Despite starting late, Bengal is giving e-governance a lot of importance. This is in keeping with the chief minister’s efforts to make the state a leading investment-puller. Computers are seen everywhere. In hospitals, for example, an outdoor patient gets his ticket from counters manned by computer operators. The schools are getting PCs under the ‘Sarba Sikhsa Abhijan’.

All is not well though. This is because technology is Greek to most of our bureaucrats and ministers, add to that lack of proper planning. We still have to pay our electricity, telephone, corporation taxes at different offices standing in long queues whereas in Hyderabad one can pay all kinds of bills in a single window.

I think two important parameters of e-governance should be:

1. Training of staff
2. Recruiting a dedicated tech support team

As far as training of staff is concerned, the steps taken are satisfactory. In hospitals we see the old staff handling computers with ease. Same for banks. Training sessions have been conducted for teachers of schools which have been given computers.

However, a team of tech-guys who can tame an unruly printer at the time of need is lacking. Computers left unused for months are not a rare phenomenon - the problem might be as harmless as a loose monitor wire though! In a government hospital I have recently seen a man at the counter has reverted to the old practice of giving the patients hand-written slips. His computer is not working for weeks, I came to learn.

What I am really pained to see is the waste of money in buying Windows. In a developing country like India, why should we not go for open source rather than embracing MS? Do we really afford to squander money like this? Our politicians know unions pretty well but certainly not Unicode! In fact, the Bengali version of the state govt. portal does not use Unicode!