Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

Last week at Barcamp, during the e-governance session, TB Dinesh of Janastu announced an e-governance conference he was helping organise later in the year, tentatively December 2007.

Typical criticism of e-governance centres around how the digitisation is often an excuse to usher in something else, a something that may not always be in favour of the citizenry in whose name e-governance is justified. The best criticism of the technology itself that I’ve seen is limited to questioning the platforms and vendors used. None of it deals with how the manner of application of the technology, shorn of non-technological motives, correlates with its transformative effect on society.

As Mitch Kapor brilliantly summarised it, in a different context, Architecture is Politics:

When I was first thinking fifteen years ago about the challenge of protecting and fostering freedom and openness on computer networks, I originated the phrase “architecture is politics”. The structure of a network itself, more than the regulations which govern its use, significantly determines what people can and cannot do.

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When it comes to building a new movement, the converse proposition, “politics is architecture” holds true as well. The architecture (structure and design) of political processes, not their content, is determinative of what can be accomplished. Just as you can’t build a skyscraper out of bamboo, you can’t have a participatory democracy if power is centralized, processes are opaque, and accountability is limited.

BoingBoing has a timeline of Kapor’s thought process.

Dinesh has tentatively titled his conference “Information Architectures for E-Governance”. Here are his notes. Elsewhere on that site, I found another page outlining plans for the event (both links may break). While the site says the event is scheduled to be held in Trivandrum, the plan appears to have changed to Mysore (from personal conversation).

Dinesh has specific questions: what is it that makes computers e-governance, and how can the software backend be strengthened to reduce tampering? The concern: an electronic system may be said to eliminate corruption and redundancies only so far as there is no unauthorised access to the data storage. What was once a social construct defined around persons, economic standing and power hierarchies is now an act of patrolling the technological barriers, in turn defined around a different and (often) unwitting social construct.

In my opinion, a conference of this sort would be incomplete without representation from NIC.

The National Informatics Centre is a government body that provides tech solutions to various other government agencies. By virtue of regulations in India, government agencies can procure from other government agencies without requiring external approval, but must use an open tender process for private suppliers. This makes NIC the primary supplier to much of the government.

NIC built some of the key software components of the e-governance framework in Karnataka, including the Bhoomi land records system, and Rural Digital Services (RDS), a unified interface to services from state departments.

I deal with NIC as part of my work responsibilities and find their motivation structure incomprehensible. It is neither capitalistic nor based on the free software philosophy. If I understand correctly, NIC provides software at no charge, their payment coming out of a central budget. Their units appear to operate independently, for I’ve heard of radically different platform choices in different parts of the country, while each unit more or less sticks to the same platform. The software in Karnataka is not open source. They appear to not be answerable to their client, the government department that takes their software to citizens.

So what, then, motivates them? A concern for the common citizen, an altruistic sense of what’s good for the government department, or an unknown hierarchy within their organisation?

For it has much to do with how the architecture of their software turns into politics and defines what e-governance is in some of India’s most significant projects.

Akshay Mahajan tells a story of microfinance in Rajasthan, with pictures:

The group of women from the Mevat District in neighboring Haryana have driven all the way to Akbarpur to learn how to form a self help group of their own from the women at Akbarpura. For the next hour or so they had a long discussion on the mechanics of microfinancing, on how money should be saved, how loans should be dispensed, how to deal with defaulters etc. I felt I might has well have been in an office conference room in Bombay listening to suit clad MBAs rather than in village in rural rajastan in the company of very smart women in their colourful salwars.

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Microcredit—lending small sums to poor people to set up or expand small businesses—is an effective way to alleviate poverty. The poor cannot usually borrow from commercial banks, because they lack collateral. Loan sharks lend without security, but often at interest rates of 10-20% a day. Small time retailers who borrow from money lenders to buy a day’s stock often have to hand over most of their profits. Failure to repay can result in broken legs.

In March 2006, I visited the Mann Deshi Mahila Sahakari Bank in the village of Mhaswad, Satara district, Maharashtra. I spent two and a half days there learning about microfinance, rural deployment of technology, Mann Deshi’s operations, and of Chetna Gala Sinha, the bank’s founder.

Read Discovering Microfinance » (4000 words)