Managing rural citizen interfaces in e-governance systems: a study in Indian context

In business parlance, management of "user interfaces" is one of the most challenging tasks for the organizations using information and communication technologies (ICT). Despite prolific advances in ICT, maturity in development of innovative ICT enabled tools for business processes, challenges of managing user expectations are still many. Dimensions of such challenges are quite diverse in the e-governance parlance as well. In most of the nations today, government systems are gradually and effectively embracing ICT in various forms to provide simple, moral, accountable, responsive and transparent (SMART) governance for their citizens. These governments are also facing challenges similar to the enterprises because of the same unique reason i.e. "user interface". Indian government systems are quite aggressively incorporating ICT enabled government processes to provide SMART governance in the country. National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) is formulated to provide the required support. NeGP recognizes "citizen interface" as an important link in the delivery system. Drawing experiences of "user interface" and its effect in successful implementations for enterprise wide ICT enabled processes and services; it is quite relevant that "citizens" are the most critical "users" in the e-governance systems. In Indian context, this carries enormous challenge to cater to the varied needs of rural citizens who are influenced by diverse socio-economic conditions and digital divides. Thus there is a need to study this important "citizen interface" issue. In this paper, it is argued that in addition to SMART governance systems, a demand driven "citizen interface" would enhance the success of e-governance services in India. Since a large section of India resides in rural areas, successful "citizen interface" is mostly contingent upon provisioning of demand driven services in these areas. Rural citizens in India reside in villages and their aggregated needs do not reflect adequately at the state and/or national level. However, various common services including e-governance services are rendered at the village level based on the policies framed at state/national level. Therefore, it is important that gross national estimates of demand on e-governance systems should also take cognizance of individual household needs. In this paper, a framework is presented to understand the citizen interface issues, identify the factors responsible for demand assessment and influencing access to e-governance services. This framework also aims to discuss contributors to a successful e-governance set up in the village on a sustainable basis. Two cases are discussed to examine the underpinnings of the framework.