How India Can Jump-Start e-Governance and Digital India Start-up Innovation in One Easy Step
Governments worldwide are on a drive to digitalize and provide services to their citizens in the most convenient manners possible. India, for instance, has committed itself to the Digital India and e-Governance initiatives. The central government and various states have adopted varying models, some working far better than others. Many of these projects cost thousands of crore rupees (billions in dollars) and can take years to properly function.
If these projects can get application programmable interfaces up and running from day one they could provide a huge boost to public services while funneling many innovative services, in addition to analytics, to the government quickly and for free. While the Indian government has made a public commitment to making these interfaces available through its Policy on Open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), most ministries and state governments have chosen to not implement them.
Put simply, an API allows one app to connect directly to another app without human intervention. For instance, if tax authorities released an API for tax filings, start-ups could begin creating easy-filing apps much more user friendly while providing significantly more functionality over what the government is able to provide in its basic forms. The same could be done for a variety of government services, ranging from obtaining copies of birth and death certificates to renewing or getting a driver’s license.
Opening the API of most e-Governance services to the start-up ecosystem offers another benefit: allowing entrepreneurs the ability to create front ends to service various parts of the population across many devices and languages. It not only would make these services available to a larger number of users, they could be packaged in a manner that would make them more convenient and more accessible.
For businesses, companies would be able to integrate government dealings directly into enterprise applications, including the calculation and filing of taxes, paying and processing of custom duties, and generating and filing cross-border transaction forms automatically. This would automate and dramatically reduce the number of paper forms that businesses must fill out. It would also make it far easier to perform business-to-business transactions, with the government being updated and involved while the transaction occurs. Thus, it would also provide government with a large amount of near live data on how the economy and various sectors are performing rather than having to wait until the end of the month or quarter, or even a year, for all the filings to come through at once.
For those not able to access the Internet due to the digital divide, micro and small businesses could then emerge to set up e-kiosks and small shops to provide help for interacting with these services. This would lower the huge strain on government systems, which deal with millions of public requests and issues, while making the experience much more pleasant for the public. This would create hundreds of thousands of new jobs and create opportunities for self-employment with minimal training required.
Although the Dubai government does not have extensive open APIs, it has allowed small shops, called “typing centers.” These licensed locations are a one-stop shop for any citizen, resident, or visitor to access government services via forms. Staffed by one or two people, these centers offer basic form-filling services, as well as photocopying and picture services. Anyone can find a typing center with employees who speak their language, and due to competition, and to some extent standardization, the fees charged by these centers are very low.
The UK government has launched an ambitious API program under its revenue and customs department. Currently, apps can retrieve everything from individual income to information on national insurance services. Although only in beta mode, it is already creating waves in changing the way UK citizens will be able to engage with their government. The French government has launched a portal, api.gouv.fr, to provide APIs for intergovernmental applications to talk with one another, as well as for private companies to build apps around government services. The United States, under its data.gov portal, already makes a large amount of government data available via APIs, and has taken out best practices guidelines that will eventually lead to two-way API communications (allowing apps to submit forms directly) for application developers.
The Indian government already provides a few APIs to select institutions, such as under the UID (unique identity) system. But it has not done so across the board in many of the most impactful sectors. Further, most states have invested in closed-door proprietary systems that shut out public innovation, thus restricting the wide-scale impact that digitalization could offer.
There is an urgent need for an open API policy to be adopted by all Indian ministries and state governments, as already the central government and states are allocating thousands of crores in e-Governance and Digital India initiatives across the country. If, indeed, all services had an open API policy, not only would it then be easier for start-ups to help innovate delivery of e-Governance and digitalization, it would also make it easy for them to connect systems across varied states and internal departments.
The author is a serial family business entrepreneur, an educationist, and an armchair philosopher. At some point he published a national best-selling book (fiction), and more recently is known for his work in cloud computing and design think.
