The e-governance mess

Govt's digital push founders on complex, buggy portals

The Union finance ministry has taken the somewhat unusual step of publicly rebuking the technology major Infosys for failures in the income-tax portal that the latter has developed. Infosys Chief Executive Officer Salil Parekh was summoned to meet Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Monday. The ministry tweeted that the portal had not been accessible since August 21. The income tax e-filing website was launched on June 7, but has had consistent problems since then — causing some filers to face the possibility of having to pay late fees. The finance ministry’s ire is probably enhanced by the fact that Infosys was also responsible for the goods and services tax portal, which had similar teething trouble. Even further back, in 2013, when Infosys took over the Ministry of Corporate Affairs’ MCA21 portal, there were severe problems with the transition.
 

The vendor certainly needs to be held accountable for problems in the portal but the question that has not been answered as yet is why the ministry allowed a portal of this nature to go live without proper checks. At a broader level, there are deeper questions about India’s e-governance push that have been exposed by this particular problem. The government has banked on digitisation of processes in order to make things easier for citizens and recipients of state services. This is a reasonable direction for policy as long as digitisation of processes is not seen as a replacement for streamlining those processes as well. But the idea behind e-governance is that it would make the functions of the government easier to navigate and be more inclusive as well. In practice, this has not always been the case, however. For smaller businesses, for example, navigating the GST portal became something of a headache. Good practice, not just in taxation but in all such state-citizen interfaces, is to ensure that processes, whether online or not, are sufficiently simple so that they can be understood and managed by the widest range of Indians. Complex portals that require excessive efforts to navigate undermine the promise of e-governance. They also wind up being exclusive rather than inclusive. The Co-Win vaccination portal, for example, was taken advantage of early on almost entirely by the middle class, who benefited from disproportionate access to broadband, familiarity with English, and so on.

These flaws cannot be blamed on the vendor alone. They are a product of the design requirements of the client — the government. It is also likely that teething troubles in various portals are a product of constant bureaucratic changes and additions to requirements. Nor is it clear how the government can duck ultimate responsibility for running user acceptance tests and capacity tests before switching wholesale to new websites. That is hardly good practice. Just sub-contracting the construction of a website to a company is not sufficient to prepare the Indian state for the age of e-governance. There needs to be capacity within the government as well — people who can understand the design requirements, who can properly monitor the progress of the project, and are capable of understanding when a site has been tested sufficiently to go live. E-governance is not a shortcut that a country can take to avoid modernising its state and its administration. It must be seen as part and parcel of a broader set of measures. There is no alternative to greater care and capacity within the state itself.