Overview

What this chapter is about

Buying a book, paying an electricity bill, booking a train ticket, applying for a scholarship, or filing an income-tax return — a generation ago every one of these meant standing in a queue with cash and paper forms. Today most of them can be done from a phone in a few minutes. Two large shifts made this possible. When business moved online it became e-commerce; when government moved online it became e-governance. Both rest on the same foundation — electronic records, the internet, and secure electronic payment — but they serve different purposes: e-commerce is about trade and profit between private parties, while e-governance is about delivering public services and information to citizens.

This chapter explains what e-commerce means and how it differs from traditional commerce, the main business models (B2B, B2C, C2C and C2B), its advantages and limitations, the electronic payment systems that make online trade possible, and the security measures that keep transactions safe. It then turns to e-governance — its meaning, its types (G2C, G2B and G2G), its benefits, and the kinds of e-governance initiatives adopted in India as public programmes.

The material follows the standard, well-established treatment of the subject as taught at the Standard XII level. The state syllabus draws on the same principles of commerce and information technology that are common to the field everywhere; nothing here is tied to any single publisher's text.