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So says the fifth study by IDC India to assess the performance of e-governance projects across 21 Indian states. The results are based on a two level survey that assesses every state’s IT vision, implementation plan and ease of use of the various services. It also factors in IT allocation for new projects in 2007-08, their implementation and user satisfaction.
Apart from its high IT spend, Tamil Nadu has also scored high on parameters such as citizen and business satisfaction.
The other states in the top five include Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, Haryana and Andhra Pradesh. Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh have climbed three spots over last year’s ranking to the number one and the number three position respectively. Delhi, which occupied the top slot last year, has slipped to the third place this year. Continue Reading »

While Delhi, Chandigarh and Goa are rated the best in terms of e-network access by their households where a State’s e-network policies are concerned, the Southern regions take over, according to an Assocham assessment on ‘E-governance initiatives’.
“A country’s e-readiness measures the current state of its ICT infrastructure and the degree to which its consumers, businesses and governments are able to capitalise on Internet-based opportunities. It determines the degree to which a country is prepared to participate in the networked world. The States have been rated on parameters: network access, e-learning, network society, e-governance and network economy,” said Assocham Secretary, General D. S. Rawat.

• Delhi, Chandigarh and Goa have been rated the best in terms of network access. Moreover, Delhi and Chandigarh are equally well in e-learning, which is based on percentage of colleges and schools with Internet access, universities offering infotech courses and computer labs.
• Network policies, which are evaluated on government’s efforts to address issues, related to telecom and e-commerce is better in most southern States including Maharashtra.
• Network society, which is measured on the number of online companies and local language websites is better in States such as Karnataka and Chandigarh.
• Andhra Pradesh’s initiatives such as Rajiv Internet Village launched in 2004 seeks to provide a host of services to the rural population through its 22,000 kiosks. Due to these measures it is estimated that Andhra Pradesh will capture 41% of the national IT and IT-enabled services market by 2010.
• Sikkim from the North-Eastern region has done well with its community information centres (CICs) and well established network access. [Via]

“Well over 3.5 billion mobile phones are in use around the world and organizations are harnessing this technology to help overcome humanitarian challenges,” according to Timothy E. Wirth, President of the United Nations Foundation.
The recent report, Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in NGO Mobile Use, examines emerging trends in “mobile activism” by looking at 11 case studies of groups active in the areas of public health, humanitarian assistance and environmental conservation.
These include the text messaging ‘nerve center’ that Oxfam-Great Britain and the Kenyan umbrella group PeaceNet created which collected alerts about violent outbreaks during the recent civil unrest and mobilized local ‘peace committees.’ The project served as a vital tool for conflict management and prevention by providing a hub for real-time information about actual and planned attacks between rival ethnic and political groups.
The GSM Association, together with a handful of non-profit and private sector groups in Kenya, developed another conflict prevention project that allows farmers to preserve their crops while protecting wildlife. The program monitors instances when elephants approach farmed land, and provides an early warning system via mobile that is reducing the incidence of human-elephant conflict in an area where as many as five humans and 10 elephants are killed each year.
Other case studies cover the areas of public health (such as connecting health workers to one another in Uganda), humanitarian assistance (such as alerting Iraqi refugees to food aid drop offs in Syria), and environmental conservation (such as using text messages to raise awareness about deforestation in Argentina).
About 86% of non-governmental organization (NGO) employees use mobile technology in their work, with 25% believing it has revolutionized the way their organization or project works. While the most common uses of mobile technology by NGO workers are voice calls (90%) and text messaging (83%), about 10% use mapping functionalities, 8% use it for data analysis, and 8% for inventory management.

The European Commission has published a pan-European survey on electronic services in healthcare (e-health) that shows 87 per cent of European doctors (general practitioners) use a computer, 48 per cent with a broadband connection.
The survey, called ‘Benchmarking ICT use among General Practitioners in Europe,’ also found that about 70 per cent of European doctors use the internet and 66 per cent use computers for consultations.
Denmark has the highest broadband penetration among General Practitioners (91 per cent) and Romania has the lowest (about 5 per cent). [Via]

The seventh annual survey conducted by Darrell M. West, director of the Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University, and a team of researchers evaluates online government Web sites of countries around the globe. The researchers evaluated government Web sites based on two dozen criteria, including disability access, the existence of publications and databases, the presence of privacy policies, security policies, contact information, and the number of online services.
This year’s study reviews 1,687 government Web sites in 198 countries during June and July 2007. A variety of different sites were analyzed, including executive, legislative and judicial offices as well as departments and ministries of the government such as health, education, foreign affairs, interior, finance, natural resources, foreign investment, transportation, military, tourism and telecommunication.

Some highlights:
South Korea Continues to Lead World in Global e-Government
Turkey moves up from rank 27 in 2006 to9
Portugal moves up from rank 48 in 2006 to rank 7
India moves up from rank 77 in 2006 to 47

Get the complete Global E-Government Report, 2007 [pdf]

Livemint: Almost 41% of the households that plan to buy a computer or a laptop are from rural areas. Only 16% are from the super metros, the eight largest cities in the country. And 39% of the households that plan to buy a laptop or desktop computer have people who earn less than Rs1 lakh a year. Download the complete report [pdf]