The National Knowledge Commission headed by Sam Pitroda has suggested an end to the British era practices by 're-engineering' government processes and services.
"e-governance is more about opportunity for administrative reforms than just electronics, IT and infrastructure. If we miss this opportunity to re-engineer government processes before computerisation, the cost will be enormous," Pitroda said after presenting the commission's recommendations.
The e-governance report was prepared by a group of the commission headed by Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani. The report was discussed by the Planning Commission and presented to the communications and IT ministry.
A committee headed by the prime minister would oversee the implementation of the recommendations, Pitroda said. "We can expect some result over the next few years. We might spend Rs 5,000-7,000 crore on e-governance in the coming days," he added.
Pitroda said the government should identify 10-20 important processes and services, starting with birth and death certificates and ration cards. "Each state should implement these processes and learn from each other," he said.
He said computerisation should happen at the national level. "The present state-level e-governance initiatives are fragmented. Many programmes are vendor-driven, hardware-centric, and not scalable. It is essential to develop and implement standards uniformly over all states and central ministries," he said.
Pitroda said it was important to provide a nationwide secure broadband and associated hardware, software and hosting facilities with easy access at all levels.
"This infrastructure should be based on user-pay principle and public-private partnership. The work should be led by the Centre," he added.
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