In a first, the Uttar Pradesh government has implemented an e-scholarship programme to ensure timely payment of scholarships to over two crore students. Under this, the scholarships will be directly transferred to the bank accounts of the students electronically.
The recipients, belonging to Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST), Other Backward Caste (OBC), minority communities and Below Poverty Line (BPL) families, had complained of not receiving their scholarships and sometimes even receiving lapsed cheques.
VN Garg, Principal Secretary, Information Technology, said the idea was to improve transparency in the process and effectively deal with the largescale complaints.
“It is a major step towards e-governance,” Garg said. The government has also agreed in principle to start interactive websites on which the students can get answers to their queries. “They can even send in their application, complaints, check the status of those complaints and assess any related details,” he said.
About 2 crore students belonging to different categories are entitled to this scholarship.
A monthly educational scholarship of Rs 25 to Rs 740 is given to students enrolled in Class I up to the post-graduate level.
Garg said Uttar Pradesh is the second state after Assam, where e-governance at district-level has been started. The districts include Rae Bareli, Sultanpur, Gorakhpur, Sitapur, Noida and Gaziabad.
Earlier, Chief Secretary PK Mishra launched 33 new websites of state government departments and called upon the officers to make available all information on these websites. He told the officers to ensure that public grievances were sorted out through e-governance.
“The utility of information technology through websites of different departments is to strengthen the work culture and quality of the government,” he said.
The Uttar Pradesh State Wide Area Network (UPSWAN) will connect 900 nodes covering all blocks, tehsils and districts within a year. The e-governance facility will be available in 17,909 Common Service Centres to be established in the villages in the next three years and 50,000 unemployment youths will get employment opportunities through it, Mishra said.
Autor(en)/Author(s): Piyush Srivastava
Quelle/Source: Lucknow Newsline, 02.09.2007
