IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

It will become mandatory to deliver all government services electronically in five years after the Electronic Delivery of Services Bill under the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) is passed, an official said on Thursday.

New Electronic Transaction Aggregation & Analysis Layer (e-Taal) software links services offered by different state governments and agencies, said Gaurav Dwivedi, Director, e-Governance, Department of Electronics & Information Technology. e-Taal will also measure all transactions taking place throughout the country among different state governments and agencies, he said.

New Electronic Transaction Aggregation & Analysis Layer (e-Taal) software links services offered by different state governments and agencies, said Gaurav Dwivedi, Director, e-Governance, Department of Electronics & Information Technology.

Thus, e‐Governance is the application of Information Technology to the Government functioning in order to bring about Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsive and Transparent Governance.

At present, six districts in the State are e-districts, including Ernakulam, which was declared as e-district today at a function here by the Chief Minister.

Chandy said the State had lagged in making use of the IT wave.

This way the government is looking at various egovernance ways to deliver better services to the citizens through single point delivery mechanism and involve areas like: e-citizen, e-transport, e-medicine, e-transport etc.

Citizens are now participating in governance through social networking etc. Globally too, this has been a trend with people focusing on e-participation, e-service usage etc.

"The majority of mission mode projects have moved from the drawing board to the deployment stage. There have been numerous success stories like that of e-panchayat etc," said Narendra.

The government has constituted a task force for eGovernance initiatives in the shipping and road transport sectors and will give initial report within a month, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari said today.

The task force, which includes former Infosys CFO Mohandas Pai would be headed by the minister himself.

“We are working to convert eGovernance into good governance, for that we are looking for e-solutions, e-recommendations and we have assigned the job to Mohandas Pai,” Gadkari told reporters.

The 10-member Mohandas Pai committee set up to recommend e-governance initiatives in the shipping and road transport sectors is expected to give its “preliminary” report in a month, Nitin Gadkari, Union Minister for Shipping, Road Transport and Highways has said.

“We are looking to convert e-governance into good governance. For that we are looking for e-solutions, e-recommendations and we have assigned the job to Mohandas Pai”, Gadkari told reporters on the sidelines of an Assocham event in the capital on Wednesday.

The Corporation of the city of Panaji (CCP) is likely to have its e-governance system in place within the next six months.

Panaji mayor Surendra Furtado told TOI on Friday that the CCP has received a sanction for funds of 19.79 crore for the e-governance project from the central government through the Jawaharlal Nehru national urban renewal mission (JNNURM). Furtado said that the central sanctioning and monitoring committee had approved the amount at its meeting on April 23.

Speaking at a consultative workshop on the topic, 'Citizen centric e-government', Rajendra Kumar, joint secretary, department of electronics and information technology, government of India, said "The vision is to make government services accessible to the common man in his locality." The goal was to cater to the basic need of the common man and the focus has been on service delivery, he said while speaking on the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP).

The fund, to be carved out from Rs 700 crore allocated for the national e-governance plan in this year's annual budget, is the latest in a series of initiatives aimed at fostering the growth of startups across the country. "The fund will be created and managed by the department of information technology for a minimum of three years," said a government official who did not want to be identified.

According to the data provided by Union Minister for Communications and IT Kapil Sibal in a written reply to the Lok Sabha, government had released a total of Rs 1,225.90 crore in the last four financial years for various e-governance projects.

In 2010-11, the government had spent Rs 264.15 crore, while in the next fiscal it had released Rs 256.17 crore on e-governance.

The new initiative is part of the national e-governance plan, announced in the Union Budget for 2013-14. However, the size of the fund or the average ticket size has not been disclosed yet. The fund will be managed by the IT department.

According to the media report, financial assistance will be offered to companies for developing mobile apps that can ease various e-governance initiatives provided through Aadhaar card. The government is planning to introduce such apps by March 2014.

For all those who have spent long hours trying to send applications or make payments on the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation’s (AMC) site, there is good news.

Your wait may soon be a matter of the past as the civic body mulls initiating an e-governance project worth Rs39.9 crore to ease your woes as well as upgrade the setup.

Meanwhile, the AMC employees continue to work the ‘not-so-smart’ way, filing papers and preparing physical files. Requesting anonymity, one of the clerical-level employees at AMC building in Danapith said, “We had computers, but now they are obsolete and non-functional.

"Internet is a gamechanger...Common citizens (can) now directly engage in policy making process," Modi said through video-conferencing at an event organised by Internet search giant Google here.

He said Internet has empowered people and made communication with leaders and the government a two-way process.

"RMC is the first corporation who launched e-payment facility in Gujarat and now we will connect all our 23 ward offices with e-governance in this year. Moreover we will be the first corporation to start online issuing of birth certificate with digital signature. There will be also facility of online registration of birth from the hospital," said Bhadoo. RMC has proposed to spend about Rs 1.45 crore on e-ward office and other e-governance related facilities.

"We have set up new IT labs in 64 colleges and 2,600 schools across Haryana. The IT department of the state has also escalated its efforts and has begun organizing training programmes regularly in government offices all over Haryana," said a state official in Gurgaon.

The friendly, paper-and-glue smelling post-office is reinventing itself, becoming swank and going electronic.

An ambitious tech makeover at the Department of Posts may change things some more. You may soon be able to pay utility bills and insurance premiums at a post office. Why, you may even get to buy your bus ticket for that long delayed holiday!

Minister of State for Information and Technology Pawan Kumar Gupta said that the bids received for SWAN were high and that has delayed the creation of the network.

Jammu and Kashmir is yet to commission the State Wide Area Network (SWAN) required for e-governance. It is the only state in the country that has not implemented SWAN.

The status of the project on the Common Services Centers Scheme (CSC) Department of Electronic and IT, Government of India website says that the bidding is under way and the expected date of completion is mentioned as 2012. However, the project is yet to be commence.