ICT for government reform: Parliamentarians speak up

The most anticipated panel of the summit featured MP Dr. Harsha De Silva and MP Navin Dissanayake who went on to have an animated debate on the topic ‘ICT for Government Reforms’ and the session was moderated by FutureGov Asia Pacific Magazine Editor-at-Large Laurence Millar.

MP Navin Dissanayake (left) speaks as FutureGov Asia Pacific Magazine Editor-at-Large Laurence Millar (Moderator) and MP Dr. Harsha De Silva look on

Q: What do you think the country needs in terms of ICT and Government reforms?

Dissanayake: There are mainly three or four policy levels that any government should be looking at. In the case of Sri Lanka because of our population, literacy factor and physical factor in terms of proximity to China and India, ICT should be and is one of the main platforms of development. When you talk of the policy formula, you look at the infrastructure development. Our internet penetration rate at around 10 per cent is not adequate for an emerging country like ours.

The Government has to invest its own funds and secondly have a very proactive outlook, a much more dynamic liberalisation aspect to have private investment come in and invest in the backbone.

Secondly how do we get e-governance going in Sri Lanka? I am happy to say that ICTA has played a key role in this regard and the Government has been very successful in taking e-governance to the people. You have a whole host of Government services been given to the people through ICT and this process needs to be more rapidly advanced and more dynamically pushed forward as I feel that some Government institutions are not being proactive and not investing in bringing their services online.

Government services are being brought to the people through ICT. The Presidential Secretariat has released a series of policy measures which for example, state that all Government institutions should have an ICT initiative and have a CIO. That policy formulation has happened. However, as a Government minister I am not really happy with the implementation aspect of it. In all governments, you can have vision and mission statements but it’s the implementation that matters.

The fourth policy level is where I come in. I get the public servants more educated in ICT to exchange information flows, ideas and get things done and this is really happening in the Government. We have policies and we are training second and third level govt servants in ICT and it is happening in a big way.

In these policy frameworks there are gaps to be filled and it’s time to take Sri Lanka to the next level of ICT because we have huge potential – we can see how India has developed and we have to ask why we haven’t hopped on that bus. We can make it a realisable vision.

De Silva: This is ICT for Government reform. What is reform? Reform is to correct what is defective and in this case, the defects in governments. Defects in governments as I see it particularly when it comes to this context, it’s about opaqueness, transparency, accountability and corruption. In the extreme case, governments may be completely overhauled. We have seen how government reforms in many countries have completely changed the growth path of nations.

What is the role of ICT? ICT is only a vehicle. My contention is that no amount of ICT can reform a government unless a government wants to reform itself. Looking at transparency, the basic understanding is that people must have information about the functioning of the government. There must be transparency, else governments move away from being a democracy to perhaps an autocracy. What we saw in the recent past was how ICT was able to bring down those dictatorial regimes.

The example I want to use is India’s Right to Information Act of 2005. That is where we want to get to. Prior to the Act, India was governed by the official Secrets Act. What the RTA did was remove such restrictions to secrecy but of course there needs to be certain exceptions in terms of national security and such and ICT can play a big role in putting that information out. It has made a significant change in the development in the lower levels of Indian society.

In the case of Sri Lanka, while I appreciate a lot of things that are being done and I congratulate the ICTA as a government agency that has delivered time and again and is an example of how a Government agency can be run by professionals in this country. However, without a RTA how can you reform governments if you don’t have that? Our party even recently attempted desperately to bring in a RTA but both times the Government bulldozed us and said there doesn’t need to be a Right to Information Act.

ICT can only be utilised if there is a genuine need for transparency and accountability in the Government.

Q: Would you like to comment on the RTA debate?

Dissanayake: It seems to me that Harsha’s argument seems to be that you need an official Right to Information Act in place in order to bring about reforms. Of course each country has its own paradigms to work with. The Secrets Act is still in place in the UK. Certain government information can’t be revealed because if the sensitivity of it.

Just as much as the private sector has sensitive information that they keep because of certain factors such as competition, even governments are like that. In my view, while it is a very good Western notion of being transparent and Western hullabaloo, we as a society have to come to conceptual understanding of our own and move forward.

As far as the ethnic conflict was concerned there was a view that the only was a negotiated peaceful outcome with the LTTE. Successive governments tried that for 30 years which didn’t work and the President took a successive initiative and now we have peace.

I think as a society we have to use our own mechanisms and concepts and for this we need learned interaction by learned individuals like Dr. Harsha De Silva.

Q: Do you think the pace of putting information online can be increased?

De Silva: The pace is not fast enough but that is a subjective thing so it’s going to take some time. As an economist I want an incentive regime in place and the inverse of an incentive as well. For instance in India, if you don’t provide information by a certain day you are fined everyday and if you provide false information you are fined again which is deducted from salaries.

I also read about the directive from the Presidential Secretariat and looking at the final compliance report on the ICTA website, I found something very interesting. The best was the District Secretariat for Kalutara which got a compliance score of 89.5 but the worst was the Department of Information which got zero per cent for compliance! It has not adhered to a single directive by the Presidential Secretariat.

There is no disincentive for not doing it. You can request people to do but if they don’t do it, what is the mechanism by which you are going to compel them to adhere? Unless there is a legislative provision, it becomes difficult to implement. This is one of the reasons why implementation is not as great as one would have expected it to be.

Dissanayake: The fact of the matter is that at least Harsha can go on the website and see that the Kalutara District Secretariat has got 89 per cent so there is a system like that in place. For it to go to the next level, the implementation process is key. Five years ago, Harsha couldn’t go to the website and see such information.

In my own area, Nuwara Eliya, my secretariat has not implemented the reforms – it is also zero per cent. I am very disappointed with that, so much so that one month ago I had a new secretary put in place.

De Silva: So the Department of Information Director’s days are numbered then.

Dissanayake: If I was the decision maker, yes!

Q: Do you think the publishing of the scorecard will result in better behaviour?

Dissanayake: I do agree with Harsha that there needs to be a penalty system in place otherwise our targets are not going to be met. There needs to be a penalty system for public servants when they do not perform. There is no reward for implementing as well. A penalty system for public servants is the need of the hour.

De Silva: The point is that it is transparency you are looking for. By publishing, it created transparency and because he is the Minister, he was able to take that decision but that is just one case. I agree with Navin – we can’t put everything out in the public and that is not what I am requesting. I just want to remind my colleague that this whole programme was started 10 years ago when he was a Minister in the previous Government – e-Sri Lanka was started by the previous regime.

Q: What are the reforms the public administration can use to remove barriers?

Dissanayake: We are looking at institutions – the structural change that is needed to make that organisation efficient. Secondly I am involved in the attitude changing process. I think it’s very important for a public servant to understand that he is being paid by the public and he has a particular duty to perform at his best and for that, we are trying to change the culture of thinking.

It is not an easy thing because the structure of the private and public sectors are totally different. I am happy to say that the young public servants who are coming in are very IT savvy and have a positive approach to things. The perception of the public servants is one of negativity and it’s a herculean task to change this but I think we will see a transformation in about a decade because the training process is very arduous and long.

De Silva: In terms of public sector, we have too many people who get too little pay – you can’t have the cake and eat it. People love working for the Government because their pay is not performance-based. Unless incentive structures are put in place, things will not go the way they are expected. These are political issues. The last time our government tried to curtail the number of jobs in the public sector, we got chased away.

Dissanayake: There has to be a balance. I was involved in the 2002 Government and I saw how dissatisfied people were when the Government issued a directive saying not to employ even one person. On the other hand, we have a very populist president. The recent employment of 16,000 graduates for example. Economically it may not be viable but socially, I saw the happiness and satisfaction that each graduates gets. We are now starting a programme to train them properly. Governments are not there to make money.

Q: The services are online but the volume of transactions is not very high – what are your views on that?

De Silva: You’re right. How many people are connected to the internet via the standard computer – very few whereas the mobile phone is a ubiquitous thing which is always in your pocket. What you need to do is to look at services that can be offered via mobile phones and that will be a much faster avenue to get to where we want to go.

Dissanayake: I also see that as a person who represents a rural area. I see people making payments via mobile. We have to push this to the next level. At the moment there seems to be a rural-urban divide in the ICT sector. If you go into the penetration rates, you see a large numbers from the urban areas. That gap needs to be bridged and for that, the Government has to make very decisive policy decision which it will do.

Pix by Upul Abayasekara