E-Governance through Strategic Alliances

Volume 18, Number 4 Article by P K Suri & Sushil December, 2006

E-Governance through Strategic Alliances — A Case of Agricultural Marketing Information System in India ::

Information and communication technology — the underlying platform for e-governance applications — offers an opportunity to go beyond departmental boundaries and evolve a common service delivery channel for citizens. Government organisations in India, however, generally work in isolation and tend to be possessive of the programmes being executed by them due to independent budgetary allocations.

P K Suri and Prof Sunil make an attempt to address this critical issue and arrive at a workable collaborative solution between government departments by presenting the case of the Agricultural Marketing Information System (AMIS). The authors studied four central government organisations with areas of contiguous interest in agricultural marketing and information gathering and dissemination, and overlapping systems, namely the Directorate of Marketing and Inspection with its marketing information system venture AGMARKNET, the Directorate of Economics and Statistics, the National Horticulture Board and the Department of Consumer Affairs. Using the Situation-Actor-Process-Learning-Action-Performance (SAP-LAP) framework to conduct the study, the authors have conceptualised a framework for a strategic alliance among the four organisations to serve their various target groups more effectively without any loss of their strategic autonomy. The expected benefits of the AMIS approach, the likely difficulties in forming the alliance and suggestions to overcome the difficulties have also been brought out. The study is expected to serve planners and policy makers in re-orienting the implementation approach of the NeGP by selectively forming capability based strategic alliances across government organisations for their mutual benefit as well as for the benefit of society at large.

Reprint No 06406b