Changing paradigm in government business

There is a plethora of
government opportunity that can be explored and banked upon by the
Indian SPs. This is what Ashis Sanyal, former senior director,
department of information technology, government of India, believes.
“For sustainable inclusive growth, we see ICT as an effective
enabler for inclusive growth, deployment of ICT in all walks of
government business, massive application of electronic governance,
and there is a need to bring in citizen-centricity in government
activities,” said Sanyal.

One area where the Indian
SPs can delve deep into the government sector is National
e-Governance Plan (NeGP). NeGP has been formulated with inclusive
vision, wherein the government has identified citizen-centric
services. NeGP's vision is to make all government services accessible
to the common man in his locality through common services. It ensures
efficiency and transparency and features centralized initiative but
de-centralized implementation.

According to Sanyal, NeGP
involves public-private partnerships as the preferred
financial/operational model; centralized programme management;
state-wise project level management; and PMU created in almost all
projects wherein external consultancy is used. Furthermore,
government is moving from product procurement to service, as it
believes that asset creation is not the solution. Today, most of the
NeGP projects are deploying the PPP model, as government is seeing
value in PPP model for ICT infrastructure development projects.

As far as NeGP is
concerned, Sanyal sees forward and backward linkage between SPs and
government agencies. There is potential business opportunity under
NeGP for SPs, as it has massive core infrastructure services like
SWANs, SDCs, and CSCs amongst others. Also, ICT Capex is amortised as
Opex over the project period. Moreover, SPs should not forget the
mobile environment, as it provides an extremely conducive eco-system
for them to grow exponentially. With rural mobile penetration and
infrastructure going up, it can be certainly said that SPs have a
long way to go and prove their mettle.