UPPSC 2024 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 123 of 150

Correct — B, 2 and 3. The item is built so that statement 2 appears in every single option, which means the whole question is decided by rejecting statements 1 and 4 — and both of them are inversions of the standard case for e-Governance. Statement 2, that e-Governance reduces the cost of government, is accepted: once a service is re-engineered as an online transaction, the marginal cost of each additional application, licence renewal or land-record copy falls sharply compared with a counter-based, paper-file process, and the citizen's own cost of travelling to an office repeatedly disappears as well. Statement 3, that it increases citizens' input into government, is also accepted: grievance portals, online consultation on draft rules and policies, feedback and rating built into service delivery, and open data all give the citizen channels of input that a purely counter-based administration never offered. Now the two that are wrong, and wrong in a way the examiner has deliberately made symmetrical. Statement 1 claims e-Governance reduces transparency. The entire justification for ICT in administration runs the other way: publishing rules, forms, tender documents, application status, beneficiary lists and land records online removes the discretionary gatekeeper who once controlled access to information, and it is the same instinct that Section 4 of the Right to Information Act, 2005 codifies when it obliges every public authority to disclose information suo motu, as far as possible through electronic means. Statement 4 claims e-Governance increases bureaucratic red tapism. Again the reverse: the point of process re-engineering, single-window portals and workflow automation is to compress the number of desks a file must cross and to make delay visible and timestamped rather than invisible. So statements 2 and 3 stand, statements 1 and 4 fall, and the answer is (b). A fair caveat for the thinking student: these are the intended and generally documented benefits, and the exam is testing that intent — not a claim that every e-Governance project in India has delivered them.

• (a)2 and 4 — Keeps the correct statement 2 but adds statement 4, that e-Governance increases bureaucratic red tapism. That is the opposite of its purpose. Red tape means multiple layers of approval, repeated paperwork and unaccountable delay; automating the workflow, moving to a single-window online application and timestamping each stage attacks precisely those layers. A student may notice, quite fairly, that badly designed portals can create new frustrations — but that is a criticism of implementation, not a defining feature of ICT-based e-Governance.
• (c)1, 2 and 3 — This is the tempting near-miss, because it correctly includes 2 and 3 and only adds statement 1. But statement 1 asserts that e-Governance reduces the transparency of government, which reverses the central claim made for it. Putting government records, entitlements, tender documents and application status online is what makes administration visible; transparency is the first argument advanced for e-Governance, not a casualty of it.
• (d)2, 3 and 4 — Correctly includes 2 and 3, then spoils the set with statement 4. If you can identify that red tapism is reduced rather than increased, this option is eliminated instantly and you are left with (b). Note the structure of the item: statement 2 is common to all four options, so a candidate short of time should spend the seconds on statements 1 and 4, which are the only ones that discriminate.

e-Governance is the use of information and communication technology to deliver government services, exchange information and carry out transactions between the government and citizens (G2C), businesses (G2B), other arms of government (G2G) and its own employees (G2E). It is not simply computerisation of existing files; the substantive part is process re-engineering — redesigning the procedure itself so that the citizen deals with a single window rather than a chain of desks. India's institutional push came through the National e-Governance Plan approved in 2006, built around a set of centrally, State and integrated mission mode projects, and later through the Digital India programme launched on 1 July 2015.

Questions of this shape are almost never about facts; they are about direction. The examiner takes a well-known list of claimed benefits and flips two of them, betting that a candidate skimming under time pressure will register the familiar word — 'transparency', 'red tapism' — without registering whether the sentence says increased or reduced. The defence is mechanical: read the verb before the noun. Then use the structure of the options. Here statement 2 appears in all four options, so it carries no information; only statements 1, 3 and 4 discriminate, and of those, 1 and 4 are the flipped pair. A second habit worth building is to attach each abstract benefit to a concrete Indian programme, because UPPSC and UPSC both ask the concrete version in other years — transparency to the Right to Information Act's proactive-disclosure duty, cost reduction and reach to the Common Service Centres and to Direct Benefit Transfer, citizen input to online grievance and consultation platforms.

• The National e-Governance Plan was approved by the Union Cabinet in 2006 and organised e-Governance into mission mode projects at the central, State and integrated levels; MCA-21, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs' electronic filing system, was among the earliest and is the standard textbook example.
• The Second Administrative Reforms Commission devoted its Eleventh Report to the subject, titled 'Promoting e-Governance — The SMART Way Forward', SMART standing for Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsive and Transparent government. Transparency is written into the acronym, which is why statement 1 cannot be right.
• e-Governance is conventionally classified by the parties to the interaction: Government-to-Citizen (G2C), Government-to-Business (G2B), Government-to-Government (G2G) and Government-to-Employee (G2E).
• Section 4 of the Right to Information Act, 2005 requires every public authority to maintain its records in a catalogued and computerised form and to publish specified categories of information suo motu, as far as possible through the internet — the statutory backbone of the transparency claim.
• Digital India, launched on 1 July 2015, rests on three declared vision areas: digital infrastructure as a core utility to every citizen, governance and services on demand, and digital empowerment of citizens; DigiLocker, UMANG and the Common Service Centre network sit inside it.

• Reading the noun and missing the verb. 'Reduces transparency' and 'increases red tapism' contain the right keywords pointing the wrong way; in this format the direction of the verb is the whole question.
• Confusing e-Governance with e-Government or e-democracy. e-Government is the technology and infrastructure; e-Governance is the wider process, including citizen participation; e-democracy is the narrower participation-in-decision-making slice.
• Assuming that because a statement is a criticism made in the real world (portals fail, the digital divide excludes people) the exam will treat it as correct. The examiner is testing the intended and documented characteristics of e-Governance, not an evaluation of Indian implementation.

UPPSC asks the conceptual version — a list of claimed features of e-Governance with one or two deliberately inverted — while UPSC almost always asks the concrete version, naming a specific initiative such as MCA-21, DigiLocker, Digital India or the Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme and testing what it does. Prepare both: the four-way G2C/G2B/G2G/G2E classification and a stock of named programmes.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Second Administrative Reforms Commission's report on e-Governance used the acronym SMART. It stands for

  • (a)Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsive and Transparent
  • (b)Systematic, Modern, Accessible, Reliable and Timely
  • (c)Speedy, Measurable, Affordable, Reliable and Technological
  • (d)Simple, Modern, Accountable, Rapid and Transparent

  Answer(a) Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsive and Transparent — the Second ARC's Eleventh Report was titled 'Promoting e-Governance — The SMART Way Forward'; note that transparency is part of the definition itself.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  An online portal through which a State government invites public comments on a draft policy before notifying it is an example of which type of e-Governance interaction?

  • (a)G2B
  • (b)G2C
  • (c)G2G
  • (d)G2E

  Answer(b) G2C — Government-to-Citizen, the interaction between the government and individual citizens; G2B covers business and regulatory filings, G2G inter-departmental exchange, and G2E the government's dealings with its own employees.