Institutionalization of gender equality and gender justice in e-government requires a strong policy and legislative framework. The Digital India programme is not an effective substitute. A policy framework on e-government must be a comprehensive document that strategically outlines the vital role that e-government can play in redressing women’s historical exclusion from governance and democracy. The Ministry of Women and Child Development should come out with policy guidelines on ‘women’s empowerment and e-government’ to further women’s rights mandates in the information society context.
The programmatic framework of Digital India must be reviewed from a gender perspective, and a concrete strategy for furthering women’s empowerment and gender equality in and through each of the 3 critical pillars of Digital India – service delivery, connectivity and citizen empowerment – must be formulated. The Ministry of Women and Child Development must be central to this exercise. Coordination mechanisms for integration of the strategic directions thus identified into existing components of the programme and collaboration with the Monitoring Committee on Digital India, the inter-ministerial committee that has already been set up, are important.
Gender mainstreaming in e-service delivery should be recognized as a process of designing last-mile service delivery systems that prioritize women’s rights and entitlements in relation to information and services. In the design of such systems, commercial considerations and centralized monitoring should not over-ride the equity imperative. In the case of the Common Service Centre scheme, officials of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology and State Designated Agencies involved in monitoring and review, and village level entrepreneurs involved in day-to-day implementation, need capacity-building in gender-based planning and budgeting and in evaluating gender outcomes.
PPPs in e-government should be based on partnership agreements that clearly specify accountability mechanisms for ensuring service quality and data protection. Penalty / recourse in the event of corporate non-compliance with the terms of such agreements are vital to the foundations of a citizen-responsive and women-friendly e-government.
Developing broadband infrastructure at the last mile must be seen as an exercise in building empowering cultures of Internet use among marginalized women and other socially vulnerable groups. Gendering the implementation of the Bharat-Net/ National Optic Fibre network, especially by involving women’s collectives and organizations in developing last-mile connectivity models is an important way forward. The participation of local government in these models is key to develop creative and context-specific ways to enhance women’s and girls’ access to online spaces and local public services. Use of mobiles by some state governments for SMS updates in food security108 and wage payments in employment guarantee programmes109 show possibilities for effective targeting of women. As mobile-based connectivity improves, it can be a game-changer for bringing women into e-government, more centrally.
Online citizen-consultations must be backed by policy instruments that specify follow-up measures that ensure citizens’ ‘right to be heard’. Historically, women have been marginalized from public policy debates. In developing country contexts, agile design, using hybrid methods, is essential to use emerging opportunities for online participation to bring women and girls into discussions in the public domain.
In digital literacy programmes, curriculum design, module development and teaching-learning processes must be informed by the understanding that digital literacy for women (and men) is not merely an exercise in skills-training, but a strategic pathway for digital citizenship. The involvement of women’s organizations in linking digital literacy to social, economic and political empowerment of women can transform the current focus on technical skills. Successful government-civil society partnerships in this area such as Kerala’s e-jaalakam need to be replicated on a larger scale.
Tackling Violence against Women through techno-solution approaches such as safety-apps may tend to promote simplistic and individual interventions to complex, social realities. There needs to be adequate investment in systemic solutions to enhance institutional capacities to ensure public safety. Data systems for a coordinated response to women’s safety can promote effective policing, inter-agency coordination and women-friendly law enforcement.
The unique identification number-based direct benefit transfers system that India is currently building must be underpinned by a robust privacy and data protection legislation that protects marginalized women.
An effective Open Government Data programme that enables rapid and effective integration of existing databases held by different departments is an urgent imperative in India, for a gender sensitive and citizen-responsive e-government. Such a programme should focus on moving from ‘department-centricity to citizen-centricity’ in the production, publication and use of data-sets, so that such data can be used for local development and women’s empowerment.
Gender-disaggregated data systems in digitalized service delivery, online access, connectivity and public access need much improvement to support gender-responsive e-government programming.
Such as the state government of Chattisgarh for example. In fact, the SMS alerts on delivery of food grains to Fair Price Shops is part of the Mission Mode Project on the Public Distribution System. See PIB(2014), End to end computerisation of good governance, http://pib.nic.in/newsite/printrelease.aspx?relid=114041, Retrieved 26 November 2015.
Such as the state government of Orissa. See http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/mobile-based-wage-payment-for-nrega-workers-114022401028_1.html, Retrieved 26 January 2015.
