With many projects under the national e-governance plan nearing the end of their implementation period, the union government is planning to launch the national information infrastructure (NII 2.0) which will make the implementation and maintenance of e-governance projects easier for states and central line departments.

Under NeGP, states departments and central ministries have been mainly occupied with setting up the information technology infrastructure like data centres, wide area networks, middleware, though the end-objective of the Plan was to automate workflow to deliver government services (electronically) at citizens' doorsteps. Many e-governance experts have criticised this preoccupaiton with hardware and software in the government and have urged for prioritising business process engineering and electronic delivery of services. The technology deployed in these projects is also fast becoming obsolete.

"The starting premise for the national information infrastructure is that it will serve for us for the next 10 years . A road-map is being prepared in this regard," J Satyanarayana, secretary, department of electronics and information technology (DeitY) told Governance Now on Friday.

"We have constituted an expert committee under professor S Sadagopan, director, IIIT-Bangalore on NII 2.0. It has already met and has formed sub-committees on various aspects- infrastructure, services and capacity building. The committee will submit its report in next four months," he added. 

Elaborating on the need for NII 2.0, the secretary said, "We want to change the game by making it plug-and-play for states. They don’t have to worry about data centres, network, connectivity, etc. You pay as you use so that they could focus on their core domain — service delivery, business process reengineering, capacity building, implementation and monitoring SLAs. The working group is looking at technology, road-map and business models. Concept of cloud computing will also be leveraged. This, however, will not be a unitary but a federated structure."