A Case for Open Governance

E-Governance has been the buzz word in India for more than a decade now; entities like
DeiTY, NIC, NISG and C-DAC are working to further the progress of e-governance in India.
Though the e-governance policy talks about involvement of citizen, bringing transparency
and accountability to the overall success is still a mixed bag with many promising projects
yet to deliver.
The technological limitation of e-governance is one of the reasons for the limited success of
the initiative. The PC penetration in India is still at sub 20% with the internet penetration
being very much a metro phenomena until a few years ago. Though the broadband
connectivity and penetration has increased in the last few years, it is still in the 10-15%
range. The most significant technological limitation is the lack of effective support for
Indian languages in computers. This limitation has not only created a digital divide but has
also, to an extent contributed to a social divide. The information asymmetry created by the
lack of PC and connectivity penetration may lead to serious socio-economic issues in the
country.
E-Governance by definition is Technology driven governance, which in other words means
the application of Information & Communication Technology (ICT) to deliver government
services.
E-governance has focused largely on efficiency, transparency, data quality and effectiveness
of the process but at times focused primarily on the vertical integration rather than a
combination of vertical and horizontal integration to derive benefits. There is a need to
enable applications for policy inputs and citizen participation and it needs to be integral part
of all the government initiatives.

E-Governance to Open-Governance
There needs to be a significant shift in delivering services to citizen as well as soliciting
Citizen participation. E-Governance focuses on Electronic delivery of Government services
and the related policy, process and infrastructure related changes. This shift can be
obtained by moving from e-governance to Open Governance (O-Governance)

The World Bank describes Open Governance as follows
4

Open governance ensures citizens have access to government (information, data, processes)
in order to engage governments more effectively and that governments have the willingness
and ability to respond to citizens and to work collaboratively to solve difficult governance
issues. It facilitates an active dialogue between government and its citizens regarding, for
example budget allocation and utilization and provision of social services. Citizens have
improved access to their leaders and mechanisms in place to demand better services, and
government has the capacity to respond.

O-Governance (Open Governance) takes a much broader view of Governance. Open
Governance would mean fundamental shift in our understanding of what Government
needs to do to effectively use the technology to deliver the services.
In order to be effective, O-Governance needs to support the following at a minimum
A. Open Technology
a. Open Source
b. Open Standards
c. Open API
d. Open Data
e. Cloud based implementation (Infrastructure as a service, Software as a
service, Platform as a service)
B. Public Participation in creating services & applications (only common infrastructure
and open technology as described above can enable this)
a. Co-creation and Co-delivery of services
C. Anytime Anywhere Any Device availability of service
D. 3A Model Available to All- Accessible by All Adopted by All
a. Accessible via PC, Mobile, Tablet, TV
b. Accessible by differently abled people
c. Accessible in Regional Language
E. Open Communication
a. Process and Technology for two way communication with complete
transparency
b. Common framework to communicate across technologies and government
systems
c. Standardized data structures for commonly used attributes across all the
entities
i. Ex Name, Address
d. Communication between various government entities using open technology
/ Knowledge sharing initiatives
e. Creation of Common Infrastructure, Common framework and Application
Store (Collectively called as Common Resources)
i. Incentive mechanism for government entities for using the common
resources
F. Citizen Centric to Citizen Driven approach
G. Information delivery in the language of choice and using the technology of choice
H. Regional Language Support
a. Content
b. Social Media Interactions
c. Email id
d. URL / Domain names
Effective implementation of O-Governance will help isolate the impact on service delivery
and government interaction with Citizen from Technological changes even if they are
disruptive in nature. Also giving due importance to what is perceived as valuable by the
citizen will give more sophisticated view of the development and bring in further
participation from the citizen.
Effective governance would also mean invisible government as unnecessary interaction with
the Government (politicians and bureaucrats) is perceived to be hindrance to the progress.
Open Governance can also help create SMART
1
(Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsible,
Transparent) Country, i.e. Smart Government, Smart Society, Smart Business.
The technological advancements can help us provide Governance at the finger-tip by
effectively using Mobile Phones, Tablets and TV (digitization of TV, Panchayat / City / State /
Central Government functions and services on TV/ Mobile/ Tablets a personalized service
offering).

Though the benefits of Open Governance are obvious, implementing the same would
require significant changes in the use technologies and the way technology is used, policies
and processes.

References
1. The 5
th
World IT Forum IFIP WITFOR 2012 Proceedings
2. M-GOVERNMENT, Mobile Technology for responsive governments and connected
societies OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) & ITU
(International Telecommunication Union)
3. The shape of e-participation: characterizing an emerging research area By Oystein
Saebo, Jermey Rose, Lief Skiftenes Flag; Government Information Quarterly
4. http://wbi.worldbank.org/wbi/content/supporting-open-governance

Suresh Anantpurkar