The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Partial e-governance to be launched in December

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Saturday, Jul 14, 2007
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Partial e-governance to be launched in December

N. Anand

Information on land records, civic services at click of mouse

TCS operating agency for the network
Tamil Nadu only State to cover all districts, taluks

CHENNAI: After successful testing of backbone connectivity of the wide area network, Tamil Nadu’s Information Technology Department is set to launch tools of e-governance in certain sectors of government by December this year.

It will enable citizens to access information on land records, transport facilities, encumbrance certificate, municipal services and food and civil supplies any time from any part of the State.

Talking to The Hindu here on Wednesday, IT Secretary C. Chandramouli said: “We have taken the first step towards e-governance by initiation and testing successfully the Tamil Nadu State Wide Area Network (TNSWAN), the backbone connectivity of network that establishes connectivity up to the taluk level. We are the only State to have all districts and taluks to have interconnected successfully, though Gujarat has done it in a limited way and Andhra Pradesh in a different format. We are happy with the result.”

“TCS is the operating agency for the network on BOOT basis, and BSNL the bandwidth provider. After testing BSNL links in districts and 204 taluk offices through 700 Point of Presence, we are ready to offer Voice over Internet Protocol in the first stage, followed by data services and then video streaming, videoconferencing and video-beaming. Within the next 45 days, we will go in for a state-of-the-art data centre in Chennai,” he said.

The third phase calls for setting up of Common Services Centre in rural and urban centres.

Tenders have been invited. The private players will be selected next month. As per the programme, 5,440 centres will be set up through public-private partnership. The State will give financial assistance for private players for setting up kiosks.

Mr. Chandramouli said 15 mission mode projects had been selected under the National e-Governance Programme. These departments had written to the Line of Ministry to get funds. As it would take considerable time to get funds, the IT Department decide to start the e-governance programme with the land records, registration, transport, municipalities and food and civil supplies departments.

“To give these private players some traffic, we will initiate work with land records since most of the data has already been digitalised for the entire State. Certain files have to be updated as they are residing on certain computers.

The PCs will be linked through the Web, so that citizens can have updated information. Similarly, citizens can get encumbrance certificate for 30 years, and guideline value for a particular place, book bus tickets, pay property tax, enquire about ration card and permits.

In every Collectorate, we are going to set up a Modern Citizen Facilitation Centre so that citizen can log on their grievances or suggestions,” Mr. Chandramouli said.

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