Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Society Next

Through these pages, I intend to share with you my views about some vital societal issues and seek your valuable feedback. These concepts form part of an alternative social philosophy - developed by me. These emerged out of intensive thought processes spanning over 30 years. Most ideas do run contrary to common perceptions and would need an open mind and patient reading. You will soon find that these add up to a completely new societal framework that promises greater happiness, harmony and prosperity for individuals and society.

While I am compiling these ideas into a book, a preview of a few important viewpoints appears in the articles listed below. I propose to maintain an ordered list of all my posts on different subjects in this page to make it easy for you to link to my writings


The role of social philosophy in society

This article attempts to provide an understanding of why do we do what we do and the role played by factors such as faiths and beliefs, likes and dislikes, values and weaknesses in our daily life. It also advocates that a study of social philosophy is necessary for resolving conflicts between the desires and decisions of individuals and societies. It also emphasises the need for validating our personal ideas and idiosyncrasies towards minimising frictions and stress in personal and social relationships. [ More ]

Egovernance for Good Governance

Through these pages I look forward to learning, sharing and discussing the knowledge needed for developing good egovernance applications that pass tests of Timeliness, Efficiency, Security, Transparency, Equity and Responsibility (TESTER). It is also an advocacy initiative to promote the use of innovative database architecture for handling complex data sets and adoption of standardised parameters and classifications. The main objective of these articles is to help governments in the selection and use of ICT and software solutions, which enhance productivity, bring down governance costs and promote economic progress and social wellness

Support Egovernance for Good Governance

It is time that the governments wake up or are woken up to the urgent need for adopting full scale egovernance for, the benefits that egovernance promises are far greater and more valuable than what economic liberalization brought in. Worldwide adoption of intelligent egovernance systems could yield more prosperity than what could occur under the new international trade regimes of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Quite easily, at least 35 per cent of the transaction costs can be eliminated by the introduction of egovernance. Civil society organizations have a major role to play in urging the governments to adopt egovernance faster than the pace at which they liberalized economic policies. Only egovernance applications can meet the long standing demands of civil society organizations efficiently. [ More ]

Egovernance Case Study: India's First Regulatory Compliance Monitoring System

Building efficient egovernance solutions is no mean challenge. In fact, there are hardly any software solutions in core areas of governance like regulatory compliance monitoring. Indian Mines Safety Information System (IMSIS) is India’s first regulatory compliance monitoring application. It is also a showcase of what egovernance could do for good governance. It provides compliance monitoring framework with respect to the Mines Act, 1952; Mines Rules, 1955; Coal Mines Regulations, 1957; Mines Rescue Rules, 1985 and Indian Electricity Rules, 1956.IMSIS is currently in use at the Directorate General of Mines Safety (DGMS). It provides end to end solution for compiling all the data collected during the mandatory safety inspections of coalmines in to a structured database and automating the generation of statutory reports and violation letters and also tracking the initial and follow up actions taken against each violation. [ More ]

Innovative Database Architecture for Egovernance

Egovernance applications generally involve many to many relationships. Each application has a need for not only identifying each entity inside the application uniquely but also embedding the hierarchical relationships within such entities as part of such unique identification codes. Egovernance applications require what may be called as a hierarchically relational data model
Conventional architecture could no doubt be used to deal with such data needs but at great cost and considerable loss in efficiency. The new architecture incorporates two innovations, which help handle even the most complex data sets with ease and economy (View illustration. See Chart) [ More ]

Egovernance for ensuring security

What has been the net outcome of all the money that we have spent so far in the name of strengthening intelligence and beefing up security? Are we feeling more secure? Are we still going to rely on moles to gather intelligence and save our lives? Can we afford to keep on building fortresses that are impregnable? How much more should we need to pay for security?
Only good egovernance systems could help translate all the information that is routinely collected by governments in to a reservoir of knowledge. The effectiveness with which such knowledge bases could be used to minimize the lead-time or response time would certainly depend on the quality of databases. [ More ]