Saturday, April 11, 2015

National Informatics Center - At the forefront of innovation-Oh Really?

I just went to the national informatics center website casually thinking that it will just be another government website and what i found really enticed me. Project achievements in individual states and throughout the country looked like a hundred revolutions in a micro universe of its own.
E-Governance projects of the government of India have only demonstrated that things can be done and that too despite the system than because of it. That these projects have been successful shows that change can be brought about even by the so called "inefficient" and "lethargic" bureaucracy.
Government departments to share source codes of E-governance apps that they developed. This is a news that should warm the cockles of the heart of any E-Governance enthusiast.
However, Our government is exhibiting myopic vision by relying on the national informatics center for each software that they need. What they should actually be doing is to call for tenders and award to the lowest bidder. A local ecosystem of software developers will emerge who will actively involve in ideating and conceiving E-Governance projects.
The problems of each project implemented by NIC is that it appears more like a technology demonstrator and not some project that was meant to be used. Despite working since so many years on digitizing PDS system progress in many states has been tardy. It seems as though computerization still is resisted in government circles.
There are a few bright spots in the administration like Shri. R S Sharma, Secretary in the Department of IT.
I would like to talk about a few remarkable achievements of the NIC.
Aadhaar Enabled Biometric Attendance System is one such project. This project if implemented by every department right down to government schools then it can bring in a lot of efficiency.
Others like Bhoomi project in karnataka and clones in other states called by a variety of names if implemented on a national scale with inputs from ISRO and all departments, it would be awesome.
Some of the projects like the dissemination of information during 2014 general elections are the ones where NIC likes to pat its own back. 
NIC has developed software for automation of courts but this is not being taken up for further enhancement. 
NIC has implemented software for automation in government hospitals. 
NIC has developed software to register marriages. 
It has developed software to register land records. 
It is behind the Direct Benefit Transfer program and the software that supports the DBTL(world's largest social sector scheme) was developed by NIC.
You just name any field the government works in and more often than not you will find an NIC application running.

Please visit this site for more info=> http://www.nic.in/projects

This site mentions about nearly 1096 projects that NIC has dipped its fingers into.
It just needs a grand visionary like Narendra Modi to transform these standalone applications into a single seamlessly unified system served from government owned data centers(cloud).

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