Developmental Aspirations and Networked Readiness

Abstract

Development in a networked world has a much wider connotation. While there are varieties of participants representing different cultural and behavioural perceptions, there are also many platforms raising demands, mobilising opinion, generating critiques of policies and competing to be heard. There are various possibilities and opportunities which governments and citizens can utilise and learn from and develop abilities to enlarge the scale and proportion of their activities without impinging additional burden of cost and time on participation and implementation. In a world full of information and alternatives, no government can deny the need for networking nor can citizens escape being part of at least some of these networks. While the second chapter established the necessity for formulating e-governance policies with a critical insight on state power and the likely impact upon citizen's lives, freedom and privacy, the present chapter would highlight the need for revisiting the linear implementation designs of developmental policies and programmes to a more meandering, warped and sometimes entwined process in which contingencies and exigencies can make impactful changes in policies while they are implemented. While this needs knowledge-based governance, it also requires skill, technology and connectivity for preventing the society from splitting into counterproductive digital divides.Development and ICTs are related and nothing proves it better than the rising GDP of countries as the score on 'Networked Readiness Index' (NRI) goes up. NRI is propensity of countries to exploit opportunities for bringing development. ICT makes it easier to achieve the targets and the goals by transcending many traditional handicaps of geography, bureaucratic behaviour, human error and institutional designs. As the year of MDG deadline of 2015 draws to a close, nations are fervently gyrating to explore, invent and discover strategies, innovations and shortcuts to achieve the committed targets. Many data management and survey companies across the world are becoming active on identifying and selecting indices and policy categories for ranking countries in some of the key areas of governance and