Transparency in e-Governance

It is quite frustrating dealing with government organizations especially when one does not know anybody personally there. And of course, everybody seems to know that there are "ways and means" to get things done anyway. Its very surprising that almost all the work processes in government agencies are well specified with almost no room for subjective arguments. Every decision are taken referring to some well specified policy. Even if the rules or policies do not address a particular situation at hand, an elaborate system ("TIPPANI UTHAUNE") has been developed so that a broad consensus is attained by collecting bunch of signatures before a decision is taken. The whole system seems to be well designed and operated to eradicate corruption.

If you go to government departments, you will find that the employees are very much cautious with every single activity they do. They are cautious using specific words when they write, and they always make commitments referring to the "policy and regulations books" and "business as usual". More often than not, they seem to choose non-action or personally safe actions rather than committing to or doing anything that can hold them accountable. There are so many problems in the present bureaucratic system which can all be easily evaluated and traced back to one single root, 'lack of standard, reliable, intelligent and automated support system to facilitating the existing governance system". In the existing system, citizens don’t see the complete picture of the any process (they don't know where to look at for such 'complete picture' of the service workflow), because of this, citizens spend a lot of time visiting one department to another and one table to another; there is not effective and efficient way to cross-reference the work progress, performance Standards are not followed and there is no incentives for best performers in bureaucracy and no real-time performance, process and accounting audits.
Only Technology can be the answer for this!

Nepal is moving ahead for transformation, at least I really look forward to seeing the transparent society. It is quite essential that government services which have direct face to face contact or interactions with citizens especially where the government agencies have to serve or support the citizens, such services have to be using the tools of Information and Communications Technology (ICT). For this to happen, software have to be designed and written to standardize and encode the process rules, procedures and similarly other related government services and access to those public services should be through IT, especially through Internet based online services. Then the government services can provide equal and unbiased access to all citizens based on pre-coded common process rules and even with rules to handle the exceptions in a transparent manner. As myself being myself in IT industry for the last 15 years, I am confident that Nepal has got its own sufficient IT talents in Information and communication Technology (ICT) to develop any complex software applications required for e-governance. Visit www.rajeshshakya.com for other details.

Each components of e-Governance including 'transparency' have to be initiated as a mission and such initiations should be complemented by the appropriate legal infrastructure. We should not forget that simply implementing the software applications don't bring in the transparent system, it requires whole lot of training and exercises for the government employees to change the mindset from "knowledge hiding" attitude to "knowledge sharing" attitude. On another side of the coin, citizens should be aware enough to demand its right to Information.