E-Governance            

Electronic governance or e-governance is adopted by countries across the world. In a fast-growing and demanding economy like India, e-governance has become essential.  The rapid growth of digitalisation has led to many governments across the globe to introduce and incorporate technology into governmental processes. Electronic governance or e-governance can be defined as the usage of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) by the government to provide and facilitate government services, exchange of information, communication transactions and integration of various standalone systems and services.

In other words, it is the use of technology to perform government activities and achieve the objectives of governance.  Through e-governance, government services are made available to citizens and businesses in a convenient, efficient and transparent manner. Examples of e-governance include Digital India initiative, National Portal of India, Prime Minister of India portal, Aadhaar, filing and payment of taxes online, digital land management systems, Common Entrance Test etc. 

Types of interactions in e-Governance

e-Governance can take place in four major types of interactions, apart from the processes and interactions in the back-office, within the government framework:

Government to Government (G2G)

Information is exchanged within the government i.e., either, between the central government, state government and local governments or between different branches of the same government.

Government to Citizen (G2C)

The citizens have a platform through which they can interact with the government and get access to the variety of public services offered by the Government.

Government to Businesses (G2B)

The businesses are able to interact with the government seamlessly with respect to the services of the government offered to businesses

Government to Employees (G2E)

The interaction between the government and its employees occurs in an efficient and speedy manner.

Objectives of e-Governance

The objectives of e-governance can be listed down as given below:

• To support and simplify governance for government, citizens, and businesses.
• To make government administration more transparent and accountable while addressing the society’s needs and expectations through efficient public services and effective interaction between the people, businesses, and government.
• To reduce corruption in the government.
• To ensure speedy administration of services and information.
• To reduce difficulties for business, provide immediate information and enable digital communication by e-business.

While e-governance provides the advantages of convenience, efficiency and transparency, it also has problems associated with it. They are as follows:

• Lack of computer literacy: India is still a developing country and a vast majority of the citizens lack computer literacy which hinders the effectiveness of e-governance.
• Lack of accessibility to the internet or even computers in some parts of the country is a disadvantage to e-governance.
• e-Governance results in a loss of human interaction. As the system becomes more mechanised, lesser interaction takes place among people.
• It gives rise to the risk of personal data theft and leakage.

e-Governance leads to a lax administration. The service provider can easily provide excuses for not providing the service on technical grounds such as “server is down” or “internet is not working”, etc.