Abstract
Amlan Bhusan raises important questions in this chapter. To him, there is a growing academic consciousness, regarding the use of e-governance, to deliver social goods in a better way. This voice advocates that more needs to be done by public institutions, governments, and more importantly, the academia, to develop e-governance as an enabler for social efficiency. Such developments would help reach debates and discussions on this area to the grassroots of the policy system. His chapter is neither a commentary of the application of e-governance to deliver social change nor a study of how different governments have handled this area around the world. Rather, it is a practicing consultant's views of the power of e-governance to refine public choice and social decision making and how this process was enriched by a more vigorous role of the academia. Taking specific examples from the education sector, particularly universities, this chapter is a comment on some of the ways in which e-governance ‘can' be handled across the education system and how lessons from the developed countries can be used to inspire similar revolutionary changes to the status quo in the developing world. His objective is to promote a greater role for the academia in the public policy making process. The idea is to support a more constructive engagement of the academia with the more vulnerable parts of the social system. Above all, he argues for the benefits of spreading the values of information democracy, right to access to information, among the people. He envisages that the power of a more vocal and active academia would be profound in how it could positively affect the information apartheid affecting many large sections of the developing world. He proposes greater research and development on the means of engaging with e-governance and to establish the mechanisms to enhance, converge, simplify, homogenize, and structuralize the knowledge and information enterprise of the global political and social systems.