The head of strategy of an IT services company that does work for the government bristles at such diverse interpretations says, on the condition of anonymity that, "E-governance is just lip service at present. These are e-governance projects in a broad sense. But for true e-governance, a lot of processes need to change—like tendering, time to award a contract, the lack of a CIO kind of role to champion technology projects in government."

At present, the person in charge of defining the targets and pulling the strings, as much as he can, is Satyanarayana, who concedes to shortcomings. "We have control on quantity, where we know in real-time how much is happening. But the quality that is not there in all services," he says, defining quality as the number of physical visits and ease of use online. "Last mile is a problem in India, and this is reflected in e-governance as well," adds Raghupathi CN, vice-president & head of India business unit, Infosys, which implemented e-filing of income-tax returns.Satyanarayana implores assessing as much on how far India has come as on where it needs to go. "We are coming from a situation where there was no certainty of work being done or any time-frame," he says.