The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : President's model to give a big push to e-governance

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Nov 28, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

President's model to give a big push to e-governance

Vani Doraisamy

CHENNAI: A pioneering e-governance model being put in place by the President's Secretariat promises to cut through the red tape cluttering the administrative apparatus, apart from giving citizens a participatory role in the decision-making process.

The portal, funded by the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology, will first take connectivity to the people, with the government-to-citizens (G2C) site becoming functional in January. This will be followed by G2G, with the Prime Minister's Office, Ministries of Home, Law, Human Resources Development, Science and Technology, the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha secretariats, all State secretariats and Raj Bhavans being linked up.

Pet project

The pet project of President Kalam was inaugurated at the Rashtrapati Bhavan on October 13. It envisions digitised, paperless transactions across administrative units and quicker file movement. What this would mean, in effect, is that the Rashtrapati Bhavan would be able to seamlessly access any information from any part of the country directly and conduct business with State governments and Raj Bhavans at a moment's notice.

The facility is expected to come in handy when, for example, seeking sensitive information from the States and Union Territories.

Citizens can now directly interact with the President, enabling speedy redressal of pleas.

"Apart from enabling citizens to have easy access to the President's Secretariat, we will now have secured, digital access to all units of governance for speedy disposal of files and facility to track file movement. We will also be able to connect to any part of the country, urban or rural, through fibre broadband with secured VPN network, VSAT and even Wi-MAX. Apart from G2C and G2G, a government to business (G2B) interface is being created," V. Ponraj, Director (Technology Interface) in the President's Secretariat, told The Hindu over telephone from New Delhi.

Digital era

Collaborations, discussions and meetings can also now be done digitally within and across various organs of governments. Apart from tremendous savings in cost and time, the e-governance model will facilitate smooth flow of information from government departments to citizens, making the right to information a reality within the digitised space.

The e-governance model will establish a Centre-State networked grid; a horizontal grid across State governments linked to the vertical Central grid; an e-Governance data centre and a national citizen-ID database.

By making real-time anytime, anywhere information available digitally, the Rashtrapati Bhavan hopes to encourage all State governments to go in for total e-governance.

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