Governance in Rural India: An Empirical Study

Before the advent of the information technology era, rural India was reeling with problems of unemployment, illiteracy, poverty, lack of communication infrastructure, transport connections and unavailability of the necessary infrastructure. Furthermore, Inefficiency of government, lack of transparency of information on government policies and services and primitive mechanisms of complaint handling, low education level among citizens, prolonged absence of self-sufficiency had created an encompassing dependency of rural citizens on local bureaucrats. Rural citizens used to visit government offices and stand in queues to avail the services and information in the traditional system. In the current era, recognizing the power of e-governance, rural citizens are viewing it as an ideal tool to connect them with government to share their problems. ICTs have opened a new vista for reaching out to the people at the lowest economic level. Currently central and state Governments of India have adopted e-governance to improve the efficiency of the organization and reach out to the citizens, to share knowledge which leads to greater satisfaction. In this paper, the authors have tried to analyze the impact of e-governance service project (TARAhaat) on the life of rural citizens of India. In rural area, citizens are in search of transparency, efficiency, and effectiveness, reliability to get their work done. Authors have coined a quantified term named 'good governance services index'. Transparency, affordability, efficiency, reliability, and effectiveness have been observed to have significant role to improve the quality of the rural life. Good governance services index' represents the quality of the information service in e-governance era.