E-Governance Projects for E-Inclusion in India

Globally, e-governance systems have evolved towards wider acceptance. Almost all the countries have embraced e-governance as part of their long term policy. Contemporary e-governance systems argue in favour of convergence with scale up strategies. These strategies include convergence among the business sector, government and the civil society in the country and aim to connect with international agencies for better networking. E-inclusion has also been an integral part of the national e-governance strategies to spur citizen participation. In case of European Union (EU), e-governance, e-inclusion and such convergence have become very important because of the member-driven common interests and benefits. In the case of developing countries, similar efforts are being made to incubate and rollout converged services to citizens in rural and semi-urban areas with e-inclusion imperatives. Notwithstanding these varied approaches, there are pitfalls in translating the strategies into actions at the national level. Implementation of strategies at the national level calls for appropriate architectural analyses. This is because e-governance efforts need huge capital investments, require longer life development cycles and involve multi-agent service orientation to address the barriers of e-inclusion. In this chapter, e-governance architectural issues are discussed with three cases drawn from Indian scenarios through a conceptual framework. This framework aims to examine the possibilities of architectural convergence for national level e-governance services with e-inclusion as an important attribute.