IT as utility

Let public-private partnership thrive

A technology advisory group headed by Nandan Nilekani has recommended that national information utilities be set up to handle several large e-governance projects ranging from goods and services tax to the new pension scheme. The country is lucky to have come as far as it has through the successful functioning of the large IT backbones of key operations like the National Stock Exchange and the National Securities Depository. If the government adopts the mindset that drives the recommendations, then it will build on that and write a new chapter in the use of information and communications technology (ICT) for development. The positive impact will come in two ways. One, it will give a tremendous boost to the domestic IT sector which is a fraction in size of its Chinese counterpart. As for the wider impact, the report itself says that the five projects that it has looked at “have enormous transformative power and can change India’s growth trajectory”.

The most important paradigm that the report says should be kept in mind is that business change should drive the design and implementation of these projects. That is, the executives and IT experts running them should not begin to live in a world of their own, considering that the very large projects will have an extensive combined footprint. No matter what wizardry IT can be made to deliver, it is after all an enabler and a powerful tool to serve the perceived business needs of the overall economic system. In designating these projects national information utilities, the report underlines the other reality. They themselves will not be pure business ventures operating in a competitive marketplace but be more in the nature of private companies serving a public purpose. They will have to work in partnership with the government, in fact intermediate between the government, which is the client, and the private IT vendors who will build the projects. Once these projects have been built and have stabilised, the government should restrict itself to laying down policy and letting the utilities leaders run them smoothly. The cornerstone on which this government-utility partnership will rest will have to be an agreement between the two which will specify what is to be done, the obligations of the two, the financial arrangement, service level agreement (the deliverables that the utility must guarantee) and a business continuity plan.

The big danger that the report seeks to eliminate by recommending a common structure and platform for all the projects is a multiplicity of systems and the nightmare of getting them to talk to each other. They must all belong to the same family and run on a single application which will reap enormous economies of scale and thus both lower costs and deliver major efficiencies. Within this, there will have to be customisation at every deployment. Since the Centre, states and major public sector concerns have already given themselves different systems, the interfaces between them will have to be worked out and dovetailed with the new overarching platform. If all this comes about and there is no reason why it should not, then the threat of a digital divide will be transformed into a digital bridge.