According to C. Umashankar, managing director of Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (Elcot), government departments across the state will switch from Windows desktops to Novell's Suse Linux and OpenOffice from this year. Elcot is Tamil Nadu's state-owned IT supplier.
The first component of this roadmap specifies the e-Governance Vision of the Delhi Government and strategies to achieve the development agenda of the state. It goes on to identify prioritised e-Governance ‘Initiatives’ and ‘Services’ that need to be rolled out in the next five years. The e-Govt. Services have been classified as G2C, G2B, G2G, G2E, G2N (for different stakeholders like Citizens, Businesses, other Govt Depts., Employees and NGOs) and the total number of such services identified is 115.
Silicon Valley technologist Srikanth Nathamuni, who along with Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani runs the IT social start-up, eGovernments Foundation, was at the Chennai Corporation headquarters on Monday to make a pitch for municipal e-governance systems.
Read more: India: Chennai: e-governance plan for Corporation projects
The scheme, aimed at providing advantage of Right To Information Act to the common people, was supposed to be expanded to all the 10 blocks of the city so that the people from far off villages could also get its advantage. But due to insufficient technical support and manpower, the plan could not be implemented.
As a nation, we face a major challenge — the bulk of our population is on the wrong side of the Digital Divide. Despite significant gains, telecom penetration is a meagre 2 per cent in rural India and data connectivity is practically non-existent. Internet connectivity, though growing, is still low. India has just about seven million Internet subscribers of whom only 1.3 million have access to broadband connections, way below the target of 20 million set for 2010.