Digital India is a flagship programme of the Government of India with a vision to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy.
E-governance initiatives in India took a broader dimension in the mid 1990s for wider sectoral applications with emphasis on citizen-centric services. The major ICT initiatives of the Government included, inter alia, some major projects, such as railway computerization, land record computerisation etc., which focused mainly on the development of information systems. Later on, many states started ambitious individual e-governance projects aimed at providing electronic services to citizens.
Though these e-governance projects were citizen-centric, they could make less than the desired impact due to their limited features. The isolated and less interactive systems revealed major gaps that were thwarting the successful adoption of e-governance along the entire spectrum of governance. They clearly pointed towards the need for a more comprehensive planning and implementation for the infrastructure required to be put in place, interoperability issues to be addressed etc., to establish a more connected government.
e-Kranti : National e-Governance Plan 2.0
The national level e-governance programme called National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) was initiaited in 2006. There were 31 Mission Mode Projects under National e-Governance Plan covering a wide range of domains viz. agriculture, land records, health, education, passports, police, courts, municipalities, commercial taxes and treasuries etc. 24 Mission Mode Projects have been implemented and started delivering either full or partial range of envisaged services.
Considering the shortcomings in National e-Governance Plan that included lack of integration amongst Government applications and databases, low degree of government process re-engineering, scope for leveraging emerging technologies like mobile and cloud etc., the Government of India approved e-Kranti programme with the vision of “Transforming e-Governance for Transforming Governance”.
All new and ongoing egovernance projects as well as the existing projects, which are being revamped, should now follow the key principles of e-Kranti namely ‘Transformation and not Translation’, ‘Integrated Services and not Individual Services’, ‘Government Process Reengineering (GPR) to be mandatory in every MMP’, ‘ICT Infrastructure on Demand’, ‘Cloud by Default’, ‘Mobile First’, ‘Fast Tracking Approvals’, ‘Mandating Standards and Protocols’, ‘Language Localization’, ‘National GIS (Geo-Spatial Information System)’, ‘Security and Electronic Data Preservation’.
The portfolio of Mission Mode Projects has increased from 31 to 44 MMPs. Many new social sector projects namely Women and Child Development, Social Benefits, Financial Inclusion, Urban Governance eBhasha etc., have been added as new MMPs under e-Kranti.