Having spent thousands of crores on several e-governance projects, the government is eventually planning to measure its effectiveness through transactions. The idea is to aggregate data on (online) services delivery transactions – at the state and central level—and put it on public domain.

In couple of weeks, according to officials of the department of electronics and information technology (DEITY), the nodal agency for the implementation of national e-governance plan (NeGP), union communications minister Kapil Sibal, will launch a national electronic services dashboard – nesd.nic.in – which would quantify number of applications, for an array of government to citizens services delivered electronically, processed and number of citizens benefited.

The portal will have transaction data for around 300 plus services across 25 states and central government. Land records, property registration, direct benefit transfer, vehicle registration and drivers license and e-courts are among the key services which have been be covered in the dashboard.

The decision in this regard was taken in an apex committee meeting (on NeGP), which is headed by cabinet secretary on January 11, 2013.  The IT secretaries of all states and union territories have already been informed, said a senior DEITY official.

The department has drafted set of guidelines and it is expected to be issued to all states at the launch of the electronic services dashboard.

“The government is spending a lot of money on e-governance projects, which are aimed at simplifying services delivery and make it more efficient and transparent. However, there is no mechanism to know whether it has benefited citizens. The government doesn’t know how many certificates or licenses have been issued,” said a senior NIC official, not willing to be quoted in the story.

The application software of these services has been linked to the transaction portal for this purpose. The portal has been developed by national informatics centre (NIC).

NIC has developed web service tool to establish link between the service software, which is hosted in servers of the respective agency and portal. This will provide realtime information as and when a transaction happens.

The implementing agency has written to nodal agencies of all mission mode projects (of departments which are undergoing computerisation under NeGP) to provide access to their services for putting data in public domain.

NIC is expecting an early response from ministry of external affairs (for number of passports issued), unique identification authority of India (UIDAI), ministry of corporate affairs (MCA)- agencies which are at quite advanced level in implementing e-governance projects.

The new online services being developed will have the web service tool already installed in them, ab initio, according to a senior DEITY official.