E-governance – the divide between theory and practice (a study of e-governance services in Haryana, India)

Events like the easing of the US Government’s clutches over the Internet technologies in the late 1980s, the coming of the World Wide Web from CERN, the European Nuclear Research Labs, around the same time, and the spread of mobile telephony in India in 1990s, have triggered Governments’ interest in honing of these technologies for delivery of citizen services. By the end of the first decade of the third millennium CE, several e-Governance projects were afoot in India. Almost a score of years is passed since India saw one of its pioneering e-Governance projects – Drishtee. Success stories of e-Governance portals abound, there is another facet of the delivery of public services through digital electronic means. The fruits of these projects can be reaped to an extent severely limited by the Great Indian Digital Divide. Firstly, E-Governance projects are rarely fully digital sans humans, and secondly, the rural-urban and gender-based digital divide poses serious limiting challenges to such endeavours. The present communication studies the gaps between the promises made in e-governance concept papers and the ground realities of e-governance projects in the specific context of e-governance services rendered by the Haryana Government.