Digital India: Is It Digital Enough? An Investigation Into E-Government Policy Gaps And Opportuniets From a Digital Divide Perspective

Abstract

There is widespread recognition of digital divide and its repercussions on E-government, despite that gaps at the intersection of the two exist. This paper studies a sample population from Guwahati, India, to gain insights into the prospective users’ relationship with technology, the internet and the e-government. This is done so by interviewing 50 randomly sampled candidates and at the end of which the importance of social support emerged. Strong social supports in this group acted as enablers and trouble-shooters. The availability of such support helped created positive experiences, while the absence creates roadblocks for new or weaker users. The paper concludes with the identification of 3 functions of the social support – Gateway, Roadblock and Proxy User, and additionally recommends leveraging these relationship while e-government policy implementation