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Bindi, Henna, Zari

In 2000, a store came up in Milano. The designer was Roberto Cavalli, and people remember thinking: Who is this guy? Well, six years on the Italian designer has over 20 stores all over the world.

One minute you are just another name, another minute you’re a brand. From Tom Ford using a zari border to Madonna’s bindi, from Hollywood’s chandelier earrings to Jean Paul Gaultier’s kitschy Indian motifs, from henna tattoos to mirror work bags, India seems everywhere. So far India is seen as a haven for outsourcing the exotic, and much of the credit goes to Bollywood. It has taken Indian fashion, a fairly recent industry which was born in the late 1980s, global. It has carried it beyond the NRI pockets.

 The sari and the bindi are now global short hands for India, thanks to cinema, which took fashion to the masses in a way TV is now doing (with glittery saris and elaborate crystal-encrusted bindis). The challenge is to take it from the periphery to the centre stage, beyond the accessories available occasionally on London’s Oxford Street into a substantial and recognisable brand. That will happen when Indian fashion realises the importance of marketing, when it realises that being a designer is more than looking for an appropriate celebrity to wear the clothes and getting media coverage.

When it discovers the market beyond the diaspora- people are getting used to it themselves with a store now in Dubai where they have to reach out to a new, almost entirely Arab clientele. India has to do western cuts with an Indian spirit. Only then will the fad become a factory.

PAPERLESS GOVERNMENT OFFICES

India is in transition, from a predominantly agrarian to a modern post-industrial economy. This has thrown up new challenges in the sphere of governance. Good governance rests on the pillars of information and its accessibility for both the decision-makers and the people. While good governance lays down the objectives, e-governance helps in achieving them, and the Government has taken major initiatives in this area. An important component of this is the concept of the "paperless office".

In the Indian context, it is difficult to achieve the aim of paperless offices because government offices function on the basis of accountability in the form of signatures of authorised officials for orders and approvals. Though technological advances have made it possible to overcome this through the Digital Signature Regime, there is resistance to adoption of this technology.

It is certainly possible to move from the existing scenario of the conventional office to a "less-paper office". This can be achieved by establishing electronically enabled offices, bringing in transparency, speed and provision of services on an anywhere-any-time basis.

 
Initiatives have already been taken in this direction. The Government has put in place the
National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) to empower the society through the use of technology. E-governance enables us to set up government-to-citizen (G2C) and government-to-business G2B portals. All essential citizen- centric services, like birth and death certificates, land records and other services will be provided through this portal. Every citizen would be given a unique ID, which would help in keeping track of individual records. Similarly, all the services a business establishment requires, right from incorporation to closure, would be provided through the (G2B) portals.

. In the taxation system, the additional mode of e-filing of returns has already been made available to tax payers. Similarly, the Supreme Court has taken initiatives relating to filing affidavits through the web-based facility. Many more services would be provided through the implementation of 27 "mission-mode" projects.

The 11th Plan emphasizes taking NeGP initiatives forward faster to help achieve the desired effect. The e-governance initiatives of the Government have brought a new dimension to the existing offices, tuning them into an environment of less-paper offices or electronically enabled offices, to fulfill the ultimate objective of "Government at your doorstep" -a dream that can be achieved over the next decade. We may never have a paperless office in the government, but the paper chase should become extinct in the near future.