Digitizing rural india: Challenges and prospects

In developing country such as India, e-governance has become the key to good-governance and development process. With the advent of information and development and to be at par with developed countries, the Government of India had made out a plan and pledged to use it extensively in its operation to make more efficient and effective and also to bring transparency and accountability in overall governance process. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) enabled system of governance promotes virtues and vigour of good governance and deepens democratic values in society that to at lower level. It creates an environment in which people feel empowered, establishes a system that ensures people to live with dignity and pride. States such as Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Haryana and Goa have set up panchayats portals to provide information regarding development schemes such as MNREGA and several other schemes sponsored by central and state governments. Application of ICT in panchayats caters towards managing resources within the organization. Now in the conventional governance, people have been getting ‘supply-oriented’ benefits of the governance, whereas in the e-panchayat they can aspire for ‘“demand-oriented’” benefits. E-panchayat can manage its organisation for meeting the people's demand. Democratic governance requires wider people's participation which is possible only if people are well versed with information. The entire gamut of governance has to be an ‘information-centric’ process. By ICT at panchayats level, local government transforms itself into transparent, less corrupt and treaty decentralised in decision-making process. While the developed countries have been able to use technology to the maximum and benefited greatly from the wide use of information technology, many developing countries are still fighting hard to make sense of how IT fits into their problems. The trend is very true in the case of e-governance and e-government also. The present study deals with the problems and challenges of e-governance, reasons of e-government project failures, current status of e-governance related initiatives in India and future prospects of e-governance and several challenges the country is facing.