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Abstract
E-Governance projects continue to witness sustained policy focus in low- and lower middle-income countries such as India. Not many e-Governance projects are, however, associated with improved performance leading to an enhanced public value, especially in the grassroots delivery units of government organizations engaged in provision of development services to people. Based on a case study of Information and Communication Technology use in public health and nutrition programs in the Indian province of Karnataka, this paper argues for a need to shift the design focus of e-Governance projects. While the grassroots functionaries in such organizations have a critical role in meeting performance goals, e-Governance designs have been largely oblivious to the need of improving their overall work content and environment. Our findings suggest that it is time e-Governance projects in government organizations engaged in public service delivery acknowledge and rectify this incongruity to be more effective in achieving a broad set of governance outcomes and justify huge investments being made on them in relatively resource-constrained regions of the world.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful to all the interview respondents who, despite their busy schedules, agreed to talk with me and provide rich insights into their work. I am thankful to Dr. G. V. Nagaraj who facilitated my interactions on the field and to Kavitha Narayanan for assisting me with relevant statistics on NRHM and ICDS. I am especially grateful to the associate editor, Dr. Shirin Madon and the two anonymous reviewers who went through earlier drafts of this article and provided useful inputs for improvement.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Amit's research interests lie in the areas of Information Systems and Public Policy, particularly where they intersect with Development Sectors such as Public Health & Nutrition, Education & Skill Development and Livelihoods. He has an extensive experience of working on advisory assignments related to formulating public policy and e-Governance designs. Amit is presently a faculty member associated with the Centre for IT and Public Policy at IIIT Bangalore.
Notes
1. India's under-5 mortality rate was 66 per 1000 live births in 2009 and MMR was 230 per 100,000 live births in 2008 (Chatterjee & Paily, Citation2011) when compared to a global average of 57 for under-5 mortality rate in 2011 and 210 for MMR in 2010 (as per the MDG Report 2013 of the United Nations). As per UNICEF (http://www.unicef.org/india/children_2356.htm), 1 in 3 of the world's malnourished children lives in India.
2. We use the terms “ICT” and “IT” interchangeably in this paper to refer to the broad set of computing and communications technologies generally used in e-Governance projects. This includes a computer and associated peripheral devices, mobile phone, connectivity to the internet or intranet, etc.
3. In this article, when we refer to the term State with a capital “S,” we mean the provinces of India, as they are referred to locally.
4. These are the group of people who often get referred to as “the common man” in popular use by both the governments and the media in India.
5. Village accountants are responsible for land revenue administration at the village level in India.
6. Lipsky (Citation1980, p. xi, as quoted in Hupe & Hill, Citation2007, p. 280) has invoked this argument while discussing “street-level bureaucracies,” a category very similar to what we refer to as the grassroots service providers/functionaries in this article.
7. Based on their field study on the effects of decentralization in local governance in Karnataka, Crook and Manor (Citation1994), as cited in Bardhan (Citation2003), point out that “ … when institutions of local democracy are firmly in place … [it] may reduce the overall amount of money and resources siphoned off through corruption: even though there are more hands in the till, it is difficult for people to steal very much” (pp. 308–309).
8. ASHSs; please see the next section for more details about ASHAs.
9. It has been the author's experience that respondents in India who come from lower levels of bureaucracy such as ANMs and AWWs are generally not comfortable when their interviews are recorded. This is mainly because they are often not only fully aware of the background of the researchers (or the organizations they represent) but also find it difficult to relate to the motive behind such studies. When insisted, their responses are muted and guarded, and seldom deviate from the official position.
10. Information on NRHM in the first three paragraphs of this section is mainly sourced from the website of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, GoI (http://mohfw.nic.in/) and the NRHM (http://nrhm.gov.in/), unless otherwise specified.
11. Thayi means mother in the local Kannada language.
12. Information on ICDS in the first three paragraphs of this section is mainly sourced from the website of the Ministry of Women and Child Development, GoI (http://wcd.nic.in/) unless otherwise specified.
13. These officials are often more educated than the ANMs or AWWs and enjoy better working conditions and access to departmental resources.
14. An earlier study by Madon, Krishna, and Michael (Citation2010) also reported this when it said that: “The current system of reporting places an excessive administrative burden on ANMs. After her field visit, every day between 3–5PM the ANM manually completes 13 different registers at her subcentre recording details of various different vertical programmes” (p. 255). There seems to be little change since then.
15. This is also consistent with the findings of various other studies over the last few years (Dongre, Deshmukh, & Garg, Citation2008; Gragnolati, Bredenkamp, Das Gupta, Lee, & Shekar, Citation2006).
