We Need E-governance

Public sector is taking more steps every year to digital transformation, although it is a huge challenge, but it will bring huge advantages.

Electronic Governance is the integration of information and communication technology (ICT) in all processes that would help to boost government ability to address the needs of citizens. It basically aims to simplify such processes as voting, filing tax returns, filling all sorts of documents. It helps to simplify the communication between the government and other countries’ governments, businesses, citizens and others. The aim of e-governance is not just to simplify the services, but to make the government more transparent, accountable and moral.

E-governance hugely influences the development of a country, we can clearly see that more developed countries have better e-governance systems. We can look at the Digital Quality of Life Research (2019) that has e-governance as one of the key factors in the DQL index. In the report it is shown that countries with higher income tend to have higher OSI (the online service index).

The only country that falls out of this trend that higher income countries have higher OSI index is India. India is considered to be a lower income country, but comparably its economy has been growing and India is a leader in emerging world. That is why it is important for India to recognise the importance of e-governance to their countries wealth, and they did so by implementing a number of effective projects. India could be takes as an example and analysed by other lower income countries in order to successfully implement e-governance.

Advantages of e-governance

Speed — it is no surprise that the internet has made everything faster, transactions, communications and any other processes online can be done much faster. The same goes with the e-governance, it is much faster to vote online.

Transparency — electronic governance helps all functions of business be more transparent. This is because all people can access whatever information they want.

Saving costs — most of government expenditures goes on office supplies for official purposes, for example printing ballots for voting or any kind of papers. If this would be moved to online it would be much cheaper in the long run.

Accountability — accountability comes from transparency, since everything will be available to the public, this makes the government more accountable for their actions.

Challenges of e-government

According to the DQL research, one of the biggest challenges in e-governance is ensuring the security of the data. This means that is crucial for countries to ensure cybersecurity of the government and prevent potential data leaks, hacker attacks and any other threats that could interfere with the process of electronic governance. A country must have professional cybersecurity experts, which is hard to have due to lack of them and competitive market.

To conclude — electronic governance is an important factor for future development of a country, especially now when everything is being digitised. It both helps the citizens and both the government. And in a time when it is hard to trust the government and it lacks accountability, e-governance can be a saver.

Source: https://surfshark.com/dql