At the National level, the Department of IT, Government of India, has formulated an ambitious National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) in consultation with a variety of stakeholders.

The plan envisages the implementation of 27 Mission Mode Projects across different Central Government departments and state level agencies. A key component of the plan is to develop capacity at various levels to undertake the actual implementation of these projects. The Planning Commission has also identified Capacity Building as the priority area in the roll out of NeGP.

Given the varied nature and wide scale of e-Governance initiatives planned under NeGP, the existing manpower in the IT departments of Centre and State governments is neither adequate in numbers nor appropriately trained to handle a variety of tasks that would have to be done for the successful implementation of NeGP.

The NeGP has identified lack of sufficient skills and capacity as one of the key impediments to successfully implementing e-Governance initiatives in India. This is stated in the DIT’s website. Also, NISG’s own experience in providing consultancy services for e- Governance initiatives under NeGP was in keeping with the views of DIT that insufficient capacity and knowledge base exists to meet the goals of NeGP.

As one of the means of bridging the capacity gap, NISG identified, during Q4 2007, a need for a senior level, full time specialised management course which would help bridge the significant capacity gaps that exist in the e-Governance domain in India.

TAPMI has been supporting the NGO sector for many years now and has considerable interest and experience in supporting social causes. It is a matter of privilege to TAPMI that it will be the first b-School in India which will collaborate with NISG, the Government and the industry for designing and offering a one year, full time, residential, E-Governance programme to fulfill the needs of NeGP.

The proposed new one year program is not of the genre of traditional MBA courses. By helping e-Governance initiatives of the Government of India to succeed - if only indirectly and albeit in a small way – the proposed program will serve a specific and greater national goal.

Though the focus of eGPX is on e-Governance, several leading IT and Non-IT sector private sector companies [whose target sectors are not entirely e-Governance related] have shown great interest in the program since the core theme of the program which deals with complex, large scale transformations, finds applications in domains outside of e- Governance too.