Chiniya Lama, assistant health worker at the centre, said that 20 cancer patients are availing themselves of the service that only requires a working computer and Internet connection. “We got started six months ago. Now, the patients like Surya Laxi can have direct interaction with the doctors in the capital, explain the problems they are having and get the right medical advice,” he said.
Prime Minister Sushil Koirala inaugurated the portal while marking PPMO´s eighth anniversary at the Prime Minister´s Official Residence in Baluwatar on Tuesday.
Read more: NP: All govt bidding info to be made available online
The carefully orchestrated ‘hi-tech’ inaugural of the CPN-UML general convention ended rather unceremoniously as the party returned to the age-old paper balloting for the party elections, instead of adopting the swadeshi electronic voting machines (EVMs), as was originally intended.
The two factions in the party, one led by an ex-prime minister and the other by the party’s parliamentary leader, might have had indistinct political economic visions for the country but they publicly took opposite stances on EVMs. Iphone holders in one faction repeated the manufacturer’s claim that the EVM’s design was easy, effective and culturally grounded. The suspicious in the other feared, rather vaguely, that the use of technology would somehow result in their electoral loss. It was a third party expert assessment by technologists that helped the party’s standing committee postpone the use of machine voting.
The Ministry of Information and Communications (MoIC) has already directed Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA) - the telecom sector regulator -- finalize the draft as per the format provided by it.
“The draft will be endorsed within 45 days. We have already asked NTA to fianalize it soon,” Suman Prasad Sharma, secretary of MoIC, said.
The National Information Technology Roadmap 2014-2019, released to a limited circle by the Department of Information Technology, is a fantastic document. It is a wishlist of 85 activities to be executed by government ministries and agencies in the next five years, and if completed, will transform the way the Nepali state delivers its services and responds to our requirements. In the same period, the Roadmap states, the IT sector will be among the top ten contributors to the GDP. The writers of the document want us to believe that the Roadmap will help switch the slow, chaotic, analogue bureaucratic ensemble into a fast, efficient, digital government. But the government itself is unprepared for such a revolution, as indicated by it placing 164th in the world—a drop by 11 positions from 2010 to 2012—on the UN e-readiness survey.