. Not only did the projected costs of this spiral past £11 billion, but in the end the idea was shelved altogether. So when I learned that India was trying to shift its entire bureaucracy online (and bear in mind, this is one of the biggest and most tangled bureaucracies on the planet), I'll admit, it sounded like a white elephant waiting to appear.In the course of writing Geek Nation, though, and now having done a feature for the BBC World Service science series Discovery about electronic governance in India... my mind has been changed. Although there have been pitfalls along the way, India is slowly and successfully digitising every scrap of paper in its bureaucratic ministries and regional government departments from land records all the way down to birth certificates. It's even rolling out a national biometric identity scheme (photo above), with the aim of processing a whopping million people a day. And much of this is thanks to India harnessing its legions of skilled IT professionals. It's transforming the lives of ordinary people by making government more accessible, transparent and less corrupt. Don't believe me? Then tune into the BBC World Service tonight at 7.30pm.
1 responses:
For sure Angela. I am sure that the same doubt was hovering over every Indian mind when this was declared but with the progress of the mammoth process, the doubts started clearing. We seem to be proving our IT mettle in the home ground now.
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