Right to Services Bill has many hurdles to clear

While the State government's move to enact the Right to Services Bill is laudable, it needs to buttress it with certain measures to give the law real teeth. For this, shortcomings in infrastructure and e-governance have to be overcome, adequate staff must be appointed and a computer-literate workforce must be created.

Information and Communication Technology is a vital cog in the timely delivery of services and hence streamlining e-governance applications across government departments is vital. Lack of standardised digital workflow will be a stumbling block in the implementation of the proposed law, IT sources told The Hindu . Though the Union government has prescribed e-office developed by the National Informatics Centre under the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) for digital workflow, the State at present uses more than half-a-dozen platforms for this. Departments are forced to log into multiple applications, sources said.

Inadequacy of Kerala State Wide Area Network, sluggish broadband connectivity, reluctance to leverage new technologies including 3G and 4G are some of the other shortcomings which, if not addressed will bring the digital nervous system of the government to a halt when usage peaks.

Lack of proper planning and coordination and absence of inter-departmental data sharing had in the past often led to duplication of efforts at various levels. Sources caution against treading the same path while implementing the new law.

State data centre

“It is important that the State engage the private sector to come up with data capturing and reporting solutions, which will run on multiple platforms, and update them in a State data centre so that anyone — from a village officer to the Chief Minister — will be able to drill down the relevant tables and generate reports and statistics any time,” says Anoop P. Ambika, secretary of the Technology Group of Companies. Mr. Anoop also laments the government's reliance on “half-baked technology.”

Former Chief Secretary D. Babu Paul said that problems in the implementation of the Bill could be overcome. “It all depends on how serious the government is (about the Bill),” he said.

Asked how receptive the government employees would be to the proposed law, Mr. Paul said that he did not foresee a blind opposition. They may complain about the practicality of implementing the same set of conditions in different departments whose styles of functioning vary vastly. To overcome this government will have to take into account each department and each level in a department before finalising a time limit in delivery of services.

Kottathala Mohanan, the State unit president of the Congress-affiliated NGO Association, while welcoming the Bill expressed apprehension about implementing it before addressing the issues of staff shortage and inadequate infrastructure. “The provision in the Bill that calls for slapping fines on erring officials should not be enforced without appointing adequate staff. As for infrastructure, many departments do not even have a UPS to operate the computers during power outage,” he said.