E-Government Approaches to Facilitate the Process of Democracy in the Administration of Bangladesh: Rhetoric or Reality

E-Government Approaches to Facilitate the Process of Democracy in the Administration of Bangladesh: Rhetoric or Reality

Musleh Uddin Ahmed, Md. Abir Hasan Khan
Copyright: © 2016 |Pages: 12
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-9536-8.ch007
OnDemand:
(Individual Chapters)
Available
$37.50
Current Special Offers
No Current Special Offers
TOTAL SAVINGS: $37.50

Abstract

In order to expedite the process of democracy, through the openness the functions of government's administration, multifarious initiatives have been taken by almost every government in the world. The most recent and viable one is the initiative of e-government. The main aim of e-government is to make the administration ready to endow accountability, transparency, and to ease the communication process between the government and the citizens. Bangladesh is a developing country in the world, has initiated a massive programs to introduce the e-government application through the different administrative levels. Moreover, the special emphasis has been given in the field administration of Bangladesh where from almost 70% citizens directly benefited and take part into the administrative process. However, the gap is yet not up to mark to promote the actual level of democracy. This chapter will elaborate different initiatives of e-government taken by the government of Bangladesh for endorsing the process of democracy. Moreover, the actual present situation of government will also be outlined here. In order to elaborate this paper different secondary sources of data such as, books, journals, web, etc. will be used as much as possible.
Chapter Preview
Top

Background

Technological change has been considered as the main source of the evolution of ICTs into the government. With the beginning of ICTs, especially the widespread application of PCs (personal computer) into the public offices, the hope has been raised for the application of e-government into the government process. Moreover, the persistent of e-government has strongly appeared in the year 1999-2000 (expressed as Y2K), because of rapidly expanding technological assets and their wider application in the public administration (Brown, 2005).

Basically, e-government was the concept introduced as an electronic commerce to deliver services to the citizen ‘on-line’ (Brown, 2005). However, the most important is that e-government is now a very broad and well accepted theory all over the world (Heeks & Bailur, 2006). Before going to outline what actually the e-government for, first, this is important to know the actual reasons for existing of the form of government. Pardo (2000) mentioned that a government mainly pursues the following essential objectives,

  • 1.

    Maintaining collective security;

  • 2.

    Administering justice;

  • 3.

    Providing the institutional infrastructure of the economy; and

  • 4.

    Ensuring that vital social capital is enhanced through improvements in health and education through the strong families and communities.

These are the criterion that usually government fulfills for the betterment of citizen, the country as a whole. Further, for the smoothness and hassle free government activities and services the application of ICTs into government and its administration was installed. Moreover, in order to practice the democratic process within and between the governments the focus has been given in the introduction of e-government within the government and its administration.

Economist Intelligence Unit (2013) provided a list of key terms of electronic government, which are,

Complete Chapter List

Search this Book:
Reset