There are many successful information and communication technology (ICT ) initiatives in India, oriented towards rural development, with a focus to address specific issues of rural citizen. National e-Governance plan (NeGP) recognizes the potential of ICT interventions and plans for suitably selecting important and successful ICT initiatives, with an objective to include them as missionmode projects for scaling up. Another objective of NeGP is to provide a portfolio of services to the citizens through common services centres (CSC) integrated with e-government backbone to not only set up a good e-governance system, but also to establish a support structure. NeGI plan outlaY is Rs. 12000 crores with the mandate to complete the mission in next three years covering 100,000 CSCs and involving 600,000 villages. This provides an opportunity to look into the strategic issues in rural e-govemance. E- governance initiatives are mostly mooted by government administration, non-governmental organization (NGOs), cooperative as well as private sectors. Like any ICT project, e-governace projects call for “usability and user-centred design”, since the ultimate beneficiary is the “user”. The similarity between users in “rural development initiative” and that of a “business process initiative” is that the uesr ultimiltely ends up using the technology, and it is imperative that technology needs to be accepted. But the real task is to create a “demand-driven , citizen-led ICT initiative for the rural sector” , Mostly, pilot projects are based on sheer innovating frameworks, either through a development agency or through bureaucratic set-ups to support governance issues. Many frameworks are incubated with active support from government and funding agencies. While innovation is essential for any model to be accepted, it is important that projects need to move out of “incubators” and translate its success through transformation from “supply-driven” concepts to “demand driven” and sustainable process improvement imperatives. Scaling up of ICT initiatives is also another issue that requires support from users. However, in the Indian context, ICT acceptance and its uability in rural area are not easy. NeGP critically recognises these issues while embarking on such an enterprise level action through CSCs. E-governance architectures are also being conceptualised. In this paper, we discuss a possible process view related to e-governance architecture ,with due emphasis on citizens' participation and their contribution to the architecture, leading to sustainable information systm plan ning and implementation strategies. We also narrate a case which supports this view of e-governance architecture for scale-up.
Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) focuses on supporting income of Below Poverty Line (BPL) citizens in India. Its outreach across Indian states and among the population having diverse employment challenges in rural India has made the scheme more complex. Role of e-Governance has been quite beneficial in ensuring transparency, accountability and empowering rural citizens to exercise their rights. This has been possible through innovations in e-Governance services that involve complex federal and democratic structure of government systems. In this paper we discuss the issues related to innovations in services, and restructuring the processes while embedding citizen interests. This paper illustrates role of e-Governance in successfully planning, designing and implementing innovations for effective deliveries of MGNREGS services with multi-dimensional effects on sustainable development in a country like India.
Through the seven principles of cooperation, cooperatives have showcased examples of how these entities are people-centred enterprises. These enterprises are no different from any business enterprises. Yet, these are owned, controlled and managed by the members who come together voluntarily to realise their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations (ICA 2015). As per the sustainable development goals (SDG) of the United Nations (UN) and decent work narratives of the International Labour Organization (ILO), it is far more imperative that all forms of enterprises need to work for sustainability (ILO 2018). Through its 17 goals, SDGs mandate narrate broad contours and yet very emphatic outcomes concerning society, environment and development with distributive justice as opposed to mere growth (Rawls 1971). Today, large and top-ranked business organisations agree that businesses need to adopt strategic initiatives to remain growth-oriented and contribute to society, the environment and local communities, where the businesses of the local communities are (ICA-AP 2019). By nature and in principle, cooperatives are implicitly involved in meeting these imperatives and the illustrative metrics include self-help, self-governed, democratic, equality, equity and solidarity (ILO 2018). With reference to SDGs, it is quite important to note that globally, inequality is still in existence, though decreasing slowly (Anthony et al. 2019; Hohler and Kuhl 2016).Growth in state-owned large enterprises, state-owned and closely held companies have led to inequality in the economic inequalities, and existence of investor-owned firms, member-owned cooperatives and mutual insurance companies constitute only part of such activities (Höhler and Kühl 2016). It lays emphasis on the existence of cooperative society as the basic sustainable development structure to ensure adherence to SDGs through social entrepreneurship and enterprises (Chiara and Maurizio 2014). It is, thus, important to understand the applicability of organisational forms that a social enterprise could adopt and pursue. Such forms include inter alia, small producer organisations, producer companies, hybrid organisations and federations with ambidexterity set-ups and affinity for embracing innovativeness while displaying resilient architectures (Alho 2016;Turner et al. 2013).Emergence of digital age and industry 4.0 (Vika et al. 2020) has provided enough challenges to the cooperative structures, and sustainability of such social enterprises lies in adaptability of the technologies to remain competitive and pursue resilient organisational life cycles, while ensuring maintenance of core principles (Cook and Iliopoulos 2016;Nadeau and Nadeau 2018). Since the core principles of cooperatives intend to address basic inequalities and yet pursue
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