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"This book provides a comprehensive, integrative, and global assessment of the e-government evolution in terms of real-life success and failure cases"--Provided by publisher

The development of mobile technology is facilitating the transformation in a way that governments deliver their services. Mobile government is one area that has received very little research, but it can have a tremendous impact on the way citizens engage with their government. This research analyses the data gathered from 81 respondents through online survey on the various aspects of mobile government and collects their views on some of the key questions related to the use of mobile government. The findings showed that although citizens are aware of the possibilities they hardly used mobile devices as a direct communication channel with government. Most users tend to use social media platforms and social media is used as an intermediary between government and citizens. The findings of this research also indicated that although the users are well aware of m-government services and own smartphones, only a handful of them use their mobiles for accessing government services.

Purpose
Despite the increasing technological capabilities and its affordability, a significantly large proportion of developing nations' population are still lacking resources to own basic information and communication technologies such as computer and internet. This suggests that majority of the citizens from developing countries (e.g. India) are also not able to access and use emerging electronic government applications and services. This is leading to a further and bigger digital divide gap that already exists between rural and urban as well as economically less and more able population. To reduce the widening digital divide, India has innovated Common Services Centres (CSCs) as means to deliver public services electronically to citizens at the village level. This viewpoint paper aims to discuss some of the challenges and obstacles of such CSCs and to offer some recommendations for their effective implementations and sustainable operations.


Design/methodology/approach
This is a viewpoint paper that is based on authors' awareness of the context as well as knowledge and issues relevant to the research topic. A number of appropriate and current citations have been utilised to illustrate the current state on the topic as well as to support authors' arguments presented in this paper.


Findings
The paper identified a number of key issues relevant for effective implementation and sustainable operation of CSCs. The authors present their views and recommendations related to the following key issues: connectivity problems, lack of or delayed rollout of government to citizen (G2C) services, demotivated village-level entrepreneurs due to lack of G2C services, low computer literacy, lack of awareness about services and facilities, lack of adequate training and support, poor provisioning of an effective infrastructure, lack of support from the concerned government officials, inaccessible locations, burden of high investment, corruption at the government level, lack of skilled manpower to run the CSCs, lack of power supply, language barrier, lack of space, problem with maintenance and management of connectivity network and problem caused by the Naxalite and anarchist activity.


Originality/value
The discussion and recommendations presented in this paper would be valuable to various agencies (both from public and private sectors) as well as policymakers for effective implementation and long-term sustainability of CSCs. The approach discussed in this paper offers an effective way to diffuse e-government applications and services in other developing countries (particularly resource-constrained nations from African, Asian and Latin American regions).