The capacity building (CB) scheme seems to be doing many things at once and at times can seem overprepared. What else can explain the training conducted under the programme of chief information officers (CIO) when the creation of a formal post, as recommended in the Nandan Nilekani-led committee report on human resource for e-governance, awaits the approval of the government?

The report is pending the cabinet’s approval and it can take some time before the CIO becomes an official figure in every department.

The CB scheme, with an outlay of Rs 313 crore, was approved by the cabinet committee on economic affairs in January 2008. The scheme was introduced to address the huge deficit of skilled government officers who could operate and manage the IT infrastructure created across line departments and ministries at the centre and in states.   

While on the one hand the training programmes are designed to provide holistic training to government personnel so that they can lead the e-governance programmes in their respective departments, on the other, the lack of clarity on roles and responsibilities of the personnel after the training is a cause of much concern. According to officials of the department of electronics and information technology (DeitY), the nodal agency facilitating the scheme, officials are not given the right role in the department even after undergoing training. This, the DeitY officials said, makes them ineligible for deciding over technology matters.

The skill set related with project implementation and programme management of e-governance also remains unutilised.

Elaborating on the CIO trainings, Dr Vashima Shubha, senior consultant, national e-governance division (NeGD), said it is a holistic training which helps officers improve their everyday working efficiency. She said the Nilekani report on HR is already with the government for approval, and once it is through, there will be a rush for CIO training. “Hence, it is good that the government has some CIOs in place already,” she said.
Shubha, however, said that it is unclear if the officials who have received training would be eligible to apply for the CIO’s post when it is created. Getting placed even in the right team under the supervision of the head of department, let alone becoming a CIO, is a far-fetched dream for these e-governance champions.

The CIO trainings are conducted at three levels: e-governance leadership training, e-governance champion training and e-governance executive training. The first level is for officials of the rank of joint secretary, the second for the mid-level or director-level officials, and the last one is for section officers, undersecretaries and district-level officers.

While two batches have already completed the e-governance champions programme, another batch of officers will complete the same porgramme on June 29. The first e-governance executive batch will start on July 1.

An official working with the education department of a state – who underwent training under the e-governance champion category of the CB scheme – spoke to Governance Now about his experience. Pleading anonymity, he said he had submitted proposals to the government suggesting reengineering in the way school monitoring reports finally reach the state headquarters. The existing process is time-consuming and is vulnerable to manipulations. He, however, is awaiting response from his higher-ups and is afraid that the proposal might fall on deaf ears. He rues that the skills he acquired during the CIO training are not used productively by the government in his state.

A similar initiative has been in practice in Andhra Pradesh since 2000. Over 213 CIOs were trained until 2010. However, not many of them were placed in the decision-making positions. An assessment of the AP CIO programme conducted by the Hyderabad-based Centre for Good Governance (CGG) says, “Only in 12 percent cases, respondents felt that they were key decision-makers on IT issues in the department. Thus, in spite of the programme being there for eight years, it has not produced decision-makers. The CIOs need to be given important responsibilities instead of an assistant’s role.”

Taking the same example of the Andhra Pradesh CIO programme, former secretary, DeitY and telecom, R Chandrashekhar, who is the new NTRO chief, explains why it did not yield the desired results. “First, not all the people who were chosen for the training were right for it because the government was not ready to part with them for the duration of the programme. Thus, the training period was reduced from initial 12 months to six and then to three months. Finally, the trained candidates were sent back to their respective departments instead of being appointed as CIOs,” says Chandrashekhar.

Defending the CB scheme at the national level, Sanjiv Mittal, CEO, national institute of smart government (NISG), said that not every time unsuitable candidates are sent for the trainings. “We get a decent mix of people from all backgrounds. Though sometimes, yes, there is a mismatch, but not all the time,” he said.

CB is a scheme full of good intentions but bad execution. Designed at the time of the inception of the national e-governance plan (NeGP) in 2006 (though the actual trainings started much later, only in August 2010), it was conceived to have an apex team, a state-level team (state e-mission team) and a department-level team (project e-mission team) to assist the training programmes for e-governance. The SeMT and PeMT were constituted by extensive hiring from the private sector to build a robust team to lead the e-governance programmes. However, here too, only 222 officials were hired for the 327 available positions under the SeMT programme.

Awareness among key players also plays a crucial role for the states to conduct CB programmes for their officials and employees. NISG conducts many awareness drives and leadership summits to drive home the necessity of these programmes. However, according to Shubha, these meets are known more for the number of times they are cancelled than when they are conducted. “Many a time, the MLA or secretary we are in talks with gets transferred before the plans materialise,” she said.

Funds lying underutilised in various states indicate the apathy for capacity building in the country. In the recently-concluded state consultation workshop in Odisha, Deepa Sengar, director, NeGD, requested the state to use its underutilised funds for more CB programmes.

According to Shubha, underutilisation of funds by the states is one of the issues, but this is not something by which their e-governance readiness should be judged. “A state can choose not to use the funds provided by the centre for CB because they might have their own programmes running. Sometimes, they simply do not need funds from the centre as they have their own funds. For example, the funds of Andhra Pradesh are underutilised but they are doing pretty well in e-governance overall,” she said.

Though the fund utilisation might not be an exact indicator for the interest a state shows in CB, participation in the centre-led programmes surely is. Shubha said that many a time the right person with the required qualifications is simply not available. Participation by under- or overqualified professionals defeats the very purpose of the programme. Resistance by officials and hierarchies which inhibit learning make it very difficult to implement programmes on the ground level.

The alienation from the larger scheme of things might be the cause. “Indian CB programmes are not directed towards what the candidate really needs to learn. The government wants to do ‘something’ so that’s what it does. The candidate doesn’t know what is the takeaway from a CB programme so why should he or she care,” said Aneetha Rao, a research scholar in human resources, who has worked extensively in the area.

“Do the training programmes justify a bigger picture, is what we need to ask. Else all these programmes are just paid holidays for the participants,” she added.

Rao makes a point. Is the government really interested in studying or analysing the impact of these trainings? Are the programmes designed keeping in mind the ground-level issues? Or is capacity building just moving towards fulfilling some sort of a predefined target?

According to Shubha, NeGP capacity building programmes provide behavioural, attitudinal and motivational training to the trainees apart from just the core learnings. She said that there are thematic workshops which are conducted as part of capacity building. Change management is an integral part of CB where officials are not just taught the advantages of e-governance but also to redesign their processes to make them simpler and more efficient, she said. “Without this (change management), CB is only half done,” she added.

Even with issues at implementation levels, capacity building as an idea has been firmly planted in e-governance and will reflect in the way the next phase of projects will be designed. As far as CB 2.0 is concerned, the learning of the first phase will be incorporated in the approach paper for the same. “The next version, to be launched in another one or one-and-a-half years, will cover a much broader base and aspects,” said Shubha. Also, things might not be as bad as it is today when the government decides to implement the key recommendations made by the Nilekani committee, which strongly advocates appointment of a CIO, chief technical officer and dedicated project teams for each of the departments across central and state governments.