Italy and India

Last month, while surfing the web on my smartphone at the Department of Transport Management,  news about Italy’s innovative attempt at charming the growing number of technology-savvy citizens captivated my attention. The article said that newly-elected Prime Minister Matteo Renzi had symbolically held up his mobile device in the air and said that he wants to see the whole of Italian public administration simplified on an app. “This is the future of our administration,” he said. “How much pension do I get—all will be here.”

The story did not reveal much, but I was able to quickly draw parallels with a similar initiative closer to home—the Indian state of Karnataka’s ‘Mobile-One’ e-government project under the catchy tag line “Governance at your fingertips.” The Karnataka government’s app integrates nearly 600 government-to-citizen services on mobile phones, allowing citizens to pay utility bills, property tax, traffic tickets, obtain driving licences, and PAN-card services as well as book public transportation tickets. Therefore, I presumed the Italian citizenry would be prescribed something along the Karnatakan line, but with an European flair.

Prime-minister Renzi’s assertion led me to wonder of a time when Nepalis will be able to interface with the government through an app—a time when the crowds assembled in front of government department would be smaller, if not completely absent. For a moment, I overlooked our government’s backwardness when it comes to adopting bleeding-edge information technology for effective service delivery.

Well begun, half done

On the bright side, a series of commendable efforts from the Ministry of General Administration (MOGA) and the Ministry of Agriculture Development (MOAD) in the recent past shows that things are changing for thebetter. It seems there is political will and bureaucratic commitment within the two ministries to tailor government services to the citizen’s convenience. Last December, MOGA’s minister, Lal Babu Pandit, directed a few government agencies that attract a high number of service seekers to start a 12-hour day in two shifts. Even if this was not in terms of e-service delivery, it was a revolutionary act nonetheless on the minister’s part. In much the same spirit, Minister Pandit also recently announced the government’s plan to set up a think-tank to furnish suggestions to catalyse positive changes within existing administrative services.

Similarly, MOAD has also taken a praiseworthy initiative to develop apps to allow field verification of sub-projects, monitor details of subsidised sub-projects via GPS in cell phones, and access the list of farmers who have received subsidies. Several World Bank-supported initiatives are in the pipeline as well. However, for now, the apps are limited only to information access.

On the other hand, had successive administrations paid attention in the last decade to what other countries were doing to put fundamentals of e-governance in place, and acted in a timely manner, I am confident Minister Pandit and his able administrators would have pushed the bureaucratic machinery within their influence to simplify public administration on an app, just like in Karnataka. Unfortunately, they were not able to do so, at least this time around. Key components necessary for e-services, like electronic identification (e-ID) management systems, are non-existent in Nepal.

Digital IDs

Over the last decade, governments around the world have implemented e-ID systems as a technology platform to administer service delivery and enable trusted remote interactions between government and citizens. When we Nepalis visit government agencies to apply for services, we are required to show credentials that prove our identity, in our case, citizenship cards. While  traditional forms of identification are adequate in face-to-face transactions, they are not appropriate for online transactions. Therefore, to tackle this challenge, governments in technologically-advanced countries have created national electronic identification systems—an aggregate of technologies and policies that enable citizens to electronically prove their identity to an information system.

Once the e-ID system is in place, governments can easily authenticate the service seeker’s e-ID and proceed with services delivery. As a result, citizens are able to complete and sign government forms electronically from anywhere, eliminating time consuming trips to government offices. Estonia and Malaysia were the pioneers in the field, launching their e-ID programmes in 1999. An Italian national ID card project, Carta d’Identità Elettronica, was launched in 2001 to replace the existing paper-based identity cards with biometric smart cards.

In Nepal, an ‘e-Government Master Plan Consulting Report’, prepared by the government in collaboration with the South Korean government, had made various recommendations encompassing technical, organisational, human development, and legal matters in 2006. The highest priority was assigned to the e-ID project. Ironically, while requisites like Government Integrated Data Centre and Government Enterprise Architecture are supposedly in place, the e-ID has somehow failed to materialise, even after almost a decade.

Up to a point, it seemed the Ministry of Home Affairs was serious about the e-ID project, because the National ID Management Centre (NIDMC) was established in 2011 with objectives to collect personal biometric data, provide a unique ID number, and distribute national ID cards to citizens. Unsurprisingly, the project ceased to advance and the NID Bill and NID Regulation seem to have gathered dust.

In contrast, e-ID is in full swing in India with the Aadhar programme, which has already generated e-IDs for 35 percent of the population in Uttar Pradesh and 25 percent of the population in Bihar. These praiseworthy accomplishments can be credited to the 20,000 enrolment stations that are labouring across the country, enrolling more than 800,000 individuals.

Given our socioeconomic underdevelopment and the failure of mainstream politics, it seems that broader transformation of the Internet economy is the only thing that can propel this country towards prosperity. Without an e-ID system in place, the Italian government would not have been able to reduce its bloated bureaucracy and extend current e-services to an app. I am not sure why our political leaders are not able to emulate what other countries have achieved seemingly easily. Age could be the main reason. Prime Minster Renzi was 39 years old when he took office. Our political leaders are quite not so young.

Shah was part of a study conducted on National Identification Cards for service delivery in Nepal