Posts

Showing posts from May, 2021

Pain points in e-Governance – 4 : Reinventing Wheel

Image
  Reinventing Wheel  Anything under the sky, is a stake holder for a government and hence governance becomes challenging. It needs constant change/innovation/adoption. In a federated system, where every state has its own powers, bureaucrats often try to leave their foot prints within the system by making change/innovation/adopt. Depending on the strength of the change, legacy may continue or perish. But the fact remains, the expenditure for any change is borne by all of us. Change process is slow in government due to due process of rules and regulation, as compared to corporate. Hence, ideally in a technology driven governance, it’s always better to adopt the solution, which are time-tested. Since Indian state governance is built on colonial legacy system, the process is largely same, with minor changes due to Cultural, demo-graphical situation and also geographical situation. Hence adoption of technology with minor changes is more viable in terms of efficiency. For technical s

Good Governance Tool 1: Digilocker

Image
Mesmerize   Digilocker. Yes, it is Digilocker, mesmerizer for me. The way it grew, adopted and being used is no ordinary wonder. Just imagine the relief from going around the offices, friendly middleman! never ending waiting, long lasting ques etc., to get your own documents. I always wondered, why applicant is made to run around, to get a document from “A” department and submit to “B” department and bears the burden of proving that the submitted document is genuine. Why not a department which requires particular document can get it from the issuing department (source of truth) directly, without intervention of the applicant in this software era. And it happened. Somewhere in Jan 2015, the concepts of Digilocker was introduced by NEGD. It took almost few weeks to realise how it works and its impacts. Luckily My bosses (many IAS are visionaries) realised and asked us to take it forward quickly. Any product much in advance has its own challenges. When we started talking about this wi

Pain points in e-Governance - 3 : Resource Hopping

Image
  Resource Hopping Government, while implementing various e-Governance project, hire man power from market on contractual basis in various capacity to fill up various technical skill gaps. Most of the times their salary/package is on par with the market. Unlike private sector, hiring process in government has long approval cycle and  bench is not allowed. By the time interview is scheduled 1/5th of the candidates refuse to attend interview, siting long gap from application to interview. And in the interview, many candidate’s skill set never matches to their attractive 'CV’. We hire them for particular period, which most of the candidates are not willing. With all these pain, once appointment letter is issued to the candidate, three in ten refuses to join quoting wonderful reasons like, I need gym, office is not good, I can’t travel, I can’t work on Saturday, I need canteen, I can’t work after 5m, etc., etc. Later in many instances we have come to know that, these candidates