A Systematic Approach towards Citizen Centric Services Using Digital Governance

It is broadly admitted that e-governance is very effective in promoting the efficiency of government workings and enhancing public service delivery. Many e-Governance projects have been launched across the state in the country by various departments both public and private sector. Apart from this, there exist certain factors affecting the performance of e-governance in the service delivery domain. The most important factors are lack of citizen centric approach in recognizing citizen‘s needs, process design, portal design, IT system architectures, besides inappropriate capacity of delivery system to delivery responsiveness and so on. For obtaining maximum advantages of e-governance, a citizen centric approach to service delivery is suggested. And this approach permits government to obtain required efficiency, enhanced service delivery, promotes citizens satisfaction with government services and improves quality of life.

The greatest advantage of citizen centric services using e-governance is reduction of service life cycle delivery time. Now, citizens can avail the services from their homes and offices and obtain necessary documents delivered to them. The initiation of citizen centric e-governance services enabled the government to create a great impact on quality of service delivery by obtaining citizen confidence in the government functioning. The benefits must be exposed and communicated into economic and social practices. The citizens were expected to move to the service counters located at the site for making transaction from a specific department before the launch of e-governance portal. The service counters of various departments were generally situated across the city and the citizen were supposed to go from one counter to another travelling a long distance. The waiting time for the citizens was supposed to be very high because the number of counters was very low. It was very difficult to know the actual process being followed inside the department to facilitate the service. So, the main aim of citizen centric services is to make availability of services round the clock. And if the e-governance portals are developed in such a way that they are integrated with different government department‘s applications and provides access to the citizens and businesses, than this will help the citizens in reducing their waiting time at the department counter

centric services. The citizens can check the status of their service request and obtain all the information required to avail the service as these services are integrated with the portal. This permits the citizen and businesses to learn the process of the government department. The portal also helps the employees of the departments to accumulate required information to facilitate the services so as to improve the efficiency of the resources of the department. The portal also helps the citizen and businesses to make the transactions in secured manner. And this is how the e-governance portal enhances the quality of services facilitated by the government department in both state and central level.

It is considered that globalization is accelerating the customer expectations. Mostly citizens are transacting with commercial and other services delivered through internet. The commonly known examples of such services are eBay, Amazon and MSN and search engines like Yahoo, Google etc. These global services are establishing the standard and providing the customer expectations. The initiation of NeGP18 has provided a big twist. It was launched to lay the foundation for the long term growth of e-governance in the country by Government of India. The main objective of this program is to accelerate various e-governance initiatives across the different government departments at the local level, state level and the national level. NeGP is focused at enhancing quality, effectiveness and accessibility of government services to citizen and businesses with the help of ICT19. In order to transform the service delivery process to facilitate transparent, efficient and better services to the citizen, several state governments have taken various initiatives. Presently, 20 central government departments have taken initiatives to implement National e-governance Program. This program incorporates more than 350 departments all over India and which has been initiated by 35 states and Union Territories. The NeGP is encouraged as a centralized initiative to approve citizen centricity. It also supported the maximum usage of ICT infrastructure and resources across the country. It is very essential to design the infrastructure required to facilitate the services to the citizen and businesses for the implementation of NeGP. The primary requirement for infrastructure is the connectivity. The Department of IT, Government of India advised that all the states must develop and implement State Wide Area Network (SWAN) ,which is supposed to be the backbone of all the citizen centric services. It is stated that State e-Governance Portal is an integrated

18 National e-governance Plan 19 Information and Communication Technology

to access the citizen centric services for the citizens who cannot access the service through Internet.

Citizen centric services can be defined as the most significant part of e-governance. And the good services are characterized by efficiency, cost effectiveness, user convenience, reliability and citizen centricity. Efficiency of citizen service describes simplicity of user action required for obtaining the service, speed and timeliness of delivery of service, quality close to the user expectation and elegance of the user-interface. User convenience incorporates single window access to several services, easy access to the request fulfillment cycle, use and independence of time and place and 24*7 availability and single sign-on. Cost effectiveness of citizen centric service involves saving of user time and cost and consequent opportunity cost of user time, reduced direct cost compared to the conventional system, reduced indirect cost involved in repeated visits, enhanced revenue benefits to the government agency and reduced cost to the government agency in servicing the request. Reliability of services includes buying free system that returns no error messages, high degree of availability 99.99 percent through disaster recovery system and alternative channels and system that produces accurate results and response. Hence, at the end citizen centric services incorporate developing all user interfaces in local languages, designing of services from user point of view rather than of the agency, eliminating scope of ambiguity at the user end requirements and behavioural patterns. One of the most important factors of the citizen centric services is the state portal. The state e-governance portal is described as one-stop access point through which citizens can avail various transactional and informational services

incorporates all the services provided by various government departments and works as the single-point access to the citizens and businesses to avail their services. These state portals also support the government departments to enhance the accountability and transparency of their workings and reduce the delivery life cycles, so as to minimize the cost of facilitating services having compliance with government norms. Some of the salient features of services are depicted below.

Digital governance is described as the process of transforming the government work, share information, involve citizens and election services for the benefits of government. It provides citizens to access government services and information by electronic means. It is stated that there are various dimensions of digital governance. One of them is known as e-portal. E-portal is developed webpage or website which incorporates all the information related to specific field of interest from different sources in uniform manner. In this paper we have discussed an e-governance portal which provides help to the users with easy access to all government information and service. Higher accessibility and fulltime service availability i.e. 24*7 without visiting government offices is provided through e-governance. It highlights many benefits like saving of time due to provision of services through single window, simplification of procedures, better office and record management, reduction in corruption and improved attitude, behavior and work handling capacity of the citizens. It enhances the effectiveness and efficiencies to do the right work at right time. as a strategy that incorporates processes and policies developed to attain, retain, attract and serve citizens. It is an organizational concept that makes efforts for building, managing and sustaining citizens for obtaining the greater benefits of e-government system. It is stated that delivering citizen centric services requires to be seen as an ongoing and incremental process rather than a one-time exercise. At the end, it can be concluded that it promotes citizen to avail e-service from citizen portal. It facilitates easy and affordable access, moral support to citizen in terms of providing host of services at citizen portal. It must provide confidence to citizen that the e-kiosks provide credible servicing. Hence, it should add value to citizens by way of providing value added services, creating trust, confidence and values for establishing quality of life.

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Research Scholar, MUIT Lucknow