The just-approved Digital India project, seeking to deliver all government services electronically in less than four years, has already thrown up object lessons whose implications go far beyond the future of the project itself. The project is vital for the future well-being of every Indian. The information technology industry will be given a boost, too. And it has the benefit of building on an already successful pilot project, in Gujarat. But the challenges are daunting. In fact, one of its key goals - achieving an import-export balance in electronics - seems unachievable in the foreseeable future.
The backbone of Digital India has to be - quite literally - the National Optical Fibre Network, or the NOFN, whose cables will carry digital signals across the country. This project, started in 2011, set out to connect 250,000 gram panchayats in 27 months at a cost of Rs 20,000 crore. The scope has subsequently been scaled down to less than half (110,000 gram panchayats), the scheduled completion target is gone, and the project is nowhere near complete. In a revealing article in this newspaper four months ago, Nripendra Misra - a former chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India - spelt out the numerous hurdles the project encountered and by implication, the lessons that needed to be absorbed. The project had been approved by the Union Cabinet, and had such high-profile names as Sam Pitroda and Nandan Nilekani on its implementing committee - but it suffered from lack of coordination. The need for both hardware and software (local language content) had not been thought through; the maintenance of what was done was not properly provided for; officials, mindful of anti-corruption laws, were unwilling to approve procurement tenders as cartels appeared to be at work; there was no revenue model that would be the mainstay of the project once it got going; and the country did not even have enough capacity to manufacture the ducts that would carry the cables.
Mr Misra is now principal secretary to the prime minister, and presumably has been available to provide guidance about the cardinal need for coordination to ensure any kind of progress. Under the current government, there is every hope that coordination will be better and execution swifter. But still is it realistic to set a timeline of under four years for a project many times the size of the NOFN - and, to begin with, five times its budget? One key issue central to any coordinated collection and storage of digital information on citizens - privacy - appears not to have been addressed. In part, the project is a collection and repackaging of existing incomplete projects under a nice-sounding label. It is great to launch a vital, grand project, but where is the homework?
