Thursday, April 28, 2005

Last week, we were called into a meeting by the Secretary of E-Governance for the Election Commission. When we arrived, we were shown to a couch & chairs in his office to wait for a while, as he was stuck in traffic on his way there. A few bits of hilarity ensued.

First, there was a full-blown committee meeting in progress in the other half of the same room. Ten people yelling and shouting and getting overly animated about some strange drawing on a whiteboard... it made it very hard to talk to prep for the meeting. As soon as the Secretary walked in, that group exited, and the room returned to its quiet state so that we could begin our meeting.

However, literally the minute the Secretary (a rather soft-spoken man) started talking, a protest started outside the window... there must have been a hundred people chanting and yelling in Kannada about who knows what. We were on the ground floor and couldn't close the windows because it was too hot -- it was maddness!

Then, he handed us all these glossy brochures his department had made about Bangalore's electronic goverment initiatives... I read the tagline and almost burst out laughing: "Bangalore on e." For anyone not part of Gen X or Y, the term "on e" is slang for "on ecstasy," the hallucinogenic drug. Hip hop stars use it in their songs, as in "trippin on e." Hilarious.

Anyway, I give the Indian government major props for pouring so much money into e-governance initiatives. The nice thing about not having a lot of technology to begin with is that they can more quickly adopt the state-of-the-art stuff that's out now. The US, by contrast, has a lot of path dependence on very old infrastructure that needs to be junked and replaced, but there's too much valuable data to do that. Most records here are still in paper (or don't exist, in the case of black-money land ownership), so the transition will be much easier.

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