Computing and bureaucracy

Building on my previous post, Computing, Encoding and Decoding, here is a next food for thought. How would you convert a lethargic bureaucratic Indian Government to a action oriented, speedy governance.

E-governance as most of you must have heard. If we analyze the most fundamental question of why Indian bureaucracy is so much in-efficient and corrupt we can understand the problem lies in layers of hierarchy of controls created for permitting the licenses etc. For example, if you want a birth certificate, the only person who can sign the document and make it authorize is the Regional Commissioner in respective Corporations of Indian cities. Why burden him by making him sign the document when that time could be used for some better purpose?

The second most fundamental problem is transfer of documents in hard copy format. For example, a Birth certificate needs to be printed, the records for it are needed to be searched in old archives, the birth certificate is needed to be transferred from one place to another for authentication and validation etc. All this takes time, because it involves variable human factors such as travelling time, record searching time, data entry time, human negligence time etc etc.

Now imagine, if the physical files are converted to virtual files represented on Computers. Imagine the records are stored in Computer Databases, and now imagine, the travelling time on roads is represented by network transfer time in Computers. Once this is done, there will arrive huge respite because in all this procedure, human involvement is minimal. Most of the work is done by Machines aka Computers. And All these steps could be done at the cost of a few clicks by the governing officers. This would save a huge amount of time and would improve productivity.

E-governance is thus an important aspect for making the bureaucracy efficient and fast paced. We stay in a modern Computerized world and I hope India builds a solid e-governance infrastructure soon.