Understanding SOA Perspective of e-Governance in Indian Context: Case Based Study

Role of information and communication technologies (ICT) in managing business processes has been phenomenal. Today, ICT is aggressively used for development process and results are showing positively in this direction. E-governance projects are no exception. In today’s context, e-governance projects have become a part of national policies across the world. Globally, e-governance projects have remained restricted to delivering government interfaces digitally with the focus to optimize transaction latency, improving transparency and extending on-line services. However, e-governance projects have fallen short of citizen expectations in developing countries (Mehdi, 2005). Most of the developing countries around the world have adopted e-governance systems strategically to provide better, transparent and value added services to its citizens with the help of ICT. Millennium development goals (MDG) have also included ICT as means of development (WSIS, (2004)). In India there is rapid progress in implementing e-governance strategy keeping pace with the global scenario. With the national e-governance plan (NeGP), the pace of progress in setting up information technology (IT) infrastructure has been accelerated (Ramarao et al. (2004)). NeGP has identified various projects on “Mission Mode” for scale up nationally and have allocated funds for “Common Service Centres” (CSC) for deployment of ICT enabled services including e-governance services at the door steps of citizens (Chandrashekhar, (2006); NeGP, (2005)). Besides, there are many mission mode projects like Gramin Gyan Abhiyan (GGA) as per agenda set through Mission 2007, National Rural Employment Guaranty Act (NREGA) and Ministry of Company Affairs (MCA-21) have been taken up. However, alike the experiences worldwide (Heeks, (2006)), the scale up exercise for egovernance has not been yielding results as expected in India (Janssen, (2005); Mishra, (2007)). Various reasons including inadequate local level planning with least participation of citizens and challenging situations to spread effective infrastructure contribute to this poor adoption of e-governance services. Despite improved ICT infrastructure, penetration of telephony and internet, Indian e-governance applications and services are below expected levels of delivery standards. In this paper, it is posited that e-governance projects in India need to follow SOA principles in order to make them successful in terms of sustainability, providing appropriate services to citizens. It is argued that Indian e-governance initiatives to be termed successful should