With the recent spate of MoUs and the visit of steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, Jharkhand is definitely on the industrial and tourism radar. Ample curiosity is being generated about the state, its resources, people and infrastructure. Needless to say then, the state deserves an official website.
The first one, maintained by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) which comes under the department of information and technology, looks official enough. The site was launched amid great fanfare during the Babulal Marandi’s tenure and for a period was the only official site. That is till the Jharkhand.gov.in came into the picture.
Developed and maintained by a private organisation, “NetGuru-India”, this site, too, claims itself as the “official” website of the state. It was on June 28, 2004, that NetGuru-India was awarded an “e-governance” contract by the state government. Then it developed “Jharkhand Online,” a communication portal.
The bilingual portal offers online access to government officials and systems and once more it stakes “official” claim, a fact agreed upon by state secretary of information technology Ram Sevak Sharma. He goes on to add that the government has copyright over the site contents.
Now, the question on whether a new site came into being because the government was dissatisfied with the NIC remains unclear.
When asked, Sharma does not exactly clear the air. “The Jharkhand government has its own site. There is no conflict with them (NIC). They also work for us and are our partners and are helping us in many ways, at least as far as they can with their limited manpower,” he said. The other area in which NIC helps the state is in providing video-conferencing facility among prisoners and courts .
Though the IT secretary may have very little to complain about, the state head of the NIC’s information centre, R.C. Patra, seems far from happy. “If the people open our site they find it woefully outdated as far as content is concerned,” he said.
Clearly, the NIC site is far less colourful and illustrated and seems to take an almost miserly stance while providing information on tourism; it has practically no mention of railway links and does not provide any online booking, something that the jharkhand.gov.in does.
Patra stresses that they are the victims here. Not many read the disclaimer at the end of the content, which goes on to state that the “site was designed and developed by the NIC. Content provided and updated by the Jharkhand government”.
“Thus, people lose confidence in the software though it is the state machinery which is not sending us the inputs,” he says, emphasising that NIC is a respected and a popular name that enjoys links to different sites and can provide great help in times of need.
Though the content may be dated, the NIC sites still continue to get both “static and dynamic” content and nearly 50 sites that are linked to it get updated. “We work for many departments — treasury, transport, commercial tax — and also put up government tenders on the site,” he said.
Today the site seems to be more preoccupied with tenders — as there are around 50 mentions in the link.
While about cabinet meetings, the NIC site starts from 11.11.2000 but it ends at 11.12.2002. And there is very little information on tourism and hotel bookings apart from some phone numbers.
Now back to NetGuru. It is evident from the site itself that it enjoys better support from the state and has more or less the latest information. It has an impressive GIS map, on-line booking facilities, grievance cell (though that did not work when this correspondent tried to enter a comment) and is more colourful and better illustrated with photo galleries.
Though there are a number of congratulatory messages in their outbox, it seems that the site, too, could do with more information on tourism and related information. It describes the state as one with “unlimited possibilities”, but it does little to explain what the possibilities could be.
When it was born, it was claimed that the “Jharkhand Online” portal would be the most significant venture towards excellence in the field of IT. But the government departments are yet to make optimal use of the site.
Autor/Author: Hemendra Narayan
Quelle/Source: The Telegraph, 30.05.2006
