An Assessment Study of Indian State Government Portals

Abstract

Does the e-readiness of a country or a state give any insight into the success of their e-government projects? Does scaling up of e-readiness help to measure the acceptance of e-government projects by citizens? Research has failed to provide a direct answer to these questions. While an e-readiness index summarizes the infrastructural condition of a state or country in terms of network readiness and availability of hardware facility; e-government readiness implies the acceptance of e-government projects by the citizens in a state or a country. So, the e-readiness index cannot clearly depict the e-government readiness of a country. Since e-government projects are broadly categorized as Government to Citizen, Government to Business and Government to Government, it becomes difficult to quantify the satisfaction level of the stakeholders. For analysing the acceptance of e-government business models particularly the web based ones, researchers (Yang, 2002; Kašubiene & Vanagas, 2007; Janssen, Kuk & Wagenaar, 2008; Morgeson & Mithas, 2009) often adopted the quality criteria used in evaluating service offered by of e-commerce sites. The most pervasive concept of quality in use is the extent to which a web service meets and/or exceeds a citizen’s/customer’s expectations. Portals at the Federal Government level in India were developed with the idea to form a ‘single window’ access to the facilities provided by the states or union territories to the citizens in an integrated platform. The idea behind such investment on state wise portals was to serve the citizens better but there was hardly any attempt from the government side to assess the acceptance of the portals. Some of the portals have counters to keep a track of visitors and email facilities have been provided to serve queries of the visitors. So the effectiveness of the portals has become a questionable issue today. In this study we have tried to concentrate on Indian State government portals and assess the service quality provided by them. It was observed that State wise Service Quality issues in e-government differ significantly when global parameters like usability, adequacy of information, navigation facility interactivity are considered. So, to evaluate the portals a conceptual framework based on previous research works was proposed. Quality dimensions were identified to assess service quality of government portals and each of the state and the union territory portal was audited based on the parameters proposed like usefulness of information, adequacy of information, citizen centric information, usability, accessibility, interaction, privacy, security and citizen participation.

The digitalising state: Governing digitalisation-as-urbanisation in the global south

“…E-governance initiatives across the global south sought to reduce state–citizen exchanges in the everyday state to a series of digitally mediated transactions, but scholars have identified that these unfortunately failed to include those who were already excluded from digital technologies and infrastructures (Chary, 2010; Heeks, 2002, 2008, 2010; Kumar and Bimal, 2015; Mazzarella, 2006). While the rolling out of e-governance across countries in the global south in the last two decades has enabled the state across all scales to alter the terms and conditions of its earlier developmentalist and neoliberal agenda, a persistent ‘digital divide’ (Graham, 2002; Kamath, 2018; Kleine and Poveda, 2016) presents municipalities with ongoing developmental challenges in delivering online citizen services, taxation, revenues, property registers, citizen ID cards and so on (Bhattacharya et al, 2010; Chary, 2010; Chatterji, 2018; Mazzarella, 2006).…”