Monday, August 14, 2000		Lead Article

 E-GOVERNANCE

	GOVERNMENT AT YOU FINGERTIPS E-governance initiatives and measures for providing basic necessities to the people must be undertaken simultaneously, Rajiv Nair, head, Microsoft India, tells Roopinder Singh.
	E-governance initiatives ÿNetworking of the Andhra Pradesh Secretariat with district headquarters. ÿCompact — Computer Aided Administration of Commercial Taxes, which has already resulted in realisation of lakhs of rupees in taxes. ÿ Hazard Mitigation Information System introduced in Andhra Pradesh. ÿ Aarakshi—an intranet for the Jaipur City police

Why talk of e-governance in a country where people don’t even have basic amenities?

It behoves us and it behoves the government to provide basic amenities. There is no question of (disputing) that. If we, in our country, say that we will stay the computerisation and e-governance process until everything is provided, that may take too long. I think that we have to be bold enough to take parallel initiatives; both are equally important.

Would e-governance be too elitist?

I think that it is actually not so. The concept of electronic governance makes sure that the common man has access to government’s processes. There are many modalities to that. Not everyone is going to have a computer — that’s a given. Not everybody can afford it. Even abroad, in rich countries, where people don’t have personal computers at home, the government provides kiosks.

Just take the example of the STD booth. A few years ago there were no STD booths. Now you have STD booths everywhere and you can make a phone call anytime. Twenty years ago a phone was an elitist gadget. Today, to have a phone is very commonplace.

The same thing will happen with the Internet and Web-enabled services. The common man would be able to go to a kiosk and for a small fee check his land record, or apply for a ration card without having to stand in line and go through layers of bureaucracy. I don’t think it is elitist at all. It is a mindset.

Which e-governance projects would you say have been successful in India?

They are all in various stages (of implementation). We have the Police Network Project in Jaipur. The entire police in Jaipur is IT-enabled. Constables enter the FIRs in Hindi on computers. If you want to pull out an FIR that is two years old, it is catalogued and databased. You can pull out such records without any problem at all. If you want finger prints and mug shots, they are all on the computer. You can transfer information and instructions from various offices electronically. So that has been successful.

Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and now Madhya Pradesh have been involved in a huge project on education initiatives.

What kind of education initiatives?

K-12 (Kindergarten to class 12). They are making sure that IT is a priority, the teachers are trained, that course material is available and that IT is woven into the normal curriculum of schoolchildren.

We make sure that we provide the technology. We bring in partners like NIIT, who are our core partners and have the expertise in curricular development and education certification. They work with these schools to acquire infrastructure, man it and train people.

What brought you to Chandigarh?

Haryana is looking to leapfrog in information technology and they are looking at technology partners. Microsoft is a leader in technology, especially in the field of software, and my people have been talking to them quite extensively over the past few months.

We have done work in other states in the past and a lot of growth is in the area of education

I am very clear that if the country wants to achieve our goal of exports worth $ 50 billion by 2008, or if a state wants to be IT-enabled in the long term, then it needs to be self-sufficient in IT professionals. For that, starting at the school level, education programmes that expose and acclimatise kids to cutting-edge technology — personal computers (PCs), PC + devices and software — are required, before they move on to engineering and management programmes.

Haryana wants to be an e-governed state by 2005. That has certain connotations; their back-end systems have to be configured so that they can provide interfaces — internal as well as external -- with the common man. They have to have back-end systems in place—those could be land records, crime records, sales tax applications, etc.

Unless you have those applications IT-enabled, you can’t build a system of e-governance. We have some suggestions in how to go about that. We have done work in terms of police networking, National Crime Record Bureau, etc. We have had preliminary talks with them. They are going to choose what applications they want and we have suggestions for that.

You have taken this kind of initiative in various states. Is Haryana the first to have taken initiative in e-governance? Also, Himachal does not seem to figure in the list.

There is none in Himachal. We started in Punjab in the area of education, and that is making progress.

That’s the Centre for Excellence?

Yes, the REC, Jalandhar. We have had discussions with officials (on other matters), but it hasn’t taken off in a significant manner as yet. In northern India, the states that have done work are Rajasthan, UP and Madhya Pradesh. Almost all states are at some stage of computerisation.

Microsoft has also been focusing on Indian languages. How is Gurmukhi developing?

We wanted two different scripts. We started with the Devnagri script and the Tamil scripts. We are going to see what kind of response we get out of it, because localising products is not a small investment. I think that in India we have more languages than all of Europe! It’s a challenge.

After the Federal Court ruling in the USA, there seems to have been a shift of focus with Microsoft concentrating on the Net. How are you going to make your presence felt further?

We have embraced the Net currently, and have done so in the past few years. But this takes it a step further. We are realising that people are not going to be just PC-centric. They are going to be mobile and there are areas in the wireless space that are going to become very important. For example, I carry my pocket PC (an HP Jornada). This is a full-fledged PC.It has electronic mail and my calendar in it. I use it when I travel. I can do my e-mail on this, I can do my calendar scheduling, I have my task list on it and when I go to office, I put it into a socket and it syncs with my PC and all unsent messages are sent. It runs on the Windows CE operating system. It recognises my handwriting, it has all my music on it and so on.

The idea is that at some point of time, I will want to sit here, connect through my mobile phone, and be able to do wireless interface with my PC in office. We have made very deep inroads into that area with the .NET initiative.

There seems to a shadow over WAP (Wireless Application Protocol).

I don’t think there is a shadow over WAP. I think wireless application is going to become ambiguous. They are going to become pretty much a way of life. I don’t think that I would want to be sitting on a fixed device to be able to check e-mail, stock quotes, my bank account to do transactions. I should be able to do that sitting in my car .As the back-end of banking systems and electronic clearing systems become more of a reality, I think that wireless applications will catch on very quickly.

How deeply are you involved with that?

We are at the forefront. We are talking a leadership position and the .NET (pronouned dot net) initiative is all about that.

Windows 2000 was released a while ago. Why is it that in India when you buy a computer, you still don’t get Windows 2000?

That depends on who you buy it from and what. We recommend the Windows Millennium Edition for home and office, or if you are power users then we recommend Windows 2000. It depends on the configuration that you require.

How many of the thousands of bugs in Windows 2000 have been fixed now?

I think it was a fallacy in the first place. There was sensationalism, which didn’t stand good at all. We would never ship a product that had bugs.