Impact assessment study of e-government projects in India

Over the last decade various Indian states have implemented a number of e-government projects but there has not been any systematic study to assess their impact. This study fills this gap to some extent by employing a general framework to assess the e-government impact in India.

The framework focuses on the idea of measuring the total value delivered by a project to different stakeholders and takes a balanced approach between case study and quantitative analyses. The study focuses on a sample of five major e-government projects representing different types of e-government applications. The projects are:

• Karnataka Valuation and Registration (KAVERI) Computerisation of Sub-registrars’ offices
• Khajane, computerisation of treasuries in Karnataka
• eProcurement – online tendering in Andhra Pradesh
• eSeva – one-stop shop for multiple public services in Andhra Pradesh
• Computerised inter-state check-posts in Gujarat

The main findings include:

• citizens prefer computerised systems to manual systems of service delivery
• the cost of accessing service has been reduced
• of the three projects where significant corruption was reported in the manual system, one project was able to eliminate corruption. In the other two projects the impact was marginal
• most of the projects show potential for economic viability.

The authors, however, caution against generalising the overall conclusions of positive impact and economic viability of electronic service delivery from this study to all e-government projects in India. More projects need to be evaluated from a larger sample to generalise the conclusions.