Institutional Options for Rural Last Mile Service Delivery through Digital Governance

• Main Authors: Thangavelsamy, Kumar, Mohapatra, Sanjay
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Communication; Developing countries; Electronic government; Information technology; LDCs; Rural areas; Technological change
• ISSN: 2049-1026; 2049-1034

In the last three decades, there has been a revolutionary change in the governance paradigm at the international, national, sub-national and local levels. This process has been aided by a techno-managerial framework. Digital governance is the foremost aspect of this techno-managerial framework. At a very fundamental level, the application of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the public sector can be termed as digital governance. Within the Indian digital governance context, there are several institutional service delivery mechanisms which are prevalent for delivering government and private sector services in the resource constrained rural context. One institutional mechanism is in the Public Private Partnership (PPP) mode as manifested in the Common Service Center (CSC) mission mode project of the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP). Another institutional mechanism utilizes the rural local service governing institution called as the "Panchayat". A third and recent institutional mechanism bypasses the local governance actors and directly delivers services to the rural citizens through mobile digital governance. Hence it becomes imperative to understand which of these three institutional digital service delivery modes is best suited for last mile service delivery at the rural grassroots. For this purpose, digital governance needs to be located within the broad ICT for Development (ICT4D) paradigm. Within the ICT4D paradigm, there have been different generations of ICT4D which have evolved over the last 50 years. The initial ICT4D approaches were top-driven and technology oriented while the recent ICT4D approaches are more participatory and more oriented towards business innovation. Using the parameters of the latest ICT4D generation, a set of best practices can be evolved for implementing digital governance institutional mechanisms for rural service delivery. Using these best practices and also using empirical primary data, this paper strives to come up with the best pro-people and efficient digital governance institutional service delivery mechanism in the Indian rural context. The findings and policy prescriptions from this paper can also be extrapolated to the rural context of other developing countries.