Auroville: E-mail savvy but not e-governance savvy

I inwardly groaned when I realized I had to apply for a fresh Indian passport. India has a notorious reputation for being a “bureaucracy-Raj” (bureaucratic Government), and I was not looking forward to the prospect of being indefinitely entangled in our national red-tape.

My jaw, proverbially speaking, fell open when I realized that, having submitted my application online and then presenting myself for an interview in Chennai, it took exactly 15 minutes for three officers to check and approve my documents, and within 24 hours, I had received a phone message saying that a new passport had been issued and would reach me in two days. (I concede there was a two-hour wait in a crowded office, but this could be explained by it being New Year’s Eve.) The entire process made me realize that we are now in an e-age of governance, and in many government offices in India, e-governance has greatly expedited administrative processes. Such offices, I learned, had improved their efficiency due to successful private-public partnerships. A new initiative by the Ministry of Urban Development, called Smart Cities, envisions introducing e-governance in selected cities in India.

Contrast my experience with another administrative process in Auroville. Last year, Foodlink submitted an application to Auroville’s Town Development Council (TDC) for a site to house a future building. The permission was given. This year, while submitting the application for the building, it turned out that nobody could find the actual site permission. The TDC secretary trawled through all her emails with increasingly sophisticated search strings, but drew a blank. Luckily, the architect had an e-copy, on the basis of which the TDC issued the requested building application. One hears similar stories of poor record-keeping and delayed processes in other key governing groups of Auroville.

Auroville working groups tend to blame delays on lack of human resources. But information technology is designed precisely to expedite such processes with minimal human resources. When I went for my passport application in Chennai, a trained secretary met me at my appointed time, cross-checked the data I had filled in online with the hard copy documents, scanned the documents she needed, and clicked and uploaded a mug-shot, all in less than 10 minutes. In Auroville, generally speaking, for every step of the process, one has to ask the necessary group in person or by email for the guidelines. Sadly, for a community that once led India in being IT-connected, Auroville is now falling behind the curve in technology-assisted governance.

E-governance

E-governance can be defined as the application of information and communication technology to delivering government services as well as facilitating interactions of government-to-citizen, government-to-business and government-to-government. E-governance can greatly facilitate people’s participation in governance, something that is valued in Auroville. At its full potential, e-governance can provide services to the citizens in an efficient and transparent manner, for it is supported by IT-enabled back-end operations and shared databases that allow governing groups to expedite their decision-making processes. For example, at present, when resolving an issue, the Funds and Assets Management Committee (FAMC) asks the concerned party or group via email to provide the necessary documentation, for example, an NOC, as it cannot go online to check if a NOC has been given or not.

We have aspects of e-governance in Auroville, such as the electronic transactions of Financial Services, the online library database that allows for easier follow-up with overdue books, and the use of email in our communication. But, as a community, we are not e-governance savvy. We are more email-savvy (of course, the degree of savviness or email literacy varies among individuals and across groups). Many of us have learnt to use email as a primary mode of communication (a decade ago, people were grumbling about having to deal with issues over email, preferring face-to-face meetings), and applications can be sent by email. But emails are a double-edged sword – they do not always provide efficiency as they are merely an extension of face-to-face discussions, and they can increase one’s workload.

Being e-governance savvy implies having user-friendly online platforms that would allow Aurovilians to upload applications for starting a business unit, stewardship of an asset, or to avail a basic service. This online information would be accessible to all groups over a shared database, and thereby could facilitate their decision-making process. For example, instead of trawling through countless emails for a piece of information, one would merely check the database. Shared online databases also allow for transparency and thereby can increase the citizens’ trust in the governing groups.

E-governance also implies facilitating inter-group work through the use of IT-tools. Some online platforms such as Google Drive and other Google tools, Dropbox, Red Mine etc. are currently used by some groups, such as the Residents Assembly Service (RAS) and FAMC, in their work. Bluelight (an open-source software development unit in Auroville) and the Centre for Scientific Research (CSR) have also developed a prototype online database to share Geographical Information System (GIS) data, which will allow groups to review information about Auroville’s immoveable assets more easily.

The current FAMC is aware of the crucial need for structured, online, shared databases that can be easily synced and updated and plans to collaborate with two Auroville groups – ASyncto (which specializes in creating shared databases) and Aurostat for populating the databases with data and sharing it online. But we lag behind in offering online services to the public.

E-governance as a step in the evolution of organizations

Being e-governance savvy does not, of course, mean that we will reach the Mother’s organizational ideal of replacing “the mental government of intelligence by the government of a spiritualized consciousness (The Mother. The Mother’s Agenda, Vol. 8, 1981: 454) If anything, e-governance or use of IT-enabled tools represent use of IT-enabled tools represents the logical efficiency of the mind.

But it would be a crucial mistake to assume that in our desire to act from a spiritualized consciousness, we can bypass the evolutionary step of a “mental government of intelligence.” As Sri Aurobindo tells us, we can expedite the evolutionary process but not jump the evolutionary stages.

In order to do this, we need good governance of the rational mind and intelligence. I believe the way to do this is by embracing e-governance and use of IT-tools to at least bring about greater efficiency and transparency in our governance.

The Police State: The shadow side of IT-tools

Any article on e-governance would be incomplete without admitting that information technology also potentially allows governments to conduct surveillance of their own citizens without their knowledge and to use, or rather misuse, personal data against individuals. In our age, the power and the reach of the United States Government in conducting mass surveillance has been exposed by the likes of whistle-blowers such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. The online website WikiLeaks, founded by Assange, regularly publishes leaked documents alleging government misconduct. Even in our small town, questions have been raised about who has access to the personal data of Aurovilians collected by the Residents’ Service. And, in India, social activists protested when the Indian Government tried to enforce a biometric id card, Aadhar, on its citizens. These activists allege that mass data collection and surveillance by a government is not so much about protecting its citizens as about allowing the government to stay in power. Use of IT tools can be of immense help in better governance, but IT-tools can also pose risks to democratic governance.

But reflecting on this issue from the perspective of social evolution, I would opine that every evolutionary step has its hazards. How a society navigates the dangers of our current information era is a measure of its collective wisdom, or to be precise, the wisdom of the individuals who govern.

In The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo discusses at length the dialectical relationship between the individual and society, recognizing the difficulty of achieving the evolutionary ideal of a perfect society where the society and the individual exist in unified harmony. As he puts it, a perfect society allows for the perfection of the individual while a perfect society “can_ exist only by the perfection of its individuals_” (1972: 1051).

I am by no means suggesting that e-governance will allow for the emergence of this ideal evolutionary stage. For as Sri Aurobindo says, this evolutionary stage can only be achieved with the unfolding of a deeper knowledge within us that is both integral and unifying.

Bindu serves as a member of the Funds and Assets Management Committee (FAMC). Her views in this article are not representative of FAMC as a group.