Current governance framework is not geared up to handle efficiency requirements of ‘communication’ in the ‘information-age’

Introduction to ‘information age’

‘James Bond’ a fictional character well known in the current society. James Bond is not only a character but it also symbolises the current trends in society and whatever which is related to the society. The secret agent is a spy for whom the only important thing is the information. He works, lives and even risks his life for getting information. His magnificent tools like his micro computing gadgets, hidden communication devices, his modern spy watch etc showcase the presence of information and related technologies in our world. Not only James Bond but the series like Mission Impossible, matrix, XXX etc. also showcase the same trend.

                                      James Bond Series Poster

The above examples signify the importance of information in the current society where everyone is hungry for information. Today we see that we are more interested in Facebook updates rather than our food, children are busy in internet surfing than playing in the fields. Advent of a number of media channels has also increased our hunger to know more about the world outside and environment surrounding us. Information is changing the way we live, in the ancient times it was agriculture then came the era

industrialization to shape our lives but in the modern society it is information. Information technology has changed our world in many ways now we don’t have to mechanically watch for updates, our mobile does this simply, our clothes are being washed by fully automatic machines, we are served food cooked in micro processer based ovens, we are driving the cars controlled and monitored by a chip, even our health is also continuously monitored by the tech gadgets. The influence of all these gadgets and modern technology has given the current period of time a name as ‘information age’. Let’s define information age in more detailed form.

The Information Age (also known as the Computer Age, Digital Age, or New Media Age) is a period in human history characterized by the shift from traditional industry that the industrial revolution brought through industrialization, to an economy based on information computerization. The onset of the Information Age is associated with the Digital Revolution, just as the Industrial Revolution marked the onset of the Industrial Age.

During the information age, the phenomenon is that the digital industry creates a knowledge-based society surrounded by a high-tech global economy that spans over its influence on how the manufacturing throughput and the service sector operate in an efficient and convenient way. In a commercialized society, the information industry is able to allow individuals to explore their personalized needs, therefore simplifying the procedure of making decisions for transactions and significantly lowering costs for both the producers and buyers. This is accepted overwhelmingly by participants throughout the entire economic activities for efficacy purposes, and new economic incentives would then be indigenously encouraged, such as the knowledge economy.

The Information Age formed by capitalizing on the computer microminiaturization advances, with a transition spanning from the advent of the personal computer in the late 1970s, to the Internet's reaching a critical mass in the early 1990s, and the adoption of such technology by the public in the two decades after 1990. This evolution of technology in daily life, as well as of educational life style, the Information Age has allowed rapid global communications and networking to shape modern society.

Now we can say that in this age when we start any work and when we take any initiative we have to keep in mind the considerations of this information age. We cant be slow, we cant be dubious in our works when a hidden spy is watching us every time, we have to compete and coordinate with computers to create a new way in this era. This information age needs radical changes in our work patterns and styles. Now we move on to discuss the impact of information age in communication and the capacity to be developed in governance framework for its effective implementation.

Communication and the age of information 

Communication is a much talked about subject in the current society. It can be defined as the activity of conveying information through the exchange of ideas, feelings, intentions, attitudes, expectations, perceptions or commands, as by speech, non-verbal gestures, writings, behaviour and possibly by other means such as electromagnetic, chemical or physical phenomena. It is the meaningful exchange of information between two or more participants. In simple terms 

"Communication is the process in which two parties convey a message with the desired meaning to each other for the fulfilment of some goal".

Communication is required for everything in our life. It is needless to say that effective communication can make you progress by leap and bounds while poor communication can leave you years back from the mainstream of society. Developing effective communication systems in this information age is a must for every society. Communication is not important only for the individual progress but communication is also responsible for the development of society as a whole. The following paragraph shows the development aspect of communication.

Development communication is an example of the social benefits of the communication. Development communication can spread the awareness about progressive changes that can lead the poor to a path of progress. It is basically the use of communication to facilitate social development. Development communication engages stakeholders, establishes conducive environments, assesses risks and opportunities and promotes information exchanges to bring about positive social change via sustainable development.

Development communication techniques include information dissemination and education, behaviour change, social marketing, social mobilization, media advocacy, communication for social change and community participation. Development communication has been labelled the Fifth Theory of the Press, with "social transformation and development," and "the fulfilment of basic needs" as its primary purposes. The Governments of developing countries are using this phenomenon of development communication to accelerate themselves in the race of progress.

In the present age of information supremacy it becomes essential to update our communication systems keeping in mind the information effect. We can harness many benefits by the use of information technology in our communication systems.

By the use of effective information technology based communication systems we can increase the productivity of our human resource, effectiveness of health systems, reach and quality of educational setups, control over crime and related activities, growth in economy , openness and accountability in political institutions, swiftness in judiciary and what not.

Communication Scenario in India, Governance and the Information age

India is a country which is growing rapidly after the IT boom of the starting decade of 21st centuries. Initially when the computerization process was to start, there were protests in the name of ‘swadeshi’ movements to stop it. But with the era of globalization we learned that without computer we are going nowhere. The advent of computer changed India in many ways and is still changing it. In India communication systems which were developed by the British are still in use today which are very complex and involve a lot of manpower to be handled. The governance in India, a successful example of democracy is still doubtful when it comes to communication systems. Old age methods of office procedures, communication systems, public relations, policy notifications etc have always kept India in back foot when we judge it on the basis of effective governance elements.

Elements of effective governance

On the basis of above shown elements of good governance elements we can analyse the incapacities and challenges of communication in our governance system.

Accountable: Accountability makes a governance system more responsible towards the citizens. In India we see that government launches a number of policies for the poor people and the backward section of the society but due to communication problems they result in failures. Government initializes a number of projects for an area but due to absence of proper feedback channels often the projects don’t impress the people. Presence of corrupt officials in the implementation chain cuts off the people from the government; this leads to lack of accountability in the system. In the current governance framework the lack of accountability in major policy sectors asks for a reform in the communication system of the Government. There are some steps taken in this regard which need to be discussed here.

Government has tried to implement the solutions like citizen charters so that citizens get a way to know their rights and the process to get their work done from a Government office. But here we also see the absence of proper communication methodology, when we visit a government office often we see a poorly formatted citizen charters which are about to be thrown in scrap. The language used in these types of sign boards is very complex to be understood by a common man. What help will this charter provide if it itself is a problematic thing to comprehend? Information age is not only about providing information swiftly but it also needs clear interpretation of the message by the receiver. We cannot deny that Government is communicating with the people but it’s the wrong choice of communication channel along with the unskilled communicators which makes the Government communication a complete.

Another example we can quote is the “Jaago Graahak jaago” campaign by the Government. Government media and even the private media always advertise the presence of consumer forums to safeguard the rights of consumers. When we look over the success of this campaign we find that it has tried to make people aware of their rights but eventually when it comes to implementation only a few of us are willing to enter the consumer forum courts. The campaign has told us about consumer forums in small ads, instead it should have created some small documentaries teaching the people about the act properly and making people know that it’s not a court.

                                 Jaago grahak jaago, website page

Apart from the TV or radio ads how many channels are there by which we can get knowledge about these types of campaigns. In mass media channels it is easy to play a trumpet but when it comes to personal interaction often the Govt department fails. Many Government offices don’t employ a full time public relations officer and then it becomes very hard for a common man to get his queries answered. Instead of getting the answers he travels from one table to another remembering the name of Government officers who played with him like carom coins. When these types of practices are there when proper information is not available for a common man how can a Government boast about accountability.

Transparent: Transparency is the basic need of a democratic system. In India we always see big scams and scandals due to the lack of transparency in the system. Transparency means that all the transactions of any type political,social, economical etc should be open for public. The mass should know where their tax money has been spent and what a particular department is doing with the money and powers allotted to it? A democratic country like us needs more transparency because in the end lies the people who are affected by the decisions taken by their representatives.

In our country we regularly see big corruption scams’ news hitting the mass media. In many of the cases it happens because the public is unaware of the works undertaken by a government department. The closed system of governance where a department doesn’t shares his projects, aims and allotments with the public regularly, then sooner or later it is infected by the virus of corruption. If a public department publishes its works along with the financial transactions then a hidden pressure to maintain transparency is exerted on the officers to be honest and sincere for their work.

For creating an atmosphere of transparent Governance, Government of India came up with the Right to Information act. Right to information act empowers people to know about government decisions and policies which are generally kept hidden by the government agencies.

                                 Transparency is a function of public watching the expenditure

Indeed RTI is a great tool to enhance transparency but we should ponder over the fact “is RTI really necessary for all the information?” In a democratic country where each rupee counts, is it really desirable that the information only be disclosed when somebody wants it. In India many of the scams came into news only when an RTI application was filed for them. Many of the RTI activists are murdered in complete day light because they questioned for information which should have been made public earlier to check the involved corruption.

It’s the biggest irony of a country which boasts about being top runner in Information age. The Government should try to increase the transparency by providing the data directly to public through websites or through news reports so that a pressure is created on the officials for not involving in corrupt practices. Today we wait for an RTI to disclose a scam which has already gobbled up public money, but the day when the information will be kept open itself without RTI then it will be very difficult for the corrupts to move the public’s cheese.

Responsive: The effectiveness of a governance system is measured by the degree of its responsiveness i.e. how quickly it responds to the pleas of its masses. Effective communication system helps the government and related governance bodies in connecting with the public. New communication media like social networking etc are providing a fast and reliable platform for the government to connect with the people. Social media like Facebook, twitter etc help in communicating the news to and fro from the government to media and vice versa.

In India about 25 crores people are using Internet and 10 crores from them are active on the social networking sites. By the use of these social

networking sites government can easily harness the potential of internet to communicate with the public. Various agencies of governance have started to use these platforms but their effectiveness is still in question.

Generally the approach of government is top to down, i.e. like a loud speaker sending sound waves here and there without even noticing the reactions by people.

Currently the use of social networking sites is limited to this approach only, government agencies are using these platforms just like news channels for feeding the public with data and figures. Instead they should try to develop it as a two way medium where public can also take part actively. Government sends out the message for public to send its responses but how many officers have it employed to listen to these messages. Only a single computer terminal getting the responses from public can’t serve the big purpose of two way communications.

Official page of the Prime Minister Office-2013, India.

Some of the major achievements of the Government are setting up of the call centres for major public related organizations like railways etc. but this practice needs to be spread through out the public organizations which have a stake in influencing the public lives. Government can increase its responsiveness only when it has proper channels for listening to public pleas.

Equitable and Inclusive: Being equitable means ‘fair to all parties as dictated by reason and conscience’ and inclusive stands for ‘Including much or everything; and especially including stated limits’. Here we will judge the government communication framework on the basis of equity and inclusiveness. In current scenario when we look onto the government communication media we find that the content is generally provided by experts. The experts have definite opinion on some issues and the government takes that as the final word and bases all its policies on it. In a democratic country it’s not advisable to have opinions and suggestions from only a limited set of audience. These types of approach can hindrance the growth of some segments of society while enhancing the chances of growth for others.

In his famous book “every body loves a good drought” P. Sainath has studied the impact of one way communication problems in the governance framework. Among the pieces that best illustrate this tragicomedy of mis communication is a story from Naupada in Orissa, in which Sainath tells of Mangal Sunani’s delight when the government gifted him a cow as part of a poverty-reduction scheme. Officials told Sunani that he and scores of others in the district (who were also given cows) would prosper after their animals were impregnated with the semen of a Jersey bull, thereby producing high-yield cows and other bulls. The officials even gave Sunani an acre of land for free, so that he could grow fodder for the cattle, and offered to pay him the minimum daily wage to work the plot. To ensure that the cows didn’t accidentally mate with a local bull, all the male cattle in the region were castrated.

Two years later, the community only had eight crossbred calves; many other calves had died shortly after they were born because the crossbred cows were susceptible to disease. By then, the local, hardier species of cattle had been wiped out because of the castration drive and the cow herders were forced to buy milk from the market. When they attempted to grow vegetables on the patches of land they’d been given, officials were annoyed: they wouldn’t be paid their wage if they raised anything but fodder, the villagers were warned.

                                 This interesting piece shows that how officials did not mind getting a word from the locals before implementing the policy. If they had a two way communication system and listened to the local villagers there, they shouldn’t have implemented such a policy which left the village in a man made drought.

Similar to this when it comes to tribal welfare government again listens to what the experts have to say. They enforce the modern style of development on the tribes which they are not ready to accept. In this type of cases government should adopt an inclusive style of communication where both the implementing party and the beneficiaries share a stage to project what they want and what should be done? When there is a two way communication officials are more aware about the needs of locals and the locals also feel satisfied that they have a role to play in their development, that too in their own way.

Effective and Efficient: A government is said to be effective and efficient when the actions taken by it are carried in the right frame of time and for the right people. The best example for this is the case of disaster management. A disaster management plan is said to be effective when there are proper actions in place before, during and after the disaster. It is efficient only when it is executed properly. Now we have to evaluate

whether our current governance system holds good when it comes to effective and efficient use of communication or not. Moving on with the same example of disaster management we can get a view about effectiveness of communication in this field.

In India national disaster management act came on being only in 2005 when a great Tsunami hit the southern coast of India. Now this time too the government relied only on the experts to develop the infrastructure needed for the implementation of this act. Costly equipments, alarms, quake secured offices were put up for dealing with the emergencies but this time too local people were ignored. Government did not hear what the locals have to say about this, the government thought that the plans by the experts were the only thing that could mitigate the disaster situation. Here also the approach was once again top down, in the case of disasters there is again the hustle and bustle to spread the information without getting the feedback from the locals.

When we talk to the local people of Andaman and Nicobar, Tamil Nadu etc they say that Government is really trying to fight with the disasters but they are not using the right way. They never care about what we say, if they will listen to us, they could be better prepared for the disasters. They provide relief during the disasters by what they think is right for us but they never care what we actually want. Clearly this type of approach again raises questions about the communication strategies used by the Government in the most important issues like disasters.

In the information age, the government should act not only as a source of information but it should also act as the gatekeeper. The efficiency and effectiveness of our communication systems also depends on its gate keeping power. There are some situations when there is a chance of crisis due to rumours only and to mitigate this type of situation an effective communication crisis plan should be there.

In the year 2012 there was a rumour in Bangalore, which said attacks on people from North Eastern states were being planned by the local people. It resulted in mass exodus of the people from north eastern states from Bangalore and it put a heavy burden on the traffic and the railways. This situation developed due to a single SMS received by a person from the north eastern state who forwarded the message to other persons. The panic that caught the people could have dealt best, if the Government was able to spread the information of this SMS being a rumour, quickly.Monitoring of sensitive information is also very necessary to provide and effective and efficient government framework.

Follows the rule of law: Laws are the basic principles guiding a state. To run a state in complete harmony with justice for all we need suitable laws based on our culture and values. For a good Government it is necessary that it establishes those practices that enforce the rule of law, and it should also monitor that there are no misuse of any law in any sense. In the current information age, with the advent of knowledge and technology there is a great demand to amend our laws so as to make our laws compatible with the current world.

In this regard Government has come out with many new laws that govern our behaviour in the information age. Some of these laws are directly related to communication and need to be carefully implemented. The problem with these new laws is that they are developed by experts but in the absence of skilled executive authority these laws sometimes become a problem for the society. One such act in the modern India is the section 66 A of the IT act, which came on news only, when it was misused by the authorities to curb the freedom of speech on the social media sites.

The information age and its citizens demand such a governance framework which is highly updated to work with the fast internet environment. Everyday internet frauds, hacks etc are increasing rapidly and our cyber security experts are not able to check this menace for the online properties and identities. Effective mechanisms are required in Governance framework which would establish the rule of law even in the virtual world of Internet. Things like online bullying can be controlled only when government has tough laws and equally skilled man power to implement that. Hence we see that in the information age to enforce the rule of law our current governance framework needs revamping.

Participatory and consensus oriented: The last thing here which I want to discuss is about the participation and consensus issues in a democratic government. A Government could be termed as fully democratic if it provides all its citizens a way to participate in the development process so that the outcome is based on consensus. The first question that came up to my mind while thinking about this aspect is if our system is fully democratic and if there are proper channels for getting the feedback from public then why do we have frequent protests in India? We often see that a large number of protests are covered by media which are generally a form of resentment being shown by the public.

We have protests opposing some big development projects, some cruel laws, and some issues where the public was not considered a stake holder etc. The rise naxalism, separatism, insurgency in India can be related the problems in our communication system. Political scientists in the country believe that a large number of youth is dissatisfied with the system because it doesn’t get a proper channel to communicate its demands and needs to the upper layers of Government.

Many a times Government wants to implement welfare projects for the people who are in dire need of such policies but after the implementation absence of proper feedback channels ruins the whole effort.

Protests are a common scene in India

The corrupt officials know that there is no any method for the common man to raise his voice and be heard by the top officials so they play their cunning games to loot the public money. We can write letters emails etc to our government agencies but the absence of skilled employees to handle this communication becomes the major hurdle.

There are some other issues in Governance which we need to address in the current era of information age. With the advent of internet and computers we have also noticed a rapid increase in adultery, a large number of porn sites are being operated over the internet which is polluting young minds.

There are many arguments which support these sites quoting the reason that it depends on the discretion of viewer what to watch and what not to, but how can an eight year old kid develop a right discretion. To tackle this type of issues government must communicate with the guardians and teachers effectively. By getting the right inputs from the direct audiences it will be easier for the Government to check the spread of this menace.

Conclusion: We have discussed in detail the obstacles that are in our current government communication framework. By the above analysis we can say that experts opinion are needed to decide the right way of development but to go for inclusive development we need inclusive communication. Getting inputs from the beneficiaries before and after the implementation of a project is the important aspect which the government agencies need to consider in this information age. This will increase the productivity of projects along with enhancing transparency and accountability in the system.

Communication channels should be used effectively not only for informing people but also for developing their capabilities. Shaping the information, the right way before it becomes public is necessary in today’s digital world. Monitoring information and handling communication crisis effectively is a much needed quality in our governance framework. A rapid increase in participatory communication will build a consensus oriented Governance system. The emergence of community radios is such a good example of this participatory communication which supplements the pace of development.

In the information age when practices like etrade are becoming more common and the cases of internet bullying are also increasing a need for more regulatory laws is needed. In the absence of proper laws e marketing could destroy local retailers and the pricing mechanism being followed in the Indian economy. To prevent online frauds effective and proactive cyber security teams are needed.

To conclude, we can say that to grow with the information age we need to revamp our communication channels. We need to change those old age practices where time delay put a question mark on most of the policies; we need to move with the tech savvy population holding the hand of those left behind due to digital divide. Only the inclusive style of communication can change the future where corruption could be fully rooted out.

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