Himachal Pradesh has been declared as the second best state in the country in e-governance. Speaker of Lok Sabha Somnath Chatterjee will give away the award during the 10th International Summit and Expo Power - 2008 to be held on November 8, in Mumbai. An assessment in this regard has been done by India Tech Foundation, Mumbai, on application of information technology (IT) and its use in government institutions.
This premier award in the area of e-governance will be given to the state for providing the best IT related initiatives and providing efficient, transparent, cost effective and speedy government to government, government to citizen, government to business services.
State IT secretary BK Aggarwal said that the award was judged on the criticality of IT usage, improvement in service, impact on quality and productivity, impact on society and innovation in terms of reach and replicability, tangible impact on efficiency, operational costs and decision making and demonstrating functionality of providing various information relating to e-governance.
Aggarwal said that Himachal Pradesh is the first state to launch state-wide area network in the entire country and added that a network operation centre has been set up to provide unified placement of data for the entire state at one place. He said that about 3000 offices at tehsil and block level would be connected through Himachal State Wide Area Network (Himswan) project in near future for which a state data centre will also be set up separately.
All the 69 employment exchanges/sub employment exchanges in the state have been computerised.
A web based job portal for all stakeholders ie employers, job seekers and the employment department has been started in the state. The IT secretary further informed that computerisation of all processes in labour offices would soon be completed. He said that 1186 gram panchayats have already been provided with computer hardware to computerise all services at the panchayat level. The state has taken a lead in the country in undertaking computerisation of 40 police stations under Common Integrated Police Application (CIPA) programme.
The touch screen kiosks have been set up at various places in the state to provide common interface for various activities and all the 68000 employees working in the state would be trained in computerisation and IT related services and the state government is making amendments in R&P rules in most departments to make IT literacy compulsory for promotion, confirmation and recruitment etc, Aggarwal added.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): B K Upmanyu
Quelle/Source: Merinews, 29.10.2008
