Digitalization is theme of 21st century. The modern society is rapidly moving towards implementation of Information Technology in order to bring efficiency and transparency in the execution machinery. Government is no different when it comes to implementation of technology based solutions and we can see that there is a flood of applications in government sphere to address one or the other problem. Take any field viz. women safety, agriculture, land registration, legal registration, disaster management , public accounting etc. , numerous applications are launched every day at local level and many of them die a slow death as their growth is stymied in government due to a certain set of reasons.
Firstly, most of the local innovation is Officer-driven. The Officer who is able to contemplate a solution implements a technology based solution and uses it till the end of his tenure and once he is transferred , the fate of local applications is also transferred in the hands of God. The next incumbent may or may not show interest in that application either due to lack of interest or due to lack of ownership. The lack of business continuity procedure continues to plague governments and as a result many good things are never able to blossom to their fullest potential. Apart from losing an innovative product, a government also loses many resources used in developing such an application and leads to demoralization of grass root workers.
Secondly, the diversity of India is also reflected in the rules and regulations being implemented from region to region. This is primarily because states are free to form their rules on certain subjects. Even in central government, certain flexibility is available at local level while implementing a particular system. The flexibility invariably results in variation across the regions and that gets translated in the business logic being implemented in the applications across the country. Thus, lack of separation between the fixed and variable component of business logic is a major reason why many of such applications get discarded when they are tested on the parameter of scalability.
Thirdly and most importantly, is the lack of portability in local applications from local level to central level. Government has not adopted any technology standards so that local innovation can be easily scaled up to other regions of the country without incurring heavy expenditure. Technology systems have essentially three parts: Front end technology, middleware and Back end technology. These include web technologies to be used at the client side, server side technologies to implement business logic and a database system to store the data. There are numerous technologies which are available and local application is free to choose any. However, major implication of freedom is that most of such applications are not scalable as they don’t match with technology being used by nodal authority nominated for technology implementation.
Local innovations are the most original innovations which are very close to ground. They try to match the functional requirement to the closest level. Good Governance identifies itself with people’s voice and people’s voice resides in local innovations and hence, it is important that local innovations should be protected , nurtured and scaled up. There is an urgent need to develop technology framework for implementation of local innovations. Such frameworks should essentially define technologies, separate fixed and variable business logic and create central repository to ultimately absorb the local innovation at central level. Such a step will go a long way in dissociating them from the people who create them and in bringing a mature evolution of technology in government.