India’s first e-budget

The 2008 Union Budget is perhaps the first budget which gives a huge impetus for the use of technology in key government operations

By Subimal Bhattacharjee

The General Budget and the Railway Budget presented in February this year have been dubbed populist particularly in the context of expectations that parliamentary elections will be held earlier than May 2009. However, despite the populist measures, information technology and related areas got a special mention and allocation. While the Finance Minister has been known to be a votary for technology and has already ensured steady implementation of provisions in his previous budgets, the Railway Minister’s special attention for IT investments is a real boon. Mr Lalu Prasad Yadav has realised the importance of better management of railway resources and modernization and the role of IT in that process.

The Finance Minister smartly increased the allocation for the consolidation of the IT infrastructure in the states so that the focus on the national e-governance plan could be sustained. Here Rs 450 crores have been allocated for the State wide area network and Rs 275 crores for State Data Centres besides the provision of Rs 75 crores for the one lakh IT enabled common service centers. These allocations are very essential for the improvement of citizen delivery services and also taking governance closer to the people. While the SWANs will set up better connectivity for remote areas, SDCs will ensure quality availability of key resources for more online applications. The Finance Minister should have also indicated additional support for the already announced mission mode projects so that they could be completed in time. There is a need to give a push to the states to increase the pace of e-governance projects. Mr Chidambaram has also allocated a sum of Rs 100 crores for setting up the broadband based National Knowledge Network. This would a logical expansion of the existing ERNET which connects most of the educational networks across the country and needs better support to be able to provide easily available quality bandwidth.
E-governance efforts needed a boost to the momentum set up in last year’s budget and this also got reflected in the Railway budget where an investment of Rs 2.5 lakh crores has been promised for the next five years to revamp the IT infrastructure of the railway networks. Also the introduction of software based linking of trains and their movements by 2009 has been a good announcement. The issue is whether such a grand plan is being addressed in all totality. Railway network is a critical infrastructure and whether a proper policy based approach has been worked out to phase wise to handle this arrangement. Such a system has to be robust and have disaster recovery provisions back up systems in place. In such an enhanced system, the signal management will also have to be placed. There is a reference to more automated signaling systems but they all need to work in unision. A special mission need to be created for implementing such a plan and the IT Vision 2012 of Indian railways need to handle all these issues very diligently.

The other aspect of the general budget which wll have a positive impact on all sectors of IT deployment is the reduced duties and taxes on IT hardware. While he has not specifically defined ‘convergence products’, this would refer to the products like the MP3 and MP4 players, the Finance Minister has announced a reduction in their duties. In a similar approach, excise duty on wireless data cards from the earlier 16 percent, has been completely removed. Likewise parts of set top boxes and specified raw materials for use in IT and the electronic hardware industry have been fully exempt from duty. These steps are laudable and should allow better IT penetration across the country. The Finance Minister should have also given some incentives for PC purchases across the social sectors.

The Railway Minister has also provided the impetus for the usage of more technology based products. He has announced provisions for smart card based tickets and also the introduction of 6000 automated ticketing vends. This is a great step as railway ticketing has still remained lagging with the age old paper based tickets despite a huge increase in the number of passengers. Smart cards will be of advantage to a large number of seasonal travellers and the pilot project in Mumbai in this area has been successful. Also provisions for more electronic displays in stations and also trains have been announced. All these provisions are good but they have to be made user friendly. The internet based railway ticketing system has been of great advantage to many travelers and incentives should be given to people who book tickets online rather than by standing in serpentine queues in reservation counters. Similarly more investments in freight management should have been proposed. What the railways need is an integrated freight, passenger and traffic management system and this should be a logical conclusion to the announcements made. This will not only help better management of resources but also help in giving a thrust to e-governance efforts in
the country.

However, both the budgets have outlined some positive steps at a time when the government would be looking backwards to highlight their past years’ performance. Now there is need for a focused time based implementation of these announcements. Experiences from the recent past of the implementation of a few of the unique e-governance projects across the country have been very encouraging. This has not only created government machinery that understands the usefulness of IT in optimizing resources but also give a healthy feeling of taking the country to the future. The domestic IT industry in India is a big opportunity for marching ahead towards modernization. It also gives the globally successful Indian companies to focus on the country and implement many of those proven solutions. Many of the critical applications in critical networks for the most demanding companies and governments are being handled by the Indian companies and these experiences will help. Likewise, focus on the modernization of the defence forces in the country has also to be undertaken. While capital outlays for defence budgets have been increasing over the years, the specific provisions to make them more technology oriented have to be outlined.

While the left opposition to the Indo-US nuclear deal still raises the spectre of early polls, there are sufficient indicators for this budget to be passed in the second part of the Budget session. However the hope always remains that our IT march should proceed ahead irrespective of what the political future of the country is.