Thorny Issues for India's E-Governance Projects

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A $10 billion National e-Governance Plan was adopted in 2006 and aimed to government services accessible to everyone through common service delivery outlets. Through a mix of front-end delivery kiosks called common service centers, State Wide Area Networks, and State Data Centers, the project has delivered 27 projects, including pensions, income tax, passports, visas, e-courts, land records, and road transport.

Public-private partnerships are the preferred method for most projects, so one can imagine the enthusiasm from companies and CIOs to get involved. As domestic IT leaders like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL Infosystems, and global IT giants vie with each other for a share of multi-billion dollar pie, every CIO is fast learning the pros and cons of e-governance projects. Studies have been conducted to identify the problems, including those by the National Institute for Smart Governance and the National Association of Software and Services Companies.

Here are some of the biggest problems CIOs and their enterprises are facing while managing their projects:

• Government projects often lack a single "champion" as well as project management tools and framework. Transfers are frequent. A new official who takes over often insists on re-evaluation of project concept, scope, and even contract.

• Decision making and funding is distributed across line ministries and departments. Political pressures are high and the original mandate for a project often changes. Some governments do not meet obligations in a timely manner, and delays in payments have hurt some projects.

• With the e-governance drive taking off across all central and state government departments, lack of time to prepare detailed project reports means the scope of work in the initial documents requested of vendors is often wrong. Even the Request for Proposal from the government is often wrong in terms of specifying the service level agreements, choice of technology, and business model. This has lead to projects that have been grossly underbid or overbid.

• The L-1 process of bidding often tempts vendors to under-price and under-staff.

• Lack of cooperation, integration, and monitoring in multi-vendor projects has led to failing projects.

• Successful implementation of a solution does not always lead to replication across departments where a similar solution is required. The government claims IPR and forbids the vendor from deploying it elsewhere.

• Once a project goes live, monitoring is delegated to junior government officials who may not be equipped to help in the operations.

• In transaction-fee based citizen services projects, when the vendor makes unexpected profits, contracts are renegotiated so companies running at successful profits are not rewarded. However, the contract neither provides transaction volume guarantees nor risk assurances, so companies aren't protected if the scope of the project changes and they have underbid.

The list seems endless. Yet the drawbacks might be overcome with time, particularly if the government can adopt best-practices for project management and monitoring and develope guidelines for dispute resolution and arbitration. Until then, the projects are too tempting to ignore. There is quite a lot of money being spent and everyone is competing for their share. But anyone doing so needs to be aware of the difficulties.