My e-Governance model for the post-Covid India

Last updated: May 2, 2020

The 2020 pandemic came like a bolt from the blue and knocked our civilization’s complacency for a loop. Such disruptions are rare for they involve a combination of impact, speed and scale. They force us to reflect upon our position and velocity as an intelligent species and make us introspect on some flawed designs upon which our society casually reclines. No doubt such difficult times require our priority on containing the menace, but oftentimes it also provides an opportunity to adopt long-term sectoral reforms. The present research focuses on e-governance possibilities in India in the wake of this crisis.

Rather than formally defining e-Governance, it can be said to be the use of electronic means to facilitate the government in discharging its duty of ensuring smooth provision of goods and services in every sector of the economy by the public and private players. Every time the government uses an e-governance technology, it results in more efficiency, lesser costs, lesser manpower requirement and lesser physical presence of humans in the job at hand. The last advantage, and to some extent the penultimate one, is of concern in the lockdown and social distancing practices of the present pandemic situation. It is also worth mentioning that if hardware automation and artificial intelligence are added to e-governance, it can reduce manpower requirement and their physical presence to the theoretical minima in every possible job/economic activity. It therefore sometimes occurs to the mind that if this pandemic would have struck a century later, then the world would have been far better equipped to absorb the shock. But unfortunately nobody can predict the timing of a whammy; one can only predict its impact and prepare in advance.

Thus the premise is clear : there is a necessity of creating abiding e-Governance reforms in India. Delivering public services to the citizens electronically is a very narrow vision of e-governance. Rather, in the spirit of the definition of economics as the allocation of scarce resources, e-Governance and digitization need to be broadly incorporated in each of the following domains of governance :

  1. Studying the resources present in India,
  2. Assigning those resources to different sectors of the economy based on requirement and merit,
  3. Allowing sufficient coordination between the sectors to maximise their efficiency,
  4. Creating a transparent monitoring system to track the progress of the sectors against planned dynamic targets,
  5. Providing sustainable incentives to expedite this progress,
  6. Shuffling resource allocation among sectors as per need and merit,
  7. Helping evolve the resources and the modus-operandi to manage them.

Digitization in each of these domains can help bypass the vulnerabilities India faces in crises like the present pandemic. Let us discuss each of these domains individually.

  1. The first domain deals with studying the resources present in India. There are 4 main allocatable resources : man, money, natural resources and infrastructure. The various exercises involved in studying the human resource or ‘man’ are the Population Census, Labour Force Surveys, Employment publications, etc. The Census is the most important of them and has the capacity to subsume all other surveys. The current trend of the government is towards linking the Census exercise with Aadhaar. But whereas the Aadhaar card is a living ID whose details can be updated instantly, the Census wakes up only once in ten years. To fix this mismatch, Census will have to be both Aadhar-linked and fully digital. This will convert the Census from an exercise to a ‘super-card’ for every Indian which can subsume all individual IDs and become a field of data updatable in real-time, and serving as an engine for e-delivery of public services.

    The second resource is money. The complete money supply in India is already under the scanner of RBI which releases its fortnightly figures on its website. However with the advent of cryptocurrencies in the future, RBI’s radar may require a wider bandwidth.

    Natural resources (including land) are perhaps the most imperfectly measured class of resources. The knotty records and the legacy of Zamindari system has complicated the transition of land titling into a digitized and conclusive structure. The current pandemic must serve to fillip the government to expedite its Digital India Land Records Modernization Programme and make an extra effort to build it on a blockchain interface, so that adequate land allocation can be done for residential, commercial and agricultural purposes. Similarly the reserves and distribution of freshwater, vegetation, minerals, radio-spectrum, air-space, etc. should be measured in real-time based on IoT (Internet of Things) technologies and displayed on an online public dashboard. It might not be an easy task, but it is an inevitability of the long-term future. The question is not if but when.

    Similarly man-made infrastructure like road, rail, electricity, etc. which are allocatable across different sectors requires mapping and recording digitally.

  2. The second domain concerns assigning the afore-studied resources to different sectors of the economy. For the sake of analysis, assuming a 100% formalized economy in the future, I believe the Economic Census of the country could be merged into the MCA21 database of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs and would become the corporate equivalent of the Census ‘super card’. However unlike the latter, this master data can largely be publicly available due to lesser privacy concerns. This database could serve as the prime input for the government to decide on the changes in allocation of the resources to different sectors based on the current and aspired states of the economy. Disinvestment and investment decisions can also be taken by the government based on the same database.

    Moreover in the future, if the government uses Artificial intelligence-driven decision-making applications for allocation, it may give preference to general-purpose entities over unifunctional ones. For example, if a company can produce and install such petroleum pipelines which can also be used to transport edible oil or water if need be, then preference might be given to it over a company which makes ordinary pipelines because demand of some petroleum products may likely plummet in future. Similarly if an auto manufacturer can make a car which can be converted to a driverless car when the right technology develops or has hybrid features, then it should get preference. This paradigm becomes more relevant in a world which is changing every day. Further it can be mandated by law for a company to promise availability of a portion of its assets for national interest in the event of a national crisis. For example, big hotels may be licensed only on the condition that in the event of a pandemic, it would be used as a subsidised quarantine centre ; or auto manufacturers may be required to invest in R&D/infrastructure to produce ventilators or smart ambulances in bulk in the event of a crisis. This proactive advance investment is crucial as trying to be extemporaneously versatile in the midst of a crisis may not be so easy.

  3. The third domain concerns coordination among sectors. There is a flow of goods and services among the sectors like household, administration, business, etc. For example, public services flow from the government to the household sector. Taxation is a flow in the opposite direction. These processes require coordination. Replacing the human elements in the process bottlenecks with digital systems is akin to catalysing the rate determining step of a chemical reaction. Upon analysis, one can understand that the government acts as the heart of the entire coordination tree, and directly or indirectly (through its protocols) acts as the middleman in this flow between any two sectors. Realising this, the India Enterprise Architecture (IndEA) is being implemented by the National eGovernance Division of the government to streamline the complete government work-model based on a ‘One-government’ backbone.

  4. The fourth domain regarding a monitoring framework is perhaps the heart of the possible eGovernance and digitization reforms in India. Assuming the government as the Political System described in Easton’s Systems Theory, it must be admitted that the increasing digitization in the feedback component of the theory is serving to complement the human element by empowering citizens with digital data that they cannot sense themselves but with whose consequences they live everyday. Take for instance the issue of subsidized urea. Before the introduction of Soil Health Cards, the knowledge of skewed nutrient ratios in soils throughout India was known only sporadically and chartlessly. After rolling the Soil Health Card programme, the nationwide trend became not just clear, but by virtue of making an updatable database akin to the Aadhaar, it has set the stage for continuous future improvements which tends towards perfection. It has also paved the way for an efficiently assessable Nutrient Based Subsidy scheme wherein subsidy depends on the quality of soil and wherein urea may ultimately be included. Thus this monitoring framework has empowered both the farmer and the government. Efforts to narrow down the scheme from the grid level to individual farm level are progressive because any digital monitoring scheme gives best results at high resolution. The digital nature of such a monitoring system is of crucial importance because digitization invariably makes a process modular, so that data, which can now be gathered more frequently and accurately, can not only be analysed by advanced analytics and artificial intelligence based algorithms, but is also fungible enough to be plugged in as inputs for other government processes, like target delivery of services in various government schemes. This naturally may provoke privacy concerns in the minds of the critics : but that can be addressed by robust Data Protection Laws like the PDP Bill, made after incorporating the opinions of both the general public and of expert committees. Such laws will also allow the government to move to a hybrid model wherein a less critical part of its sensor data can be stored on private cloud while keeping the rest on On-premises data centres.

    Another example is the Public Distribution System (PDS) in India. There are a legion of reforms possible in it but none is more enduring or effective than making the entire system digitized and transparent to the public. There is no privacy concern in sharing the macro details of PDS with the public in a real-time visualised online dashboard similar to the stock exchange metrics or the task manager of a server, perhaps linking it with the eGram Swaraj portal as well. There may however be technical difficulties due to the scale of operations. But digital platforms are built for big data.

    Now consider the current Covid-19 pandemic. Why has the whole world been stumped by it? Its for the same reason a man is stumped by an unexpected heart attack or an old technology is stumped by a disruptive one : the lack of preparedness to bear a volcano which has been silently brewing for years under the hood. In human history, there has not been a disease which combines high infectiousness and a long pre-symptomatic period of transmission and proliferation as good as Covid-19 does. The health monitoring systems throughout the world are not designed for such a disease. The lockdowns resemble a computer which hangs when it can’t understand what to do. Lockdowns are however the best way at present to save human lives. But the pandemic has revealed the necessity to continuously monitor individual and community health parameters just as other digital monitorings I have mentioned earlier. The activation barrier is the suitable measurement technology. The Aarogya Setu app, the Mother & Child Tracking System, etc. are tiny steps by the government in that direction, but it should not come as a surprise if we all have Aadhaar-linked biochip implants as a part of the eGovernance framework by the end of this century, for the larger good of humankind. Privacy issues? Well, just as diamonds cut diamonds, the solution lies in Technology itself.

    Finally there is financial e-monitoring. The 15th Finance Commission had recommended making the Public Financial Management System as statutory. If seriously upgraded, it can not only make fund flows in public projects and services more efficient but can also invade the private sector, just like UPI did in the payments realm, and render stiff competition to existing systems like SAP-ERP.

  5. The fifth domain is providing incentives. Which incentive can be greater than defeating civilisation-threatening crises, like the Covid-19 pandemic, in the future? The upcoming decade will thus for sure be replete with digitization, AI and automation technologies like never before in our history. But what’s more interesting is how incentives will be handed out once our society reaches a certain level of digital maturity : when blockchain-based processes will threaten to undermine the role of the government. I believe that just as with UPI, where the government captured the king’s seat in the digital payments ecosystem flooded with private players, it must also act proactively and roll out a blockchain interface before private players vye for the inevitable.

  6. The sixth domain is the shuffling of resources across sectors. These sectors are like stars in the universe. One dies and another is born. Data storage was shuffled from magnetic drives to discs to flash drives and now cloud storage seems to subvert them all. Like the entropy of the universe increases in every process, so also every shuffling shifts the track invariably towards digitization. Lets consider another example : Consider APMC Mandi sector as the intermediary between farmers and warehouses/wholesalers. There are a lot of resources invested in this sector at present. However they are bound to become obsolete after a few years when technologies like the e-NAM link more Farmer Producer Organisations with Warehouses in far more effective ways and bypass the mandis. What about the resources invested in the mandi sector : they will have to be shuffled out. This shuffling can take place out of choice (due to a gradual wave of modernization) or out of compulsion (due to a crisis like Covid-19 where such technologies help bypass the vulnerable segments of the supply chain). If we don’t expedite the former, we’ll be thrust into the latter. But shuffling here is not a game of cards. While discussing domain (1), I had mentioned 4 types of allocatable resources : man, money, natural resources & infrastructure. Shuffling money and natural resources is easier. In our example, money investment and natural resources (like mandi land, crops,etc) can easily be shuffled from mandis to the e-NAM sector. Shuffling manpower and infrastructure is however difficult and, without exhaustive advance planning, can lead to crises like unemployment and stagnation of outdated infrastructure. The concept of general-purpose assets proposed while discussing domain (2) can help with infrastructure shuffling while a properly designed, future-looking skill development ecosystem, with special focus on skilling in emerging technologies, can help avert unemployment during manpower shuffling.

  7. In the seventh domain, just like sector-shufflings, resources themselves are also bound to evolve and require similar advance planning by the government.

Conclusion :

This paper focuses on the duty of a government and the 7 domains of governance and how e-Governance and digitization can help the government in each of the domains. Throughout, the discussion was done with the Indian perspective only : however it can also be applicable on other countries with minor modifications. The uncertainties and constraints which have been exposed due to the 2020 pandemic has been specially kept in mind while emphasizing the urgency and benefits of transitioning governance into an ecosystem which is more digital and smart.

(An excerpt from this research is also published by ORF here)