Daniel Josef M. Aloroy                                                                                                                           1/29/08

ITETHIC                                                                                                                                                 O0B

REACTION PAPER ON ANDHRA PRADESH

                “Wow!” was my very first reaction as I read on the first few paragraphs of the story about the struggling state of India, Andhra Pradesh. “75 million people, 48 percent of whom are illiterate”. I was really amazed by the way their systems were implemented on a place like that. It would be very difficult to implement since most of them are farmers who are not trained on using computers, which may be an issue of user familiarity with the system. Almost all of the people just rely on the funds of the government, which is very ironic since the government itself is corrupt. Thus, making it really worse for the state of Andhra Pradesh.

                By the time the systems are already implemented and running, people already felt major changes with regards to the transactions with the government agencies, most especially the Land Registration Department. It is good to hear that the people are already experiencing better service now that everything is digital and they won’t have to think about where to keep their records through the help of the databases. But still, corruption is the problem they have to face.

                The transaction time a person takes to pay his bills are now dramatically reduced to just within minutes to hours compared to a few days’ processing! I am wondering why a state like Andhra Pradesh can make all their government systems online while a country like the Philippines who are far much better than them cannot completely implement it. I mean, how many people here are very familiar with the use of Internet? What is the ratio of the literate over the illiterate ones? How competitive is our IT industry locally? How many household can afford to buy Internet-capable computers? Although, some agencies are already doing business on clicks, there are still some who are not yet fully automated system dependent. Currently, the automated voting system is still an issue now that the Presidential Elections are already approaching. I mean, how come we cannot do it like the way they do?! We have people who are really good in Systems Analysis and Design and Web Developers who can greatly help in the undertaking of this huge public project. The main problem I think that stuns our progress is that majority of our government officials themselves are corrupt and don’t even care about the people they are serving for.