G2C services to go from agency-centric to citizen-centric approach

The Department of Information Technology and Telecom (DITT) is looking at making the government to citizen (G2C) services more user friendly for citizens.  An official, DITT said the initial aspect of the G2C service was focused on the technical aspect and on availabilty of the services relevant to the agency.

Of 159 G2C services, only 54 services were found to be in use. The project aimed to deliver 200 plus government services to the citizens ranging across 10 ministries, 12 agencies and 20 dzongkhags, in the fastest and most efficient way.

“The priorities services that citizen need, that would be from citizen prespective rather than assumptions of what citizens need,” Chief ICT Officer, DITT, Jigme Tenzing said.

Giving importance to the services that people use, he said, “We will prioritise the services that are most useful and most required by citizens.”

DITT has targets to make 75 services usable by end of this year, and more than 100 services by the end of 11th Five -Year Plan.

According to Jigme Tenzing, the challenges in delivering the G2C services the maintenance and updating of the back-hand database, where it stores all the previous applications and information on citizens. He said most of the database have inconsistent data and require a lot of effort in connecting to such information.

DITT will be cleaning the data before the services can go online to make sure that correct information is available in delivering services.

“The change is massive transaction, going into government to e-government, there is shift in the major policy. As one has been delivering service face-to-face, but now completely doing so electronically, it is not simple,”Jigme Tenzing said. He said there is the need of change management training as not all civil servants are IT literate.

In line with connectivity, out of 185 community centres (CCs) only 160 CCs were found with internet service provider (ISP) connection. The Chief ICT Officer, DITT said that if the ISP is to be good, it should be directly provided.  But due to the limited cost, the CCs  have the government WAN connected to the districts and the gewogs.

To solve this, Jigme Tenzing said, it requires fine tuning the bandwidth and sharing the bandwidth between the CCs and dzongkhags.

Due to insuffient funds, there could not be multiple connections in CCs, however plans are on to make it accessible to services in times of offline connectivity.

DITT is also planning to facilitate Bhutan Post with business connectivity mechanism which will address offline connectivity, whereby it would be made accessible by taking applications from offline CCs to other CCs or the dzongkhags. The fund for the upgrade has been approved by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) .

However, the delay in the approval of the services by agencies has been put into place to check out if certain agencies are able to deliver services within the turnaround time, then it would be escalated to the head of the agency, Secretary and Prime Minister of Bhutan. DITT also plans to conduct awareness campaign program specific to the services.