Public Service Delivery - Breaking the Tyranny of Ink Signatures

Public Service Delivery - Breaking the Tyranny of Ink Signatures

Public Service Delivery has always been plagued by many ills and the transaction level hardships which citizens face in accessing basic services cause a greater damage to the reputation of Government and Governance in general, more than anything else.

The core reason for many of these problems arises from the air of mystification about procedures concerning service delivery. Even today 9 of 10 people who have a valid driving license are not aware of the actual procedure of getting a license. In view of lack of information, perceptions of hassles involved in dealing with the licensing authority and general keenness to save time by adopting shortcuts, most of us prefer to take the middleman route by paying a premium of a few hundred rupees and getting a hassle free driving license. This becomes the norm rather than an exception and the result is for all of us to see in the scant respect that we have of traffic rules and the chaos that we see on our roads. The story is similar, for a ration card or a passport, and most of these service centers are characterized by long queues at delivery points which also require multiple visits. In most cases, outcome is always in suspense. No wonder, gatekeepers mushroom at every turn leading to poor quality of Service and thus Service becomes a Mercy rather than a Right.

The above situation magnifies manifold when one looks at the number of interactions a citizen has with the Government. Typically a farmer has almost 40 interactions with 8 Government Departments every year. An urban citizen has around 50 interactions with 10 departments; a medium industry will have 120 interactions with 20 departments. Similarly for large industry, students, senior citizens etc. The question that comes is that can we do anything to streamline these interactions and improve the experience that citizens have while dealing with the Government.

Actually there have been projects and interventions which have not only improved citizen service delivery but has also brought in efficiency, reliability and accountability in delivery of services. Some of these interventions include Railways, Banking, Bhoomi Land Records, MCA 21 etc. The underlying feature of all these initiatives has been use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in improving public service delivery. ICT helps to reach the unreached and reducing the cost of accessing services. It also directly results in bringing in transparency and thereby reducing corruption.

These e Governance initiatives which have leveraged ICT tools to improve service delivery have made significant advances in the last few years. Today almost all public offices up to the block level are connected on a dedicated Optical Fibre based State Wide Area Network (SWAN). With the linkages of SWAN with the Gigabit National Knowledge Network (NKN) and the proposed Bharat Broadband Network (BBN) which will connect all Panchayats with Optical Fibre, the necessary infrastructure with regard to connecting public offices is already there. The critical challenge here is ensuring uptime of the network and optimal utilization of the network for delivery of services. Further under State Data Center (SDC) project, data centers are being set up in all States. Already almost 16 States have the infrastructure in place and together with the capacity available nationally and use of technologies like Virtualization and Cloud Computing, storage is no more a challenge in electronic service delivery.

The most important component under National e Governance Plan (NeGP) has been the Common Services Centers (CSC) project. So far around 90,000 CSCs have been set up across the country. However, there are issues with regard to many of these centers primarily on account of challenges in getting connectivity, lack of power supply and inadequate number of G2C services, which directly impact the sustainability and viability of these centers. Inspite of the challenges that exist, more than 40,000 centers are reporting around 150 transactions per month and the total transaction volumes run into hundreds of crores. This infrastructure of CSCs and kiosks should be seen in light of the fact that the entire network has been primarily set up on a Public Private Partnership model and the actual expenditure by Government on these centers in the form of revenue viability gap funding has been less than 100 Crores. Worldwide, the CSC network is regarded as one of the biggest telecenter networks as the next biggest network is of less than ten thousand centers. The CSCs across the country have stood the test of time and are providing direct employment to around 100,000 youth. They have taken technology, innovation and entrepreneurship to the doorsteps of people living in the remotest rural areas of the country and there is a strong need for a policy push to support the entrepreneurs and Service Center Agencies to ensure their sustainability and viability. This network is a must for the overall e Governance strategy as they are the prime centers which will provide assisted access to people who do not have access to a computing device, connectivity or skills to access online services on their own.

The only way one can address the Governance challenges for better service delivery is to optimally leverage the e Infrastructure of SWANs, SDCs and CSCs. There is a push needed for enabling services on this network. The Mission Mode Projects (MMP), in particular, the e District MMP, seeks to achieve this. The idea has been to enable anywhere anytime delivery of online services without having to visit public offices. The strategy allowed people to apply for services from CSCs and get the services at CSCs through a web enabled application. The backend is automated to enable electronic data flow between public offices and issuance of digitally signed certificates and documents. This transformed Governance as there was no need for visiting a public office. What it also required was enabling Government Orders and Notifications which gave legal validity to digitally signed documents which anyway is applicable as per the provisions of the IT Act. Uniquely numbered and bar coded certificates – for birth, death, caste, income, records of rights etc enabled online verification of these documents also. This brought in a unique concept – as the age old conventional – ink signed and rubber stamped – certificates were no more the proof of an ultimate sarkaari document. Digitally signed and digitally verifiable documents proved to be much more simple, secure and verifiable. Shri J Satyanarayana, Secretary, DeITY, calls it Breaking the Tyranny of Ink Signatures!!

Infact the State of Andhra Pradesh, which has been a pioneer in IT and e Governance, has gone a step further in this direction. The Mee Seva project launched in November 2011 in Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh is creating waves with regard to the paradigm shift it has brought about in public service delivery. What Mee Seva does is to focus on across the counter Service Delivery rather than applying for a Service and getting a Service later, even at a Common Services Center. Under the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008, the State has framed Andhra Pradesh Information Technology (Electronic Service Delivery Rules) 2011, which enables authorized signatories to digitally sign the Certificates and Documents which are issued on secured stationary. Services are classified into two categories. Category A services are those that can be delivered across the counter by the Mee Seva operator, who is like the Village Level Entrepreneur of a CSC. Category B services are those which require back end operations from concerned office of the issuing authority. The Category B services are further classified into two categories based on the nature and back-end process involved for delivering the service. Category B1 services are those that can be moved to Category A from the second and subsequent request onwards. Category B2 services are those which are Transactional/Statutory in nature where Notices/Hearings/Field Inspections are required.

For a Service to be classified under Category A, the essential prerequisite is existence of an accurate and dynamic digital database which would enable the kiosk operator to deliver the service by accessing the information from a Secure State Electronic Certificate Repository (SECR) without asking for any supporting documents. Category B services are those for which no digital database is available. For these services, paper records may be available and there will be a need to scan, archive and digitally sign the record and place it in the SECR to move to the Category A. In some cases a field inspection or detailed enquiry may be required to confirm and corroborate the available information. In these services the applicant is required to submit supporting documents as per a predefined checklist. The Mee Seva architecture leverages all the components of NeGP – namely the SWAN, SDC, CSCs and the State Service Delivery Gateway (SSDG). Its functionality includes having a single source of digital signature repository, payment mechanism and SECR. The strategy is to migrate all services – legacy, SSDG and e District on to the Mee Seva Platform. It provides a common interface for all Services. Within 5 months of its launch in Chittoor district, already 17 Services are available on the Platform and almost 180,000 transactions have taken place. Of the 17 Services, 5 are of Category A and 7 are of Category B. Almost one third of the transactions are of Category A. Together with B1 services, they account for almost 90% of transactions. Thus it is possible to ultimately ensure bulk of transaction in an across the counter mode. State has plans to add almost 50 more services to the Mee Seva platform and the initiative is almost ready to be launched in other districts of Andhra Pradesh. With porting of almost 50 SSDG services and the e District services, it is anticipated that almost 200 services will be available to citizens on the Mee Seva Platform. It’s an amazing achievement of Sanjay Jaju, IT Secy, AP and his team.

Once the services on such a platform are stabilized, it is possible to ultimately eliminate the requirement of any kinds of certificates to be submitted by citizens to various public authorities. After authenticating a citizen’s identity with something like a UID, it should be possible for Government databases to talk to each other and fetch information as required rather than making a courier of every citizen and making him deliver information between various public offices.

The above strategy is being incorporated in the National Rollout of e District Mission Mode Project and is expected that we will ultimately be able to improve public service delivery by Breaking the Tyranny of Ink Signatures.

Abhishek Singh

PS: Views expressed are personal