Making E-Government Projects in Developing Countries More Successful and Sustainable Lessons from Two Case Studies from India

Evidence from e-government projects in developing countries suggests that most of these projects either fail completely or succeed only partially in meeting their objectives. How can these projects be made more successful and sustainable over relatively longer periods of time? In this paper, I examine this issue in the context of lessons drawn from two ICT based government to citizen (G2C) and citizen to government (C2G) projects in India. The projects that I examine are: Gyandoot, a G2C and C2G project aimed at delivering a host of government services to the people in Madhya Pradesh, and the e-government component of the Sustainable Access in Rural India (SARI) project, a G2C and C2G project in Tamil Nadu aimed at delivering government services to the public. I examine the sustainability of these projects and argue that in addition to analyzing the critical factors responsible for success or failure of a project using a cross-sectional analytic framework, it is also important to examine the sustainability using a longitudinal framework along five dimensions: financial, cultural/social, technological, political/institutional, and environmental. I conclude that ensuring a project’s sustainability along all these longitudinal dimensions is critical to its long-term success in meeting its objectives. I also draw some general lessons from these cases that are critical to the long term success of such projects. I conclude that successful e-government projects require full back-end computerization to improve service delivery, effective disintermediation, and locally relevant content in the local language. Creating suitable ICT infrastructure and coordination among supporting institutions for service delivery are also very important.