In a recent post, Gurcharan Das, wrote about how India has always been a strong society and a weak state. If you have not read Discovery of India, you may not be able to fully appreciate the import of the above sentence, but I digress. The existence of the state is because of the society and not vice-versa.
Unfortunately, in last few decades, the state has not kept pace with the changes in society and while the technological revolution is accelerating the pace at which the society is evolving our governance systems are far behind. I think this is the single biggest reason for failure of governance in India.
For example, Bangalore, a garden city, does not have a single arborist on its rolls because the government has not kept pace with the technological advancements in the field of maintaining tree cover within the city. The city meanwhile continues to loose its green cover at a massive rate of 17,000 trees per year. Had there been aroborist with Bangalore Municipal corporation, instead of loosing trees forever, we would have relocated some of them.
Another such example is VAT vs service tax debate. In a recent order, the Hon. High Court of Karnataka held that when Airtel provides broadband service to its consumers, it is 'selling' artificially created light energy via optic fiber cables! Since VAT is a state subject and service tax is a central one, the two tax authorities are often at logger heads only because the regulation is ambiguous especially in cases where technology is blurring the boundaries between services and goods.
When India enacted its constitution, one can argue that we probably got best in the world constitution. The constituent assembly reviewed every single form of government spanning across the history of the world and borrowed heavily from constitutions across the world. That was what the Indian society wanted after years of oppressive rule. However, at that time, the founding fathers did not foresee a need for a mechanism where civil society, as different from the political class, could propose legislative changes. Probably, they did see a need, but could not see how it could be possible given our massive population spread across the length and breadth of the country.
With the technological revolution followed by the information revolution, the boundaries between the policy makers and the general public needs to blur. One of the best run policy making body of our times has been TRAI. They really deserve an equivalent of the Magsaysay award on their approach to new policies and initiatives using their website and consultation papers to build up the legislation based on feedback received from the general public as well as all the stakeholders.
Today, the civil society movement has caught the fancy of the urban middle class and the popular opinion seems to be against the government. The government is on the back foot seemingly fighting against the demands of the civil society members when they could very well incorporate the popular sentiments in the drafting of the Lokpal bill using internet. Iceland is drafting its entire constitution in consultation with their online population. While the penetration rates of internet in India are dismal, the same is not true with cell phones and it could be used equally effectively in making of the law.
And if you hand them a tool, people would overcome barriers to use it to improve governance. Here are ten ways in which governance can be better by use of technology:
- Allow any member of the public to initiate an idea for a law, a change in existing law, debate with other citizens and then propose a bill to be made into law using technology as an enabler, much like Ideastorm.
- Use a CRM like system for tracking and delivering services.
- Use a zip dial like service to gather quick feedback on government officials as well as politicians. Use this feedback in their annual assessment of performance.
- Just like Citibank's website, make it possible for every citizen to request any service over the web. Last month, I spent close to three hours to get an IEC licence which if online would have taken me a few minutes only.
- Use Airtel Money like service to distribute financial subsidies to the needy rather than subsidize delivery of goods.
- Outsource and automate every single administrative function to machines and people. The biggest advantage of internet is that the data entry is done by the person requesting the service. In the example of IEC licence quoted above, since the process is not online, a govt clerk entered the data on my physical application form onto the IEC database, wasting valuable government resources. On the other hand, the income tax department today uses automated systems to process millions of returns, their officials manually scrutinizing only a small percentage of cases flagged as suspicious by the system.
- Link every single point of sale terminal in the country to an automated system harvesting data on seller, buyer and prices to check tax evasion.
- Give an incentive in terms of tax break for buyers for making purchases using electronic payments.
- A complete overhaul of the responsibilities and duties of the government officials in light of technology evolution.
- Use mathematics and statistics to draw up models while planning to deliver services especially to forecast the pent up demand accurately. (See commuters in Delhi metro packed like sardines)
The key here is to use the power of crowds for both planning and implementation.
From a post on VC circle:
Although, the anti-bribery legislation in India has been on the statute books since 1988, successful prosecutions resulting in imprisonment are more the exception than the rule. The Prevention of Corruption Act 1988, prescribes penalties ranging from imprisonment for up to five years to an unlimited fine. However, fines imposed for criminal offences in India have seldom served as a deterrent on account of their quantum.
