In Andhra Pradesh, no district magistrate or collector can plead ignorance or use the distance from the state capital to cover up for inefficiency. Naidu has leveraged communications technology to reach his people wherever they may be. With his move towards paperless government, he is doing more than improving the efficiency with which his state is ruled. He is actually in the process of opening up the steel frame to the public gaze for the first time since it was installed by the British administration.

Transparency, the progressive buzzword at the Centre from the time of the Gujraladministration, can be assured most easily and cheaply by paperless government. While file-and-stamp government is ab-out restricting access to information, government online is free-access by default, thanks to the open nature of the Internet technology driving it. It asks why people should not have access to information, rather than why they should have it.

Even assuming that a Right to Information Act one day finds a place on the statute books, government will remain opaque in the absence of a system for distributing information and interacting with the people. What Andhra Pradesh is putting together –and Karnataka, which lost the lead earlier, also wants to begin moving again in the same direction –is the nuts and bolts of such a system. But let us not be too hopeful of immediate results, because this is only the beginning of what promises to be a long haul.

The aggression with which the chief executives of the two southern states are showing their commitment to information technology may, ifsustained, put India on par with Malaysia, which went through the same experiments with supercorridors and paperless government four years ago. But the information society is an integrated system, and our move towards it lacks the unity of purpose that should mark such an enterprise.

Over the last five years, India has taken the first steps in the direction of a wired society. The technology has been successfully field-tested. The governm-ent's network allows doctors to share a case over the Internet. Lawyers have access to the case law arc-hives of the Supreme Court online.

Yet, some of the most fundamental tools of the wired world remain to be developed: an online phone book for the whole country, a telecommunications system which works and laws governing digital information. Most important, very little has been done to guarantee access to all sections of the population. The digital divide bet-ween the information haves and have-nots is going to be sharp in countries like India, perpetuating oldinequities and reaffirming the very social barriers that the digital revolution is dismantling in other parts of the world.

Paperless government is nothing more than a technological curiosity if the overwhelming majority of the population that does not have access to personal computers is going to be left out.