ROLE OF ICT IN DEMOCRATIC DECENTRALISED RURAL GOVERNANCE

Indian polity has been striving for establishing democratic goals through modernizing its political and administrative institutions. With a change in development paradigms, the focus of development planning has shifted to participatory development with social justice and equity. It called for decentralized administration, ensuring people's participation in decision making and giving priorities to their local needs. The 73rd Constitutional Amendment Act 1992 made the provision for ensuring local self governance through empowering local governments. Rural e-Governance applications in the recent past have demonstrated the important role the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) play in the realm of rural development. Several eGovernance projects have attempted to improve the reach, enhance the base, minimize the processing costs, increase transparency, and reduce the cycle times. Several states have initiated the creation of State Wide Area Networks (SWAN) to facilitate electronic access of the state and district administration services to the citizens in villages. Against this backdrop, present paper attempts to examine the role of ICT in democratic decentralised rural governance in India.