GovTech, short for government technology, is the software that governments use to run public services, together with the companies and organisations that build it. Paying property tax online, applying for a birth certificate, getting a building permit and calling 112 in an emergency all run on software that a government bought or built.
Governments buy software differently from companies. Most must buy through a government tender: the government publishes what it needs, companies submit bids, and fixed rules decide the winner. In India, many departments also buy through GeM, the Government e-Marketplace, an online portal on which approved sellers list their products and services. A sale can take a year or more, and a contract lasts for years. Because switching is risky and needs a new tender, old systems often stay in use for decades.
In India, most government software is not bought as a ready-made product. It is built by the National Informatics Centre (NIC), the government's own technology organisation, by IT services firms hired through tenders, or by nonprofits. India has also built shared national systems that any government office or company can build on: Aadhaar for identity, UPI for payments and DigiLocker for documents. These are called digital public infrastructure. DigiLocker, for example, is a government app that holds official documents, such as a birth certificate or a mark sheet, in a digital form that offices accept in place of the paper original.
Imagine a homeowner in Guntur paying her property tax. In April, she receives a text message from the municipal corporation with her bill and a link. Messages like this are sent by a government communication platform. She opens the link. Her property, its area and the tax due, ₹4,800, are shown on the city's portal. Many Indian cities run services like this on digital public infrastructure for cities, open-source software that any city may use free. She pays by UPI. A payment gateway passes the payment to the city's bank, and the portal issues a receipt at once. That night, the payment is posted to the city's accounts in its government ERP, the system that also runs the city's budget, purchasing and staff records.
Several of these products are built in India for local governments in America. America has about 90,000 local governments, such as cities, counties and school districts, and most are too small to build their own software. So companies sell them ready-made systems, more and more as software as a service (SaaS), rented by subscription and used over the internet. Many of the engineers who build them work in Pune and Bengaluru. Replacing a government's decades-old system while it keeps running is the same problem that banks face in core banking modernisation.
The newest question is AI. AI models can let a citizen ask for a service by voice, in her own language. Governments are careful buyers, though, and it is not yet clear how far they will let AI models decide, rather than only answer questions.