1. Project Background
The governments in developing countries like India face a difficult task of dealing with numerous functions that are required to provide needed services to citizens, and finding ways to interact with citizens to provide these services in a manner that is responsive and accountable to the satisfaction of the citizen. Traditionally governments are divided into numerous departments and sections, each of which develops, administers and delivers some services. The citizen needs to know which department or office is responsible for delivering which service, and even then she often realizes that her actual needs are hopelessly divided between functions of a few different offices, and that these offices are just not structured to take a unified view of meeting her specific need. Under the circumstances, even if she is able to spend all the time running around these different offices, she just may still be left unsatisfied.
The new ICTs have been used by businesses as well as by governments to get more customer/ citizen centric. The basic model is to provide a unified ICT aided interaction point between the whole organization and the customer/ citizen. All the needs of the customer/citizen are taken through this interface, communicated to the needed section within the organization, the service fulfillment obtained and delivered to the customer/citizen through the same interface. This interface also takes in the all-crucial customer/citizen feedback in terms of satisfaction index, suggestions etc and these are communicated to the concerned section within the organization for necessary action.
This unified interaction point, though almost always made possible through use of Internet technologies, may be accessed by the customer/citizen in a number of ways, as is most convenient to her. It could actually be an online interaction, but as likely, it can be through telephone or a personal meeting with front-end personnel who themselves are aided by networked computers.
However, a successful organizational transformation to take a citizen-centric orientation is a complex process, and even many top business companies are still grappling with the issues of business process re-engineering, which in this case can be so far-reaching as to throw up very difficult organizational issues. A few years back, Motorola actually changed its business division structure which was based on production logic, to customer segment based business divisions - home users, small businesses etc. And many companies are still learning the ropes of having quality interactions with customers through call centres, online interactions etc and developing complex technological and institutional capacities for Customer Relationship Management.
The basis of e-governance is not a simple online interaction with the citizen, it implies these complex organizational restructurings. E-governance has to make the citizen’s life easier, and not more difficult. So, when the citizen doesn’t find internet as his preferred way of interaction (which is obviously so for an overwhelming majority of citizens in countries like India), the convenience of a personal interaction needs to be at hand. This is why many state governments in India have come up with ‘Citizen Service Centres’ where front-end staff equipped with networked access to various backend offices of the government interacts with and provides services the citizen. Many departments, taking a leaf out of the corporate world’s book, are also experimenting with call-centres or helplines to service the citizens. The service outreach to far-flung rural areas is an issue of completely different dimensions. Governments have encouraged private and community bodies to experiment with service kiosks, where the kiosk operator equipped with Internet based networking with government departments, mediates delivery of some services to the citizens.
The fact that the exciting new possibilities have been tried to be worked on an old and unaltered organizational and institutional structure has predictably led to problems, of under-efficiencies as well as ineffectiveness.
The Citizen Service Centres (CSCs) (often with some varying terminologies) have tried out different organizational structures. FRIENDS in Kerala has tried government staff on deputation from line departments; others have recruited special government staff for front-ending services; E-Seva in Andhra Pradesh has tried private operators; E-Setu in Maharashtra has a composite front end office with two layers, government staff at the back-end for authenticating documents etc and private operators on BOOT (Build, own, operate transfer) basis interacting with the citizens. One E-Setu centre has also tried the front-ending through an NGO. Sukhmani in Punjab uses regular government staff, and to give the front-end some needed authority, there is a Sukhmani society at district level, and an e-governance society at the state level.
The fallout of having a superficially laid out front-end without doing even a basic organizational structural redesigning has resulted in service delivery initiatives getting stuck at a level that includes only the following:
- Collection of payments for different departments
- Providing basic information pertaining to various departments
- Providing application form etc, and accepting them on behalf of various departments
- Providing record authentication services like land records, identity records (income, education, caste, domicile/nativity etc), and entering records like birth/ death registration, vehicle registration etc.
It is not just incidental that all these initiatives have not been able to go beyond providing these basic services. The issue, and the problem, here is structural and systemic. All services provided hitherto have required simple information exchange, which doesn’t require complex processes of cross-referencing, discretion, evaluation and judgment - as for example are needed to judge whether a particular citizen is eligible for a certain set of welfare benefits, and providing those services to her. But to be able to provide these latter kinds of services – which really are all important, especially to the poorer and more disadvantaged sections of the society - the front-end has to have sufficient authority, training and structural arrangements with the line departments, under which these services fall.
Similarly, with the rural outreach attempted through the kiosk delivery model, the outcomes have been even worse. The low density of population, makes it necessary to combine delivery of government services with many other private services for the sake of sustainability. But with the poorly defined status, authority and arrangement of the front-end kiosk operator with line departments of the government responsible for developing and delivering various services – which is even worse than for CSCs - the poor outcome is predictable.
It is not possible, for e-governance in India to proceed from the present rudimentary levels, to carry on with these ‘thin front-ends’ super-imposed over unaltered governmental structures of conventional departments with their conventional ways.
2. Project Objective
To develop a road map for process re-engineering in government departments in India that are leveraging new ICTs for integrated service delivery to citizens, to enhance the effectiveness and reach of service-delivery, especially of welfare benefits for the disadvantaged.
2.1. General Objective
As we mentioned above, the organizational opportunity that the new ICTs bring in for any organization serving a host of customers or citizens is to reshape and restructure itself with a customer /citizen centric orientation. In doing so, obviously some crucial activity shifts, and with it the attendant intra-organizational ‘power’shifts, take place within the organizations. Chiefly, the direction of these shifts is from the backend, meaning the departments and sections concerned with design and production of services etc to the front-end, which are the sections in direct contact with the customers/citizens.
In the matter of delivering government services exploiting the e-governance opportunity, it is not enough to get a set of people to deal with the citizens directly on behalf of all departments, and expecting that these dealings will get connected smoothly to processes inside the line departments, which consider it their precious domain to design and deliver the services. And it is not only an issue of self-minded zealous protection of respective territories; these departments are in fact under political structures that are accordingly segmented (political ministries), and are separately responsible for their performance.
Under the circumstances, it is vain to hope that just by providing a set of citizen dealing staff, who are commonly available across the departments, the line departments will orient their processes to a unified delivery of services to the citizen, in a manner most convenient, and useful for her.
What instead is required is to do far-reaching system and process re-engineering across government departments. Governments work within more or less rigid set of rules and protocols. Therefore, it is needed that the structures of the governmental unified front-end, and its relationships, processes, including of cross-accountability are clearly defined and structured in the rule book as well as in department structures.
The basic plank of such re-engineering is the emergence of a separate department for each government that specializes only in front-ending with the citizen, and itself does not produce any service. It enters into well-defined agreements and relationships with service departments. Clearly defined and sanctioned processes of such a relationship are put in place and adhered to, on the basis of contractual sanctions.
This is what we call as ‘thick front ending’. The front–end department takes in the service requirements of the citizens, along with the citizen particulars relevant to the required service(s); it then decides which all departments together or individually can provide the needed service, interacts with these departments, obtains the services and delivers them to the citizen. In the process, it also gathers the citizen feedback, and evaluation of services delivered, and delivers them back to the line departments. The front-end department also collects and collates evaluative indices on service delivery by line departments for inspection and control by political authorities, and by the citizens themselves. In the long run, this front end department will also be a repository of citizens’ database, with information about the situation and needs of each citizen to be able to pro-actively offer services to them, even when the citizen herself may not be aware of the possibilities.
The intended research will study the landscape of the various developments in India in this direction. We have spoken above of how the various CSCs and other e-governance service delivery initiatives are struggling with a variety of organizational forms for the getting the front-end agency right. The officials involved in all these attempts have realized the various problems involved in ‘thin front ending’, and how they have to move to more systemic arrangements through the process of system and process re-engineering. Many of these initiatives have begun to speak of the language of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between the front-end agencies and the line departments (Sukhmani initiative of Punjab government and E-Seva of Andhra Pradesh).
At the bottom of the problem is the issue of legitimacy and authority of this front end agency. As the line government departments see this agency as taking away from them the all powerful citizen dealing interface, and lord over them with performance indicators and the like, it is obvious that they are not likely to be friendly and willing to be the supplicant back-ends to these new agencies, with questionable legitimacy and institutional authority.
All the e-governance initiatives have tired to resolve this issue in a variety of, but still ad hoc, means. The Gyandoot initiative had a Gyandoot society, to which the chief district functionary, the District Collector (DC), lend his authority. Most de-centralized e-governance service delivery initiatives have attempted to work through such ad-hoc arrangements leveraging the DC’s authority. Akshaya, the rural service delivery model of Kerala government has such societies at district, block and village levels. Sukhmani initiative has a Sukhmani society not only at district level under the DC, but an e-governance society at the state level under the Chief Secretary (the highest ranking bureaucrat in the state) to give added legitimacy and authority to the Sukhmani service delivery mechanism. E-Setu of Maharashtra also has E-Setu societies at all levels.
However, these ad hoc bodies and structures can only be transitional structures to a full- fledged state level department, which is a specialist front-end agency for interfacing with and delivering various services to the citizens. Nevertheless, the multiplicity, and variety of such attempts points to the fact that important structural adjustments are underway, and the needed lessons are being learnt.
The chosen case studies
The intended research will study six such initiatives in India, the structural imperatives they have identified, as well as the adjustments they are going through. It will show how all these adjustments and transitory structures are a development towards a full-fledged state level department with due legal and institutional sanctity which will be the state’s front-end agency for most services for citizens. The research project will bind together the emerging theory and practice that will form a basis for evolving towards this substantive structural arrangement for effective e-governance. The study will lay out a road map for negotiating with all the expected issues, including political ones, for setting up the specialist front end agency as a government department. This department will also have the required competencies to partner with NGOs, and even private agents, to extend or outreach ‘unified delivery of government services’ to rural and other sparsely populated areas, and to groups who require specialized services, or a specialized manner of their delivery.
The Indian case studies whose experience will go into developing this roadmap are;
- E-Seva of Andhra Pradesh
- FRIENDS and Akshaya of Kerala
- Sukhmani of Punjab
- E-Setu of Maharashtra
- Citizen Service Bureaus of Delhi
- Citizen Service Bureaus of Bangalore
In addition, as an important best practices case-study, the research will also visit and study the Centrelink initiative of the central government of Australia.
Centrelink of Australia - an important role model
Centrelink is a department of the government of Australia, which is a front-end for many service departments of the central government. There are specific agreements between client agencies and Centrelink, which governs their relationship. The Centrelink agency reports to a separate minister for its performance. Every third citizen of Australia interacts with Centrelink. It currently has over 27,000 staff, located in more than 300 Customer Service Centres, and 28 call centres distributing approximately $55 billion to 6.4 million Australians.
Australia is a commonwealth country like India and the basic political and governance structures of the two countries have great similarity. Centrelink is an agency oriented to the sections of the society most in need of governmental help and services, therefore it is modeled in manner that less developed countries like India can easily pick up instructive tips from it. Centrelink relies mostly on personal interactions, through ‘Customer Service Centres’ and through telephones, though the online option is also available. There is also a provision for home visits wherever necessary, by Centrelink staff. Centrelink has special provisions for under-served communities like the aboriginals and a range of service options like community outreach officers. The assistance of NGOs and community bodies are also explored.
In many ways, it is towards the Centrelink model that the specialist front end department for Indian governments has to ideally move, though of course with important local differences. Therefore, it will be of great value to include a study of this agency, and the path over which it has evolved and negotiated issues of fundamental governmental re-structuring from vertical departments to a horizontal ‘thick front end’ providing a common interface to a number of service production departments. This case study will help in juxtaposing the developments underway in India, as represented by the selection of case studies from India, to develop a viable roadmap for effective e-governance in India.
2.1. Specific Objectives
The objectives of the research project are;
- To study the attempts at system and process re-engineering of existing Indian e-governance based initiatives, which are aimed at integrated delivery of services to citizens.
- To study the Centrelink initiative of Australia as an interesting role model towards which many of the above attempts appear to be finally leading.
- To put together the emerging theory and practice for a model front end agency/department for interfacing with citizens and delivering a broad variety of services, especially to the disadvantaged, leveraging the best possibilities opened by the new ICTs.
- To provide the research output as a policy brief to governments, and a guidelines document for officials and departments involved in processes re-engineering for integrated delivery of services, using the new ICT opportunities.
3. Project Beneficiaries
- The direct beneficiaries are the state governments involved in e-governance, efforts and administrative reforms in India, innovating with the ICT based opportunities for more efficient delivery of services to the citizens.
- The ultimate beneficiaries of course are the citizens themselves.
- And, unlike most present e-governance services that are mostly about bill payments and records authentication, the new paradigm to be developed in this study allows social welfare benefit related services to be delivered with institutionalised arrangements between the front end agency and the service production department. Therefore, the present project will assist the e-governance efforts of the Indian governments to move more towards serving the needs of the disadvantaged people.
4. Project Sustainability
Since the project outputs are essentially knowledge products, they are sustainable, as long as they are of practical applicability, and are communicated properly to those who can use them. The whole research project proceeds from a standpoint of immediate applicability in the various efforts of many governments in India for using the new ICT opportunities for integrated delivery of services to the citizens. For this purpose, it also takes the route of building upon the efforts already underway, and a cross-dissemination of the best practises that are emerging thereof.
For the nature of knowledge outcomes, and the processes of their dissemination see the section on project outcomes.
5. Project Methodology
The project is a case studies based research study.
- It will involve field visits to the selected projects in India, and one in Australia, as a best practices role model.
- Detailed notes will be taken about the working of these projects, especially about the process re-engineering aspects.
- All needed documents will be collected.
- Intensive interactions will be undertaken with the involved officials to understand the issues they have faced and the negotiations and solutions they worked out.
- In addition to these case studies, a desk review of instructive efforts in this area elsewhere will be undertaken, which could provide useful guidelines.
- The outcome of the research will be put together in a document, which also will also lay out a suggested roadmap for process re-engineering in government departments, leading to the emergence of a specialist department that front-ends service delivery on behalf of the client departments, who design and develop these services.
6. Project Timeline
The project will be conducted over 6 months. It will be divided roughly into three months for field visits, and three more months to put the research output together.
7. Project Outcomes
The outcome of the research study will be
- A detailed document of issues and solutions in developing an e-governance front-end agency for Indian governments, and
- A road map from the present ad hoc arrangements to a full-fledged institutionalized agency/ department, that also addresses outreach components, including the rural service kiosk, using NGOs as well as private agents, operating within effective institutional control of governments/ community.
- The document will serve both as a policy brief for the government, and as a guidelines document for implementing officials and departments.
Dissemination of project outcomes
The project will contribute knowledge outputs that will be presented to the departments of state governments dealing with e-governance and integrated service delivery.
Assistance will be sought for this purpose from ‘National Institute of Smart Governance’, which is a Government of India funded consulting body for the central and state governments on e-governance, and with which IT for Change has a partnership on an important project.
The findings shall also be presented through a seminar on the issue of ‘Government Process Re-engineering for Effective Integrated Service Delivery - Need for a Specialist Front end Government Department’. IT for Change will obtain funding for this purpose separately.
