ICTS FOR THE BROADER DEVELOPMENT OF INDIA: AN ANALYSIS OF THE LITERATURE

ABSTRACT
India is known around the world for the success of its export-oriented ICT services industry,
but this paper asks whether ICTs have been valuable in providing broader development
benefits to all Indian citizens. Secondary data from academic articles with a focus on India
are used to analyse the contribution of ICTs towards the achievement of specific development
goals. The analysis shows that many ICT-based initiatives have taken place over the last
decade and some positive effects have resulted. However, the beneficiaries are almost always
not the poorest or most disadvantaged groups, it is hard to scale up initiatives to have effects
throughout India, and the need for attitudinal and institutional change remains a fundamental
problem. It is argued that ICTs should not be  seen as ‘silver bullets’ for development but
neither are they irrelevant. Rather, they are potentially important contributors towards
development in India but only through their integration in wider sociotechnical interventions.
Keywords: India; development; ICT; e-government; health information systems; telecentres;
mobile phones; civil society; empowerment; poor and disadvantaged group

eINDIA 2011 India's Largest ICT Event

http://www.eindia.net.in/2011/


Introduction
Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies (CSDMS) and Elets Technomedia - the publishers of the eGov, eHealth & digitalLEARNING magazines - invite you to join eINDIA 2011 - the seventh edition of India’s largest ICT event. The innumerable initiatives in terms of public policies, programmes and projects rolled out for the inclusion of the vast disadvantaged population of the country are all exploiting the power of ‘e’. The advent of ‘e’ is being considered as the key element to bring about efficiency in the delivery of public services. eIndia 2011 would therefore hover around the theme of steering an e-inclusive economy which is being held in the growth capital of the country. eINDIA 2011 would be a platform for sharing knowledge, assessing the already existing initiatives, and planning the creation of technology enabled society.

eINDIA2011 Awards will showcase best practices in the use if ICTs for development. This platform has been the torchbearer of innovative use of ICTs in Education, Health and Governance sphere.

eINDIA 2011 expo would showcase various innovative ICT products & services in the domain of Governance, Healthcare & Education. It would help explore the diverse opportunities of integrating ICT in different spheres of life.

Convened at Mahatma Mandir, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, this event aims to bring together over 5,000 high level representatives of the ICT Industry, Government, Civil society, Academia and Private sector to share the best practices, opportunities, knowledge & ideas that will shape the future of e-inclusion.

Delegate Profile

Secretary-level Officials such as head of various departments, Chief Secretaries, Principal Secretaries, Additional Secretaries, Joint Secretaries, Deputy Secretaries and Directors from Central and State government departments

Key officials from IT, Health, Education, Urban Development, PWD, Agriculture, Rural Development, Home, Planning, Power, Finance, Transportation and Taxation departments; officials from from Districts and municipalities elected representatives Key stakeholders and Key decision makers from educational institutions - VCs, Registrars, Principals, Directors and Heads of organisations

Representatives from the judiciary and legal experts

Key people from various chambers of commerce and associations Industry representatives and experts

Representatives from NGO and other civil societies Consultants and research agencies 

eGov AU Craig Thomler's professional blog - eGovernment and Gov 2.0 thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective

http://egovau.blogspot.com/

Decision Support for e-Governance: A Text Mining Approach-Journal-ref: International Journal of Managing Information Technology (IJMIT) Vol.3, No.3, 2011, 73-91

Information and communication technology has the capability to improve the process by which governments involve citizens in formulating public policy and public projects. Even though much of government regulations may now be in digital form (and often available online), due to their complexity and diversity, identifying the ones relevant to a particular context is a non-trivial task. Similarly, with the advent of a number of electronic online forums, social networking sites and blogs, the opportunity of gathering citizens' petitions and stakeholders' views on government policy and proposals has increased greatly, but the volume and the complexity of analyzing unstructured data makes this difficult. On the other hand, text mining has come a long way from simple keyword search, and matured into a discipline capable of dealing with much more complex tasks. In this paper we discuss how text-mining techniques can help in retrieval of information and relationships from textual data sources, thereby assisting policy makers in discovering associations between policies and citizens' opinions expressed in electronic public forums and blogs etc. We also present here, an integrated text mining based architecture for e-governance decision support along with a discussion on the Indian scenario.

Text Mining Based Decision Support System (TMbDSS) for E-governance: A Roadmap for India

http://www.springerlink.com/content/w548kw6478m22r18/



In this article we discuss how text-mining techniques can help in retrieval of information and relationships from unstructured data sources, thereby assisting policy makers in discovering associations between existing policies, proposed policies and citizens’ opinions expressed in electronic public forums. In this article, an integrated text mining based architecture for e-governance decision support is presented along with a discussion on the Indian scenario.

Blog mining for e-government

Blog mining for e-government

www.ejeg.com/issue/download.html?idArticle=209




eGovernment refers to the use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to improve the quality of services and information offered to citizens, to make government more accountable to citizens and ad-vance public sector transparency. As already pointed out by other researchers, one of the most important issues for making eGovernment effective is to enable citizens to participate in the decision-making process. Nowadays, topics related to governmental decisions are among the most widely discussed ones within digital societies. This is not only because web 2.0 has empowered people with the ability to communicate remotely but also because governments all around the globe publish a great volume of their decisions and regulations online. In this paper, we propose the exploration of text and data mining techniques towards capturing the public‟s opinion communi-cated online and concerning governmental decisions.

Surveying ICT Use in Education in India and South Asia

The World Bank's infoDev program recently released the latest volume in its periodic surveys of the use of information and communication technology in the education sector around the world.
Following on earlier efforts that examined the Caribbean and Africa (and UNESCO-Bangkok's much earlier examination of the Asia-Pacific region), ICT for Education in India and South Asia catalogues what is happening related to the use of educational technologies in this important part of the world.
[Disclaimer: I helped initiate this series when I was at infoDev, and was a reviewer for this latest work, and so am not a neutral disinterested observer here!]
The series of reports include:

• An extended summary of the findings
• Individual country-level reports for Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka
• Four state-level profiles from India: Delhi, Karnataka, Rajasthan, and West Bengal
• Two profiles of distance education and teacher training in Pakistan
• Five thematic essays on gender equality, policy coherence, non-formal learning, capacity building, and primary and secondary schooling
• A discussion of the methodology and database of consulted experts and documents

Key findings highlighted in the reports include the:

"importance of fostering an ICT 'ecosystem' with numerous constituent parts working in collaboration to provide opportunities for innovative educational approaches. ICTs can be seen as a platform to overcome the worst parts of education and learning. Meeting this demand can take many forms - from distance learning on a radio or TV, to newer devices like the widespread mobile phone. Through it all though, the importance of local context and systematic capacity building is key. Furthermore, careful monitoring and evaluation, and coordination, is critical to success."

Such findings may not be a surprise to regular readers of this blog, but infoDev's continued efforts to document what is actually happening 'on-the-ground' in countries around the world (many of which receive little international attention) is a welcome counter to the overheated and speculative rhetoric that many times characterizes examinations of the uses of educational technologies in such places.
All individual reports from the Survey, including the country reports, are available here.
On a related note: If you are interested in summaries of what's happening with ICT use in education in Europe, you should check out the excellent Insight reports from the European Schoolnet.

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The August version of the popular online EduTech debate coordinated by infoDev asks the question:
Does Google Make Us Stupid?
Attention, Thoughtfulness and Literacy in the Networked Age
Nicholas Carr, who wrote the widely discussed article of the same name (which he has since expanded into a book , The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains), will kick off the discussion, which will also feature Steve Vosloo, Inés Dussel and Marion Walton.
As always, you are welcome to participate.