Panel questions need for online services Bill

New Delhi: A Parliamentary committee on information technology (IT) has questioned the need for the Electronic Delivery of Services (EDS) Bill, 2011, saying that the country’s IT infrastructure would be unable to support the legislation.

The Bill requires central and state government departments to offer most citizen services online within a period of five years. This includes the submission of forms and applications, delivery of licences or permits, and the receipt or payment of money.

The aim of the law is to reduce discretion on the part of government employees, to make governance rule-based and to bring in more transparency.

It said that the low literacy and the so-called digital divide would make it difficult for the end users to avail of the services. The fact that there is no clarity on whether “manual delivery of services” will be discontinued, has also been pointed out by the committee.

According to experts, the legislation could significantly boost the country’s IT penetration, which is very low compared with global standards.

Neel Ratan, executive director of audit and consulting firm PwC, said that India is ranked below 100, according to a United Nations e-governance report and this legislation would help improve that. “People not being able to use IT can’t be the reason for not having this Bill, as in a way, that’s the very problem that this Bill will eventually address. One has to find innovative ways of providing services, especially through the mobile.”

The committee, which is chaired by Rao Inderjit Singh, also pointed out that the time frame of five years may be too short for the states to implement the provisions of the Bill and it overlaps with the Grievance Redress Bill, 2011 that guarantees the right of citizens to time-bound delivery of government services.

Mint reported on 10 July that the EDS Bill may run into rough weather because of this overlap. In fact, a parliamentary committee studying the Grievance Redress Bill also pointed out that the EDS Bill should be “harmoniously integrated” with legislation.

The report has also pointed out that a separate EDS Bill may not be required at all as several states such as Jharkhand have enacted their own EDS legislation and some others, including Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh, have prescribed rules regarding electronic delivery of public services. Ratan said only a few states have come out with their own EDS-like regulations. “We need consistency in such rights across the country,” he said.

An official of the department of electronics and information technology, which drafted the legislation, said “a parallel of what’s the potential of the Bill can be drawn with the Right to Information Act. Even though most of the department and ministries are digitizing to some extent or the other, there is scope for a lot more to be done. If the RTI Act had made it binding for government departments to share information, this would have pushed them to digitize their services.”

The official who did not want to be identified also said that even the time frame which was given to the departments was not very restrictive and could have been easily adhered to.

“The department may rework the legislation after taking into consideration the recommendations of the Parliamentary committee report.”

surabhi.a@livemint.com