(a) What do you understand by term 'good governance'? How far recent initiatives in terms of e-Governance steps taken by the State have helped the beneficiaries? Discuss with suitable examples. (b) Online methodology is being used for day-to-day meetings, institutional approvals in the administration and for teaching and learning in education sector to the extent telemedicine in the health sector is getting popular with the approvals of the competent authority. No doubt it has advantages and disadvantages for both the beneficiaries and system at large. Describe and discuss the ethical issues involved in the use of online method particularly to vulnerable section of society.

(a) Good governance and e-Governance for beneficiaries

• Good governance is public power used in a way that is lawful, accountable, transparent, responsive, effective and inclusive.
• It is not a synonym for more schemes. It is whether a scheme arrives as a right, on time, without a private toll.
• The United Nations and the Second Administrative Reforms Commission both treat participation, equity and the rule of law as part of that standard.
• e-Governance is the use of digital systems to deliver information and services: identity, payments, licences, grievance and records.
• Direct Benefit Transfer has cut ghost names in several subsidies and pensions by paying into Aadhaar-seeded accounts, which helps the genuine beneficiary when the account is real and reachable.
• Digital India public services — from passport seva to many State land-record and certificate portals — reduce the number of trips to a clerk for those who can use the portal.
• Government e-Marketplace and e-procurement, where they actually run, shrink the room for a hand-written tender preference.
• UMANG, MyGov and online grievance systems give a number and a trail that a paper dak often never had.
• Limits: a failed biometric, a distant bank, a language the portal does not speak, and a middleman who now sits on the Common Service Centre instead of the tehsil, can steal the gain.
• e-Governance has helped beneficiaries most where the State combined a digital pipe with a human last-mile: a bank mitra, a well-run CSC, a physical camp for those whom the password excludes.
• It has helped least where the office simply uploaded a PDF of the same delay.

(b) Ethical issues in online methods, especially for the vulnerable

• Online meetings and e-approvals can save travel and speed a file. They can also hide a decision from the person who cannot join the link.
• Consent and notice fail when a hearing is held on a platform the affected farmer or tenant does not have.
• Education online during COVID-19 widened a class split: a child with a smartphone and a room learned; a first-generation learner on a shared phone did not.
• Evaluation by proctored tests can humiliate and exclude students with disability, poor bandwidth, or no private room, while calling itself “merit”.
• Telemedicine can reach a hill clinic. It can also misdiagnose without examination, dump liability on a junior at the spoke, and sell data.
• Privacy: health and school data on private apps can be mined; the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 now frames consent, but practice still leaks.
• The vulnerable — women in crowded homes, elderly without OTP skill, persons with disability, Adivasi hamlets off the tower, informal workers — pay the cost of a “digital first” that has no analogue door.
• Ethical duty is universal access, not universal assumption of a device: keep a physical counter, a helpline, an assisted kiosk, and a human review of automated refusal.
• Recorded meetings should not become a culture of surveillance of juniors, nor a way to avoid a field visit that the poor still need.
• Approvals online must still be speaking orders. A click is not a reason.