The Swiss agency for development and cooperation (SDC) has committed about Nu 65M to improve public service delivery by the end of the current plan.
The assistance will go into creating a “One Stop Shop” where a number of services can be availed at one place.
“Bhutanese citizen should be able to come to one place and be able to sort different administrative matters at one place, instead of having to run to different offices asking for different forms,” said SDC’s east Asia division head, Pradeep Itty, who signed the agreement with GNHC officials yesterday in Thimphu. “This will shorten the time to sort out any administrative issues,” he said.
That e-governance is first about people and then processes and technology was one of the understandings top leaders came to after attending a two-day “training” on how ICT can make Bhutan a knowledge-based society.
“A knowledge society is about ideas and innovation; about bringing humans to the centre,” information and communications secretary, Dasho Kinley Dorji said in a presentation of Chiphen Rigpel, the project that aims to transform Bhutan.
The government had targeted 2010 as the year when every one of its agencies provide at least 75 percent of all possible public services online, according to a July 2009 updated version of the Bhutan information and communications technology policy and strategies (BIPS).
The Nu 2.04B Chiphel Rigpel project to “enable a society and empower the nation” through information and communications technology switched on yesterday, with 18 leaders, including the heads of the executive, judiciary, the legislature, the army and cabinet ministers, attending a two-day course to understand what ICT can do for a society and e-governance.
Despite the prime minister, Lyonchhoen Jigmi Y Thinley, the chief operations officer of the royal Bhutan army, Major General Batoo Tshering, the supreme court chief justice, Lyonpo Sonam Tobgye, in attendance, the opening was kept a low key affair.
The Nu 2.5B project, previously known as the ‘Total Solutions project’, is an ICT capacity building project, undertaken by the government of Bhutan, with financial assistance from the Indian government.
The project, in its six components, will work over the next five years towards enabling e-governance, empowering teachers and taking ICT to schools, enabling employment skills, furnishing tertiary institutes with ICT training centres, reaching the unreached all over the nation, and managing e-waste.