E-Governance and Rural Self Government

Competition among countries, regions and communities to go electronic is nothing up. The emergence of e-governance offers an opportunity to governments to adopt certain new value propositions of the internet age thereby bringing about paradigmatic shift in governance. Governments appear to be genuinely interested in improving the conditions for the citizens. While governments are looking for new solutions to the old problems, they want something different to happen, so that citizens perceive some difference in style, manner and standard of governance and service delivery. E-governance has the potential to create a discontinuous change in the model of governance; thus it can bring about paradigmatic changes in governance. The State Governments, through their rural self-governmental institutions have to play a significant role in implementing an appropriate IT infrastructure by in taking the necessary legal and polity measures to attain sustainability and to deliver timely services. Need for an effective and efficient mechanism to make governance the way it is expected to be has been felt all through and this need is there in Kerala and many other states in the country. Rural self-government uses IT to automate everything from payment of utilities, issuing licenses and power distribution to acquiring education on-line. Kerala with its unique social fabric, socio-economic development and penetration levels of the press, audio-visual media, telephony and with the best information infrastructure highly suits for the introduction of viable services targeted at and involving the citizen, the community, Panchayats and other government bodies. So it is apt to undertake a detailed study on the scope of e-governance in strengthening the functioning of rural self-governments in Kerala and hence, the present study. Being a unique and pioneer work in the area, it is felt that the findings of the study would have ample scope for generating information catering to the requirements of researchers, planners, administrators and technocrats associated with PRIs.