His basic idea is that Computerization does not help fight corruption because Satyam and Price Waterhouse and all the financial behemoths who failed use computers. Of course he mixes up the fact that these are all private company and e governance is supposed to help the government reduce corruption, but lets not pick this nitwits brains apart.

Apparently he has been a lone bastion of sanity:

I had always challenged the popular contention. The New Age management gurus, whose jobs are linked to promoting the use and application of technology, would only snigger.

And in frustration he asks:

E-governance is the buzzword and how can someone dare to question the perceived role computers can play in fighting corruption.

Allow me to answer(and snigger).

1. Organised and Accessible Data

One of the basic functions of a computer is the ability to easily and almost instantaneously file, store, and retrieve data. Government Data in particular has always been hard to get access too. Even considering the current RTI Act, many requests are unfulfilled or delayed because the data is simply not available in a timely manner.  Fear that a ridiculous circular issued or order passed by a government functionary might come back to haunt them will reduce corruption.

2. Data Mining for aberrant Patterns

Though not much of this is being done today, the possibilities for the future are very interesting. Imagine a case where 10% of Sales Tax officers are allowing a few companies to underreport its sales. Over a period of time patterns are will emerge to indicate which companies and which officers are involved. If a particular company is underperforming its competitors, or if a particular officers interaction with a particular company is consistently leading to revenues not in line with other interactions that the department is seeing, a flag goes up. Its the law of large numbers.

3. Speeding up processes

I am a US citizen living in India so I visit the FRRO on a regular basis. It has been my experience over the last 25 years that most of the officers here are honest. But up until 3 years ago, going to this office was a nightmare. In 2004 or 2005 they reengineered the way things were done at the office, one big difference being having the Registrants print and fill out their forms prior to meeting the officers. Since this has been done no one there feels the need to bribe anyone. A big reason for bribery is to get your work done fast. Computerization helps in speeding things up.

4. Remove the Rent Seeking

Rent Seeking refers to the practice of allowing a particular government employee to manipulate the process of getting something done in a way that he can extract money from you. This is the typical chai-paani situation. The electric guy or telephone guy asking for something to put in the connection, or the PA who controls access to an officer, or the Octroi inspector who controls how long it takes for your goods to get through the ckeck naka. They have placed themselves as toll takers. Combined with process reengineernig computerization can dramatically reduce these bottlenecks. An example of how this can be help would be the current traffic violation system in Mumbai. Today when someone is caught for a violation she has to handover her license to the traffic cop who catches her, than go collect the license from a police station 24 hours later when she pays the fine. It was a system devised to prevent corruption as this way the cop on the street never handles money. What it has led to is a wholesale breakdown of the traffic norms in the city. No one wants to go to the cop station next day. The common refrain is “Cant we settle this here?” Instead a computerised ticketing system combined with a mail-in fine, would be far more efficient for everyone involved. Cops spend less time on resolving each violation, motorists get to go on their way with minimal disruption.

What computerization will not solve is fraud. If someone who you believe is dealing with you in good faith lies, the only way that one can catch that is by verifying everything. That is neither practical or desirable. So the Satyam scam which Mr. Sharma gleefully points at as proving the ineffectiveness of computers, could never have been stopped. The problem for people like this is they think there is a magic bullet for every problem. Computerization is a big part of trying to right the ship, but its not a magic bullet. It is a tool. And tools are used by people. You try and create tools so that they are used for their accomplished purpose, but if someone uses a screwdriver to stab someone in the brain, is that the fault of the tool or the person using it?

However I am also terribly disappointed in the technology of the site, not the content but the technology. I am no open source zealot, most of the work our company does has Microsoft technologies behind it and I’m a big fan of the .NET platform in general. However I do also believe that every job has the right tool, and in this case by using a .NET based CMS Vir Sanghvi has done himself a disservice. Based on the sites content an implementation of WordPress or Joomla would have been much easier(and dare I say much less expensive), and provided the content in a far superior way.

Some specific problems:

1. The RSS feed is just wrong. The data in the feed has nothing to do with the page linked to.

2. The next page link uses an AJAX control that does not take you to the top of the next page.

3. The form for Lets Talk does not work.

Lets hope these are teething issues, but my experience has been that for content focused sites Open Source CMS’s do a better job.

There are a lot of questions being asked about how the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai could take place. Most of this seems like noise rather than any sort of concrete measure to improve security. A friend of mine has been involved with a PIL that is asking for an accounting on why numerous police modernization initiatives have gone nowhere. The Society of Indian Law Firms(SILF) and the Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry are both involved as well.  In my mind this kind of PIL is far more productive than the abstain from voting, tax revolution, bomb Pakistan nonsense that is being forwarded on the internet and over sms’s.

The filing of the PIL got some coverage in the press but not enough. Here are some articled from Mint, Indian Express and DNA. This is not the flashy emotional appeal that the majority of the press seems to lap up. This is a substantive series of steps we would like our government to take and consequently the amount of coverage is limited.

My friend has asked me to help get the word out, and try and get as many people as possible to sign up here.

So what can you do?

First and foremost I would appreciate it if you could pass this message on as far and wide as possible. The more people who sign up for this the better. At the bottom of this post there is a little share this button. You can use that to email this post, or share it with anyone you would like to. Pass it through facebook, through orkut, through twitter anyway you can think of getting this in front of as many people as possible. There is a forum on the website www.abillionhands.com Its not very active right now but maybe we can change that.

Next step would be to take this out of cyberspace and into real life. I have some ideas for things we can do, but lets see how many people we can get to work on this.

If you would like to read the full text of the PIL you can download it from here.

Below is a Background Note about the PIL.

It has happened before and it could happen again. Mumbai has been attacked by terrorists over 15 times in the last 2 decades and by virtue of it’s position as the country’s financial capital, is a prime and vulnerable target for future attacks.

26/11 has yet again exposed the many weaknesses in Mumbai’s security systems. The audacious attack on 2 of Mumbai’s leading hotels and it’s key railway station has led to a tremendous loss of civilian and police lives and great damage to property. The anger and anguish amongst Mumbaikars is palpable. This time it cannot go to waste – it has to be channelised towards effecting constructive change for the City.

Mumbai has a more than 16 million strong population and just 42,000 policemen & women. Festivals, floods, fighting crimes and terrorist attacks…Mumbai’s brave police men and women put their lives on the line everyday. They help keep the wheels of India’s financial capital turning – but what have we done to help them?

Now the Society of Indian Law Firms, that represents India’s leading law firms, supported by a large group of leading business personalities in Mumbai and the Bombay CHamber of Commerce & Industry believe it’s high time Mumbai did something for it’s Police.

PIL : WHO & WHY?

- The Petitioner is the Society of Indian Law Firms supported by a group of concerned Mumbai citizens and business leaders from the City. On Thursday, India’s oldest chamber of commerce, the Bombay Chamber of Commerce & Industry joined the PIL. The Bombay Chamber has over 2000 member companies. It is for the first time in the Bombay Chamber’s history that it is backing citizen action of this sort.

- More training, modern equipment, better coordination, enhanced resources and an elite force that can deal promptly with terrorist attacks – the solutions are all known, discussed and debated. In many cases the State has even promised to implement measures to help better equip the Police. But little has come of it.

- Now the only option is to seek Court assistance in ensuring that all measures are taken to assist the Police in being better equipped to deal with the threat of 21st century terrorism

-The judiciary is the last standing pillar of democracy. Whenever all else has failed, the courts have come to the rescue of citizens – be it pertaining to the Environment, Heritage, Law & Order or Road Safety…

PIL has been a very effective tool used by Citizens to have their voices heard

- And so the SILF, Bombay Chamber and it’s supporting citizen team are now appealing to the Court to help ensure the State assists in modernising Mumbai’s Police

PIL: DETAILS

The PIL requests the Bombay High Court to direct the Union & the State (both, either/or wherever applicable)

a) Pursuant to the guarantee of ‘right to life’ in Article 21, the Union & the State should take all appropriate measures to meet the security threat to Mumbai

b) To disclose via affidavit all concrete steps being taken, with timeline and funding particulars, regarding establishment of Special Squad (Quick Response Team has been put together but not fully empowered)

c) Alongwith the above 2 points a) & b), the Union/State should

1. Permanently station NSG unit in Mumbai and wherever else required in Maharashtra

2. Provide sufficient coastal security coverage

3. Establish coordination mechanisms across Intelligence agencies, State Police and all Security Agencies

4. Assist, train and equip Police to meet new age terrorist threat

d) Alongwith a), b) & c), the Union/State should

1. Formulate and implement Crisis Management Plan

2. Procure and provide adequate equipment/vehicles/machinery (including Marine & Chopper units) for quick mobility via land/sea/air for effective patrolling, prevention and containment of crime/terrorist attack. This should be reserved for Police duties

3. Identify, fund and provide Surveillance Gear (such as CCTV coverage)

4. Implement the McKinsey Report that studied the Mumbai Police and advised on improvement and modernisation

e) Appoint Citizen Committee comprising of eminent citizens, retired judges and police officers to assist and advise on the implementation of all these measures.

As a people we must ask ourselves one question: do we really have the appetite for unvarnished truth? Or is this a selective menu where only some things are palatable to us?

Barkha Dutt has a must read article in the Hindustan Times on how much truth we as the Indian Public want.

How much skepticism are we willing to apply when it comes to our institutions and the statements coming out from them?

One answer seems to be that while Indian democracy, for all its faults, emerges from the grassroots and deals with issues of substance, Pakistan’s spasmodic attempts at democracy are dominated by a tiny elite of wealthy feudal barons who have systematically robbed their country blind. The plastic surgery has nothing to do with the voters. It has to do with the vanity of a ruling elite, eager to splash out money on London residences and new heads of hair. In a shallow democracy, appearance is everything and the superficial takes precedence over the substantial.

Indian politics might not be as feudal as Pakistani, but its close. I think there is an oversimplification of the Indian politicians motives pertaining to the lack of care most of them put towards their appearance. The shabby clothes, the lack of a comb, the out of control ear hair, many of these seem like as much an affectation as the hair transplant. For many of India’s politicians, there is an arrogance in their humility.

Partly, it is because Mini-Me follows the Dr Evil formula so completely that he does not realise that times have changed and so have the rules. A platform that worked in the 1960s and 1970s has no relevance in the 21st century.

Amt Verma’s excellent India Uncut blog pointed to the Times of India’s “Leader” Article. I have never been a big fan of the Times of India, neither the news(which I generally get from 100s of sources all over the net) or the op-ed(I like Hindustan Times and Indian Express a lot more).

Gautam Adhikari talks a great game though. Key Quote:

Strangely, in an age when you might presume it’s improbable in a modern democracy, it’s actually difficult to belong to our bandwidth in the Indian political spectrum. It isn’t only because the extremes of a fiercely Hindu nationalist right and an obtusely Neanderthal left, with the Congress party being a muddle in the middle, leave little space for reasoned debate along classically liberal lines.
In fact, a party professing market-oriented liberalism can even be termed unconstitutional. As we have argued in an editorial next to this article, you cannot under the Constitution register a party that debunks socialism or, for that matter, secularism.

 

That second paragraph is astounding. Unconstitutional. IIRC someones been making the effort to get this law changed through the courts, same way Naveen Jindal helped get us the right fly our own flag.

Update: Saw a post by Govindraj Ethiraj, on a similar subject