The President of India has declared 2010-20 as India’s ‘decade of innovation’. The Prime Minister, addressing the National Development Council on July 24th 2010, said, “Finally, I would like to emphasize that as we proceed with our ambitious plans, which require substantial deployment of resources, we must keep in mind the need to spur innovation as a driver of national performance…The Government too must innovate both at the Centre and in the States. There is a strong case for each institution in government to try to re-invent itself to reflect changing needs and circumstances and changing expectations.”
Citizens’ changing expectations of the Government, and their impatience with the slow pace of Government reform, became manifest in the Anna Hazare movement which demanded immediate response from Government’s legislature, cabinet, and bureaucracy. The movement was remarkably successful in mobilizing masses of people using innovations of 21st century social media technologies. Social media was also used in the 16th century to mobilize masses, as The Economist (December 17th-30th 2011) explains. Martin Luther created a viral communication campaign to mobilize opinion against the Pope and the Catholic Church. The printing press, just recently invented, played a role in enabling the campaign. But the principal innovation, The Economist explains, was in the process of communication, which used citizens’ channels for spreading around the news and views laterally and very speedily. The point to note is that processes can be innovated even without technology. Indeed Mahatma Gandhi’s innovation of non-violent process, to challenge non-responsive governments, long before the Internet, has been deployed in many movements across the world, including Martin Luther King’s civil rights campaign, the Prague Spring in Eastern Europe, and lately the Jasmine Revolution in Arab countries (which combined non-violent protest with the use of internet-based communication as did the Anna Hazare movement).
I use these examples of innovations in movements of change to first introduce a framework for innovation in government, and later explain innovations required to improve the quality of governance in India.
An Innovation Framework
Innovations in a system can be made at three levels: procedures of work, processes for producing results, and the structures of institutions. Procedures execute the steps in a process. Whereas process design determines what steps are necessary, and in what order, to improve outcomes. Overall, structures of institutions enable—and constrain—the processes that can be performed within them.
Information technology can improve the performance of procedures. It can automate them, thereby improving their accuracy, their efficiency, and the speed at which they can be carried out. For example the submission of an application electronically is much faster and more accurate than a manual process. At its basic level, ‘e-governance’ is computerization of procedures previously performed manually. It enables accurate records of transactions and easier access to information by citizens too.
The first wave of improvements of efficiencies, by the use of technology in businesses and governments in the USA and elsewhere, was limited to automation of procedures without changing process design. (Just as the first automobiles in the early 1900s merely placed an engine where the horse used to be in the traditional design of a horse carriage.) The next wave of improvements through deployment of information technologies, in the 1990s, focused on ‘process re-engineering’. It realized that much larger gains could be made by crafting new configurations of processes, just as the second wave of automobile designs focused on the engine and transmission and not the horse any more, to improve the systems’ performance. (Recollect again that the impact of Martin Luther’s and Mahatma Gandhi’s movements of change came from changes in the architectures of processes of communication and mobilization, not technologies.) We need to focus much more on process re-engineering within government than we have done so far in our drive for ‘e-governance’. As the business sector discovered, the realization of these larger opportunities requires process engineers, not merely IT specialists. Moreover since change in processes requires reallocation of tasks, good ‘change management’ becomes an essential part of an innovation campaign.
The third and most fundamental level of change comes from an analysis of the purpose of the institution and from rethinking what processes it needs to fulfill its purpose. Democratic government, in its classical definition, is government of the people, for the people, by the people. Therefore, processes are required to ensure that government can perform all three functions properly. Universal franchise with elections regularly and fairly conducted can ensure that the government is of the people. India scores very high marks for its abilities in this regard, and indeed is an international benchmark. But Government has to be for the people too, and must be accountable to them. Indian citizens’ unfulfilled expectations led to the RTI movement, and thereafter to movements for rights to service (citizen’s charters) and anti-corruption. Finally, government must be by the people. The 73rd and 74th amendments to the Indian Constitution, passed twenty years ago, remain implemented only in letter and barely in spirit.
To fulfill government’s function of accountability, new processes have to be installed, like the RTI, citizens’ charters, and many others. These processes will require the delineation of procedures, and many of those procedures can be made more efficient, accessible, and transparent with information technology. For empowering people to govern themselves, institutional arrangements must be changed, and new institutional abilities developed at the grass-roots levels’, and at higher levels too where the purpose of institutions must shift to enable rather than to micro-manager and control. This requires the ‘reinvention of every institution in government’ that the Prime Minister pointed to in the National Development Council. It also expands the agenda of ‘e-governance’ from introduction of ‘electronic’ government, as it has been by and large so far, to the creation of ‘empowered’ governance.
Innovations for improving governance
This brings me to the specific domain of governance in which government must become really innovative now. Effective Government for the people requires much better communication between Government and the people. Government functionaries and people’s elected representatives must listen to people more effectively than they have, and they must communicate to them more credibly too. Governments’ communication processes are stilted and slow. They are out maneuvered by the more nimble, viral, and less costly too, communication processes of civil society movements. The break-down in effective communication between government and people enabled the Anna movement to appear more trustworthy to people than their elected Government. Left wing extremist movements have also proven to be much more effective than government at communicating with people and enrolling them.
The performance of government and its ministries and agencies must be gauged by the outcomes produced for people. Whereas all government institutions must consult with people before setting their performance targets and thereafter account to people regularly, when the Results Framework Document (RFD) process was first introduced in the central government in 2009, ministries and departments mostly set targets for expenditure, internal milestones, and improvement of procedures. Therefore an innovation was introduced into the RFD process that required all ministries and departments to conduct good stakeholder consultations before developing their performance indicators.
India is diverse. It must be democratic. It is likely to require coalitions to govern it. Many reforms and policies of Government are presently stalled because, while some stakeholders support them, others, fearful of negative fall-outs, oppose. Therefore consensus must be obtained before the reforms can proceed. The speed with which consensus will be obtained and the quality and sustainability of the consensus will determine when results will be obtained. Innovations are required in processes to obtain consensus which, in diverse, open, pluralistic India is a greater challenge than in more homogenous societies. Information technologies can make the task of consulting easy on one hand—by providing reach to millions of people. And they make it more difficult on the other hand—by inundating the policy-maker with opinions. How does one make sense of it all? Innovative solutions must be found to these challenges of communication and consensus-seeking. Insights into such processes can be obtained from our own successes and failures, as well as the experience of other democratic countries.
In conclusion, Government’s innovation agenda must have an external dimension and an internal one too. Externally, Government must stimulate the creation of a vibrant innovation eco-system in which business and social entrepreneurs can flourish. Internally, democratic governments in the center and in the states require innovations in their own institutions and processes too, as explained here, to fulfill their core purpose of providing good government of the people, for the people, and by the people.