Leveraging data and technology for efficient e-governance

There is lot of structured and trusted data already available that the government can tap into to make e-governance more insightful, efficient and effective

The current government’s strong intention of creating and promoting a digital state of mind in India is apparent and e-governance has emerged as a key focus area for them in the last few years. It has launched a slew of programs such as mygov, Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile (JAM), e-sign framework and Bharat Net under the umbrella of the Digital India initiative, targeted towards pushing the needle on e-governance. The government’s very ambitious smart cities program also has e-governance at its heart.

The centre’s vision is to transform India into a digitally-empowered society that will promote transparency, enhance efficiency, check corruption and facilitate better governance and sharper conversation between a state and its people. This will also help it build its own databases and significantly advance its agenda of e-governance. However there is lot of structured and trusted data already available that the government can tap into to make e-governance more insightful, efficient and effective. These is a repository of aggregated content from varied primary and secondary sources compiled as news, expert views, trends and other relevant formats to enhance real-time intelligence gathering to facilitate financial decisions, fraud checks, data screening, analytics and personnel check among other things.

Let us look at ways in which this can help the government enhance its e-governance efforts.

Land and revenue management

Effective use of trusted data and technology can help the government automate management of land information and property tax, enable effective valuation, and simplify the revenue management lifecycle for it. This can help them streamline tax collection and maximise revenue generation to support sustainable growth and improve services to the public. As the government looks to execute the Smart City program across India, land management must be a top priority to ensure seamless revenue flow as well as citizen convenience. Blockchain-enabled land management can further help the government achieve enhanced security and transparency.

Addressing red tapism and corruption

While India has moved up on the World Bank ‘Ease of Doing Business’ index and broken into the top 100 nations globally, we still have a long way to go before doing business in India truly becomes ‘easy’. Rampant red tapism and corruption are responsible for stalling a lot of important infrastructural projects and an issue that the government has been committed to resolve. Trusted data can be leveraged to address this issue and flag off risks well in time. Connected, open and linked data when analysed as a whole can help run a comprehensive KYS (Know Your Stakeholder) check to identify risky entities. An example is that if the government wants to onboard a vendor for undertaking an important project or accept investments in strategic sectors, it can rely on connected data to check for the entity’s financial crime history, ongoing litigations, political affiliations and connections and reports on past work record to make a well informed and efficient decision.

Law and order management

An efficient and effective legal framework underpins a modern and well-functioning society and is an important part of ensuring good governance. Leveraging data can help expedite legal proceedings and provide access to global best practices and historic data to understand trends and find speedy resolution. Access to trusted legal data can go a long way in keeping the cases moving efficiently through the judiciary system court and avoid huge backlogs.

Infrastructure boost and economic development

Studying and comprehending financial data in real time, including commodities prices, import-export trends, global market movements and currency performance among others can help government make faster and more efficient investment decisions and therefore help in creating greater wealth for supporting infrastructural development and social-economic programs across the country.

Effective use of data can open up huge possibilities for the government to streamline its governance efforts and expedite execution of its projects and programs while making sure that the deliverables are much faster and efficient. With data and analytics driving important business decisions across industry, it is imminent for data to play a bigger role in the sphere of e-Governance as well.