3. Developmental Aspirations and Networked Readiness

The world is a network of wires for most of us in the universities and policy sciences. Development has become data based made available through these many networks. The challenge of development is about managing networks which has also been one of the MDG located in the eighth place. The 2012 MDG Task Force laments for the miserable performance of nations on the achievement of this goal. ICT facilitates the networking process. But how well are countries placed to network and develop into knowledge economies? Development and ICTs are related and nothing proves it better than the rising GDP of countries as the score on ‘Networked Readiness Index’ (NRI) goes up. NRI is propensity of countries to exploit opportunities for bringing development. Granularity of metadata which serves as a design for the purpose of studying e-governance in different countries has become finer over the last decade. From the 2003 UN Survey woven around the minimum threshold level of technological infrastructure, human capital and e-connectivity has deepened to a complicated set of data which is diverse yet each data field can be treated in isolation. e-Government Readiness Index (EGRI) is composed of three indices WMI, TII and HCI which deal with the websites of countries, their infrastructure for e-governance and lastly their human capital availability. A short description about the three would explain how they reflect upon the government’s e-readiness. Networked governance is an expression used for modern day governance where administrative agencies work in partnerships and in communication with many other governmental and nongovernmental agencies for political, informational and social reasons. Lastly comes the warning that a substantial level of e-governance can be achieved provided the developmental aspirations of people and networked readiness are appropriately synchronised.