دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی عوامل موثر در ادراک فساد در دریافت خدمات دولتی توسط پلتفورم های دولت الکترونیکی - امرالد 2017

1. Introduction

For any society, corruption has been regarded as inimical (Foo, Wu and Chin, 2014). Ensuring transparency and accountability in government is important to combat corruption (Krishnan, Teo and Lim, 2013; Oye, 2013) given that corruption has been adversely impacting the growth of developing economies (Singh et al., 2010). Egovernment is one of the ways for facilitating the transition of a developing economy to a developed one (Ciborra, 2005). Therefore, governments have been adopting the information technology (IT) for providing better public services (Ndou, 2004) to ensure greater transparency and public accountability (Zhao and Xu, 2015). Furthermore, egovernment initiatives help in checking corruption, red tape, bureaucratic inefficiency and ineffectiveness, nepotism and cronyism (Cullen, 2009; Fourie, 2010; Garcia-Murillo, 2013; Hasan, 2004; Mistry and Jalal, 2012; Naz et al., 2006; Neupane et al., 2014; Pathak et al., 2009; Singh et al., 2010). In India, e-government initiatives have been initiated in many government departments in order to bring about transparency in public services and build trust of the citizens. In this line, our study seeks to assess the extent to which India’s latest e-government initiative- “Digital India”-has been successful in curbing corruption from the citizens’ perspective.

7. Conclusion

Our study sought to underscore user perception of corruption in government services post-launch of the “Digital India” programme. Despite the fact that the respondents were drawn from three “Best Performing Districts” as per the Good Governance Week report of 2015, they perceive that corruption prevails in government. Our study lends contribution to the extant literature veering around the impact of digitalization of public services and their efficacy in meeting public needs in an effective, efficient and economic way. Our study responded to the call of ascertaining the issues, prospects and challenges of e-government in India (Alathur et al., 2012; Alathur et al., 2014). As an anti-corruption strategy, e-government initiatives (Andersen, 2009) in the form of “Digital India” need a more robust and planned approach for ensuring that its advantages permeate across the length and breadth of the country.

Finally, our study holds merit in contributing to the “institutional theory” which is based on how an innovation or system needs to be institutionalized for its sustainability (Kim, Kim and Lee, 2009). As per our findings, the anticipated goals of ensuring transparency in government are not being met. We concur that: “Innovations that are widely diffused (taken-for-granted) within society are described as institutionalised. Conversely, those that pose a disruptive threat or become distrusted, fail to gain traction and are abandoned” (Currie, 2009: 70). Implicitly, we aver that if users’ confidence and trust in “Digital India” initiative weakens, this e-government innovation will not get institutionalized in the country.