Assessment of E-Government Projects

This article considers the issues relevant to assessing the success or failure of large-scale e-government projects in India. Prior research has highlighted a number of possible reasons why e-government systems in Less Developed Countries (LDCs) fail, underscoring, principally, the issue of the design-reality gap or design-actuality gap. We find that this analysis, though useful, is inadequate to capture the immense complexity of e-government systems design and implementation. This article proposes and elaborates on three issues that must be examined in the context of any e-government system in an LDC to assess its success or failure, in addition to other analyses. These issues are: demand- and supply-side stakeholder analysis, second order effects, and analysis of incentives for governance efficiency. We use the Bhoomi e-government system implemented in the state of Karnataka, India, as an exemplary system to elaborate on these issues and also to discuss concrete the theoretical aspects.