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 

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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.