When S.R. Kumaraswamy, a farmer in south India, needed to collect his driving licence last month, he braced himself for the usual struggle with a venal and slothful bureaucracy.

First, there would be four days’ waiting to see one of the legions of babus or bureaucrats who have quietly tyrannised India since it gained independence, 60 years ago on Wednesday.

Then there would be the bribes – anything up to 1,000 rupees (£12) – about a week’s income. Then the endless paperwork. This time, however, was strikingly different.

When Mr Kumaraswamy entered the government office in his village, he was greeted by a young man sitting at a computer with a printer, a finger-print scanner and a satellite internet connection. He walked out five minutes later, proudly clutching a computer printout of his new driving licence. Nor did he pay a penny in bribes.

Veterans lament lost ideals of Jinnah

As it celebrates 60th anniversary, the former British colony is caught in a struggle between democracy and dictatorship

• Common Destiny

Multimedia

• Pictures: 60th anniversary celebrations

Related Internet Links

• 60th anniversary section

Background

• Intellectual power of India takes hold in UK

• Villages log on to escape bribery

• Now try some Indian bangers and mash

Related Links

• Nuclear-armed neighbours celebrate 60

“I used to have to plan when to go, whom to meet, how much to pay,” said Mr Kumaraswamy, 55, who earns 4,000 rupees a month farming vegetables in the southern state of Karnataka. “The babus never cared about us. They treated us so badly. Now it’s so simple, I can go whenever I want.”

It was a small beginning, but what Mr Kumaraswamy experienced were the first throes of a technological revolution that could transform the lives of hundreds of millions of Indians. Six decades after independence the Government is harnessing the forces of a “new India” – technology and private enterprise – to defeat the postcolonial oppressors: the babus. The office that Mr Kumaraswamy visited was one of 800 internet telecentres set up by Karnataka since October to provide public services online in villages.

For the first time 37 million villagers can now use telecentres – staffed by young computer science graduates – to obtain official documents like driving licences, birth and death certificates, and land records.

By the end of the year the private companies that run the telecentres plan to offer more services – such as banking and insurance – that they hope will drag villages into the new Indian economy. And by March the Government plans to open telecentres in 100,000 of India’s 600,000 villages – at a cost of more than £700 million – and to add services including education and healthcare. “These telecentres have brought Indian villages to a new level of thinking – you can see it when you visit them,” Rajiv Chawla, the IT secretary of Karnataka who designed the scheme, told The Times.

“I have demolished a system that has been in place for more than 200 years.” When India gained its independence on August 15, 1947, it inherited a bureaucratic system – staffed by about 400,000 people – that was first established by the East India Company in 1793.

It proved to be a blessing and a curse. Over the next 44 years, that bureaucracy expanded to more than four million people and accumulated enormous powers under the “Licence Raj” of Soviet-inspired central planning. Market reforms launched in 1991 have since unleashed the private sector, especially in IT, and created a middle class that McKinsey, the consultancy, estimates at 50 million people and predicts will rise tenfold by 2025.

India now has 36 dollar billionaires (12 more than Japan), an estimated 100,000 dollar millionaires, and homegrown companies that are gobbling up foreign competitors, including their British forebears. But the bureaucracy remains frozen in time, its greed and obsession with paperwork denying India the basic infrastructure, public services and foreign investment.

“The Civil Service in British days were people of great knowledge and sagacity,” said Arun Shourie, a former minister and World Bank official who wrote a book on governance. “After independence they held the country together, but today that’s not the case. The governance culture has become much worse.” Indians and foreigners alike blame the bureaucracy for tangling business in red tape and preventing the benefits of India’s economic boom from trickling down to the lowest levels of society.

A quarter of India’s 1.1 billion people live on less than a dollar a day. One third are illiterate. Half of all children under 3 are malnourished. So with two years until the next general election, and the ruling Congress party reeling from local election defeats, the Government has set its sights on modernising the bureaucracy. Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister, attacked what he called the “Inspector Raj” in an unusually frank speech in April to mark Civil Service Day. “I already see the stress and strain in many areas of governance and wonder how much longer a creaking system can go on,” said Dr Singh, himself a former bureaucrat. “While economic reforms abolished the Licence Raj, complaints of Inspector Raj persist, in fact, they may be getting louder,” he said.

“This is what makes the interface of a common citizen with government a cumbersome and daunting affair. This is often the root cause of corruption as well.” Barely a week goes by now without another announcement trumpeting a national e-governance plan.

Last month the Supreme Court launched an e-court project to connect all courts via the internet that it says will relieve a backlog of 30 million cases. Under another e-governance scheme, 75 per cent of all income tax returns were filed online in July.

Sceptics say that e-governance is doomed to fail in a country where only 30 million people use the internet and half the population is not connected to the electricity grid. “Even in cities if you have a problem with your computer or your telephone, they send two people to fix it and only one understands what he’s doing,” said Pran Chopra, a political analyst.

“How will they find the expertise to run these things?” Assocham, India’s main industry association, said that India would achieve only half of its targeted 20 million domestic broadband connections by 2010. Last week all government websites crashed for eight hours after monsoon rains flooded the National Informatics Centre.

But Mr Chawla’s experiences in Karnataka – India’s eighth largest state with a population of 53 million – show how technology and private enterprise can succeed where Government alone has failed. In 1998 he started to computerise Karnataka’s land records – those crucial documents that prove ownership, delineate borders and determine access to bank loans and subsidies. Until then the records had been handled by 11,000 village officials, making pencil entries in the same sort of ledgers that were used back in 1793.

These babus – whose average age was 56 in Karnataka – would routinely accept bribes to tamper with the records, or to allow the wealthy to jump queues. Mr Chawla and his staff spent four years transferring all the data from the ledgers to a central database, then started selling copies of land records for 15 rupees each. The response was overwhelming.

The Government was soon issuing more than 20 million copies a year, more than enough to recoup the 200 million rupees spent on the project. With the extra revenues, Mr Chawla began opening the village telecentres last year and added 41 extra services.

As for the babus, they still verify information and sign documents, but they now do so with smart cards and handheld computers that make it hard to falsify data and impossible to queue-jump. With much of their work now automated, their numbers are dwindling.

The new face of Indian officialdom is Satish, a 25-year-old graduate in computer applications who runs the telecentre in Mr Kumaraswamy’s village. “To begin with, people didn’t understand how it worked,” Satish said. “But now word is spreading.” Satish’s main gripe is that the 2,000 village residents know where he lives and keep forcing him to open the telecentre outside normal office hours. “Sometimes I get jealous of those babus,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind a tea break.”

Bureaucratic stranglehold

—The Civil Service in India was founded under the Raj in 1847. It was known as the “steel frame” of British government

—Its structures were retained by the nationalist Government after independence, including the elite Indian Administration service

—Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, fiercely guarded the independence of the civil service, protecting it from political interference and corruption

—Today the Civil Service has earned the name “Licence Raj” because of its extensive red tape. Licences are sold by corrupt officials for personal profit

—India has several thousand “queue wallahs”, who can be hired to queue to wait for stamps, dockets and forms necessary for so many transactions

—In 2003 a senior civil servant requested permission to commit suicide in protest at corruption. Three departments were mobilised to consider whether suicide was a workplace issue

Sources: Times archive, Library of Congress Country Study

Poverty amid wealth

80% of India’s 1.1 billion population live on less that 20 rupees (24p) a day

224m Indians have done well out of the country’s market reforms

856m Indians are being left out of the country’s new prosperity

20 rupees will buy a loaf of bread and a packet of buscuits or two soft drinks a day

Source: Indian government report

Explore Asia News

• China News

Times Recommends

• No cause for celebration in crushed Sarajevo
• Jazz funeral for the final victims of Katrina
• French fined for 'insulting' civil servants