In the last year of the Vajpayee government, the ministry of information technology announced an ambitious e-governance programme. This was broken up into 26 projects for different ministries, with a budget on average of Rs 1,000 crore (Rs 10 billion) for each. The vision was grand, the budgets generous, the time-frame five years, and the promise a transformed government that would be unrecognisable from the dysfunctional behemoth that citizens have resigned themselves to. With four of those five years more or less gone, what have we got?

In Gujarat, early this year, Narendra Modi's government issued an order that abolished paper files in the Gandhinagar secretariat. All work in 34 departments would now be done digitally, it decreed -- the implicit promises being speedier processing, better tracking and greater transparency. This is to be extended to the district-level administration as well. Before long, the whole Gujarat government will be a paperless wonder.

At the Centre, the ministry of corporate affairs has digitised the records of 700,000 companies and made all filings and data retrieval on-line. About 25 per cent of all companies were expected to be filing their reports digitally in the first year; in fact, the achievement has been 92 per cent. And the site gets over 4 million hits a day -- by far the largest for any government website. Anyone who remembers the horror of visiting the office of a registrar of companies to search a company's records will know that this is not a small miracle. They say that you can now register a company in three days, instead of 30.

These success stories have generated interest in many state governments. Tata Consultancy Services [Get Quote], which among the IT majors has taken the lead in handling e-governance projects, has helped introduce a digital framework for the value-added tax programme in 19 states (including five in the north-east) -- with a dramatic increase in revenue collection being one claimed result. But these successes hide a much larger failure. For the unhappy truth is that the bulk of the 26 projects have made little or no headway, whether it is setting up a promised 100,000  kiosks across the country for delivering citizen services, or getting approvals digitally from the department of industrial promotion and policy.

One result of the DIPP's failure to make much headway is that India has slipped hugely in the World Bank's list of countries ranked on the ease of doing business. But the even more serious consequence is the loss to the citizen. Andhra Pradesh, which under Chandrababu Naidu introduced the idea of citizen-service kiosks, now has 2,000 of them across the state -- and the state's denizens use them to do as many as a million transactions every month. Bangalore has digitised its land records with equally dramatic results, and the programme is now to extend to all of Karnataka.

These suggest the transformation that is possible in internal government processes, the quality of the citizen interface and the productivity gains, if the national programme makes headway. The prime minister, who claimed a few months ago that unnoticed work has been done on improving governance, should take a closer look at this monumental failure in an area which could have chalked up many success stories.

Another revolution is waiting to happen with the use of RFID (radio frequency identification) technology. In the defence ministry, they use it to track files -- if someone has taken it from one room to the next, you will know. The Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation is using it to tag buffaloes. Remember those stories of banks giving 20 cattle loans with the same cow as security?

Well, that should not happen again. Elsewhere, they are looking at RFID to track railway wagons, cooking gas cylinders and fertiliser bags (you can pay the fertiliser subsidy directly to the farmer who buys the fertiliser, and not to the producing company). Naturally, since there are vested interests that benefit from the status quo, there is resistance to the new technology. But change will come if those at the helm take interest and commit themselves to schedules and targets. After all, the single most important factor weighing down the country today is poor governance standards, and e-governance promises transformational change.