Editorial
A computer with internet alone is not computerisation
The success story of Information Technology revolution across the globe that propelled the Indian service sector to such great heights stretches for more than 2 decades since the mid nineties. The IT-ITES contribution to the GDP of rhe country was at 7.5 in 2012 and at present it stands at 9.5% of the GDP and it is expected to grow by another 10-12% in 2016-17. This growth has further propelled the domestic IT enabled Government –Citizen Services (G2C) in the country. However in this great journey, North East India including Nagaland was and is still left behind though a big chunk of the workforce in this sector comprises of people from the region.
The recent skill enhancement workshop held in Kohima for the eight north-eastern states was another eye-opener; the snail paced development of IT sector in the region. Even though Assam was supposed to be the leader in this sector their own representative during the workshop admitted that the connectivity and online services were restricted to a few towns and cities only. The issue of online connectivity is one big stumbling block of the region. The new gateway in Agartala should be able to connect the NE states and hopefully enable the region to be the next ITES hub. When it comes to initiating IT enabled services, it seems too much focus has been on the World Wide Web or the Internet for the last two decades in the region but not trying to change the existing process to run on the available backbone.
In Nagaland, over the years various domestic connectivity projects seem to have failed in real sense. The State Wide Area Network under the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) was one such plan to network all the administrative heads in the state with the state capital. Then again under NeGP the Common Service Centres project was launched in the state so that citizens can avail services whether it is Government to Citizen Services (G2C) or Business to Customer Services (B2C). Then comes the State Data Centre which is supposed to run the application servers and keep all the data of the various online services of the government. The success of these schemes can be best judged by the number of offices providing services and the number of citizens availing these services but it fails to reach the mark where it can be termed as successful. At present there aren’t many G2C services to offer in the state though there may be some G2G services for the offices.
The infrastructure may have been laid down and no doubt successful but unless the government in the state have the political will to initiate IT processes it will only go waste. There has to be serious process re-engineering of all the governmental services and procedures that we commonly refer to as computerisation, only then can these infrastructures be utilised to the optimum. This in turn will add values since the mindset of the citizens especially in the remote areas will change with the new faster and quicker services available. However, when the people at the helm of affairs are unwilling to change their mindset and will do anything to keep the existing bureaucratic labyrinth with paper files and folders, true IT revolution in the state will still remain a dream.