Background

Governments across India are adopting new and innovative IT solutions to achieve greater internal efficiencies and deliver information and services to citizens, business, industry and their own employees in a faster and more effective manner.

This all-round drive fuelled by increasing awareness, competitive pressures of globalization and the availability of a variety of new technologies (ICT) has spawned a vast array of internal computerization and e-Governance projects in government departments and ministries, along with a drive towards restructuring and Government Process Re-engineering (GPR).

Successive governments have drawn up or updated existing policies and launched new programmes to take forward this process of all-round exploitation of ICT to further the agenda of ‘better governance.’ This has led to a sustained increase in IT spending and deployment by government departments at the Central, state and local government levels.

Nodal IT organisations like the National Informatics Centre (NIC) and the Department of Information Technology (DIT) have played a key role in helping define policy, lay down ground rules and technology road-maps, incubate and hand-hold 'Mission Mode' projects for user ministries/departments and provide incentives for further adoption and usage of IT in day-to-day government functions.

According to IDC estimates, the Government & Education segment in India accounted for over 14% of the US$ 8,469 million domestic Indian IT market in 2004 and was expected to grow at 19% per annum to reach a total value of US$ 2,805 million by 2009.
Therefore, any IT player who wishes to dominate the Indian IT market must effectively tap the Government sector and establish a firm foothold in the segment.

Also, since the e-Governance space is witnessing an increasingly large number of project rollouts in recent years, with state governments jostling to outdo each other, it becomes extremely important for all stakeholders (banks, development financial institutions, IT vendors and service providers, as well as the governments themselves) to be able to accurately assess and evaluate the feasibility and likelihood of success of the e-Governance project (among many) which stands the most likely chance of:

• successful implementation
• sustained, financially viable operations, and
• achievement of its key social/developmental objectives.

With this background, Dataquest and IDC decided to jointly commission an annual study to assess:

• The most efficient or highest-impact IT spender states
  (per capita availability or usage of ICT infrastructure and resources)
• The Top 18 IT Spender State Governments
• Effectiveness of IT in Government covering the key aspects of Citizen services, Business services, Government: Citizen interface, Government: Business interface etc.