Making Government Footprint more Welcome

Continuing from the last blog post idea, I feel one way to citizens feeling more empowered is to reduce the government arms to people contact. Remember its the attitudes which set the tone of the interaction and we are a nation have severe attitude problems.
Recently I paid by municipal taxes thru an online bill pay facility of a bank. I never received the tax demand but thankfully Pune municipal corporation has a website that allows you to search and view taxes to be paid by you. Assuming that was not the case I would have had to go to the municipal office. Find out where to go (interaction 1), find out my outstanding taxes (interaction 2), go and pay the taxes (interaction 3). Any of these 3 places could have exasperated me. However the online governance ensured that I do not have to waste a leave and saved a lot of time for me. That makes me feel better about Pune Municipal corporation.
Now many people - especially in government employee unions will complaint that if we make everything online where will the employees go. An argument that makes me as a tax payer angry. Does the government feed me if i get unemployed? As for municipal facilities? well half the city doesn't get municipal water (tho it pays local taxes), my housing society has its own security, if I get ill chances are I'll go to a private hospital because i do not 'trust' the government hospital to always treat me well and yes I can afford to pay for private hospital so maybe its good cause the 'sarkari doctor' has 1 less patient to see so (s)he can see another poor patient. But lets take the union's argument and assume that it is every tax payer's duty to sustain living for those who cleared a government employee recruitment exam. Can we than reduce government and still not unemploy them?
I think we can. The problem is that the government is missing from areas it should be in and is too much into areas it should not be in. Do we need a thousand tax collectors when by automating system we can do with hundred? While Pune traffic police complaints that the traffic is a mess because they have too few people? Why not take those 900 tax collectors and make them traffic policemen?
Villages don't have medical facilities because medical graduates don't want to live in a village which has no worthy school, no electricity and what not. Government still posts them and most of them go to villages only on paper. Why not take the biology graduates in government and below 25 years of age and give them an offer. Government will train them on its own expense to be a medical practitioner (RMP) provided they spend 10 years living in a village. After 10 years they are free to do private practice. Now the question is 1) what will keep them in villages and 2) do we have enough colleges to train them?
My answer to 2) is, do we really want to make them an MBBS doctor? Really how much treatment can a village dispensary do? Better idea is to open maybe 20 colleges across India that trains them to give medicine for common stuff like malaria, dysentery, family planning, taking blood samples and all, preserving them well and sending them to district laboratories for tests. Also to identify when things are beyond their competence and send them to city hospitals.
For 1) Make the village panchayats responsible for ensuring the RMP is actually in the village. If not they must report it to the district. And make Panchayats answerable for any issues arising out of non-reporting.
This is a short term solution. In longer term, a real issue is that village kids can't compete with most city kids and become doctors or engineers because the village schools are terrible. Instead of trying to get them into medical/engineering colleges through quota when they do not have the skills to compete with fellow classmates during course and bring the overall interaction quality down, why not have special schools. Do we really need MBBS in every village? Have colleges that take them for 3 years and train them to handle normal medical/engineering needs. Have PG courses that can make some of the more promising ones MBBS should they care to after doing maybe 10 years in villages. Since these are not MBBS they are not allowed to practise in private merely in dispensaries. Some will argue this is a class distinction. My answer is that given a choice between being unemployed and becoming a looked up to member of a village many village kids will jump at this opportunity. And it will raise standard of living in villages.
Similarly involve private sector. Have electricity bills/municipal bills available online. Whats stopping a bank from sending an officer to a village once a month with a laptop and a mobile net connection, collecting money and paying the bills online given the payer a receipt then and there. The villagers don't have to come over to some place, stand in line to pay and there is no additional charge. The bank can charge 2 % to the tax authorities for this service. The man power reduction in tax collection will be more than 2% in costs so net collection goes up. Meanwhile the tax collector becomes a teacher/police/doctor or some such more skilled guy.
True some will crib at having to leave a cushy job in a city with a lot of potential to harass and earn illegal money. But government jobs are not about that right? They are so that people can serve people.
Its a win win.