e-Government has been one of the most striking developments of the Internet. As the Internet supported online communities evolve, and assuming that they do indeed grow to incorporate individuals around the country and the world, they present the governments with a number of challenges and opportunities.
Governments in "democratic countries" are primarily a representative mechanism whereby the selected few debate and enact the legislation for and on behalf of their citizens. There are several aspects to this that might prove of importance in the context of e-governance, where citizens can participate in the debates and expresses their opinions and their aspirations heard and addressed properly.
Firstly, those elected representatives need access to information and communication resources. It is necessary for them to inform, interact and listen to their constituents. It is necessary for them to communicate with one another. It is necessary for them to discover and represent the wishes of those who have elected them as their representatives.
At the simplest level, the implementation of e-governance can then support information and communication requirement. E-mail among parties, politicians, parliament members and among ministers, parliament members, politicians and government departments can be easily established. It would have been great if the Prime Minister of the Country sends out monthly bulletins on projects, plans with proper instructions and motivations to the government workers down beneath to local level. Many ministries and government departments have got their web sites on Internet. It will be a good idea that our people's representatives publish their home pages on Internet, to act as constituency interaction center. This then touches on the next aspect, that of communicating with the constituents. In addition to the standard channels and mechanisms, the people's representatives can receive the email messages from those wishing to express their views. There are similarly endless ways to utilize Information and communication technologies (only limited by the imagination of the implementing agency) to provide efficient and transparent solutions to citizens. This will be the most successful participatory governance if we can make it happen.
I will discuss on more other citizen centric government services in my future posts. Write your thoughts and also give suggestions, what e-governance should cover and its scope as well.
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2 comments:
I agree that the government should use emails for their internal communications. However, I think the steps of developing e-governance should be as follows:
Step 1: Information Publishing
All the government proceedures including fees should be available online. I assume we are not thinking of changing anything so far.
Step 2: Process Analysis and Transformation
A government procedure for different task might be a bottleneck to get things done quickly. For example, forms can be filled online rather than using paper forms, the files can be transfered electronically rather than using someone to carry the bulk of file, payments can be done online rather than being in long queue etc.
Step 3: Process Reengineering
By working on step 2, we will find out the processes that are no more necessary due to presence on IT. These processes should be redesgined and published as in step 1.
Step 4: Citizen participation
Government should publish what alternates they have for certain task - like should they work on Melamchi, or should they build highway to access Mustang? People's participation should be there in any kind of policy making, and should be transparent.
Step 5: Electonic Nepal
Use ICT for all information - including citizenship, voters list etc
It is just my analysis. Certainly nothing can be achieved at once!
Raj:
Thank you for taking time to write a thorough steps, well framed!
I expect this kind of comments and suggestions and solutions alternatives discussed in this blog, by which we can contribute some how on the e-governance initiatives.
I really appreciate your regular participation.
Rajesh
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