Government ties EPF Account to Aadhaar!

Now it is mandatory for people to furnish their Aadhaar numbers at the time of opening EPF accounts.

“It has been decided to make Aadhaar numbers mandatory for new members… joining on or after March 1, 2013. However for existing members, the seeding of Aadhaar number has to done in a time-bound manner”

The move aims at getting more people to apply for their Aadhaar card. In case, an employee does not have the Aadhaar number, the employer can issue an enrolment ID as per the guidelines of the employees’ provident fund organisation (EPFO). This enrolment ID will be converted to their Aadhaar number later on, the order said.

Over 50 million existing EPFO subscribers will be required to furnish their Aadhaar numbers to the body by June 30 this year, as it has decided to use Aadhaar as a mandatory know your customer credential to provide better services.

Nominations Invited for e-Gov Rajasthan Awards 2012-13!

In order to recognize and appreciate the efforts made by various District e- Governance societies , the Department of IT&C proposes to give “e-Gov Rajasthan Awards 2012-13” under different categories.

Nominations are invited from all departments for these awards latest by 31st Jan 2013.

The final winners will be chosen on various factors such as number of ICT enable Kiosks, actively involved in e delivery of G2C services, efforts made  by DeGS in encouraging delivery of various Government departments through ICT enabled Kiosks, no. of citizens benefiting  from e-governance initiatives in the district, efforts made by individuals towards business process re engineering of government services to revolutionize delivery of citizen services electronically .

While the department of information & technology, GoR, Raj Comp Info Services (RISL) are jointly providing technical. policy level & budgetary support, it is the district e-Governance societies under the able guidance of the district collectors which are actively involved in day to day implementation of these projects at grass root levels.

Nominations are invited from all departments for these awards latest by 31 Jan, 2013.

Refer to the below mentioned link for details: http://doitctest1.rajasthan.gov.in/_layouts/Doitc/User/NewsContent.aspx?Id=153&LangID=English

 

16th National Conference on e-Governance!

The ’16th National Conference on e-Governance’ is to be held at Birla Auditorium, Jaipur, on 11th & 12th Feb, 2013, under the joint auspices of the Department of Administrative Reforms & Public Grievances, Government of India, Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India and Department of Information Technology, Government of Rajasthan.

e-Governance presents challenges and opportunities to transform both the mechanics of government, and the nature of governance itself. The big challenges are not technological but cultural. The National Conference on e-Governance has been providing a platform of meaningful interaction to policy makers, practitioners, industry leaders and academicians to deliberate, interact and recommend an actionable strategy for good governance and to improve the standard of services rendered to the common man.

Today, India is emerging as an economic tiger, inspite of the global meltdown, but this growth is meaningless till the time it is inclusive, sustainable and encompasses the poorest of the poor. In this scenario, the 16th National Conference on e-Governance based on the theme “Towards an Open Government” , will explore how use of ICT has transformed governance from the perspective of the beneficiaries of the services. It is an attempt at a reality check to ascertain the outcome of the services rendered and whether it has achieved the intended objectives of transparent, effective, responsive and accountable system of governance.

Online registration for 16th National Conference on e-Governance can be done by clicking on the following link: 

http://grievance.nic.in:8080/nceg/participant.php?event_id=42

State to Launch Citizen Call Centre(CCC) Soon!

Seeking information on public schemes or filing grievances will soon be just a call away. The state government is soon going to launch citizen call centre (CCC), mobile-based governance in the state. Services are expected to start in the next six months and will have one common number for reaching all the government departments.

The scheme will be launched in two phases. In phase-I, grievances and information have been included and a total of nine departments incorporated. “Any citizen who has any problem can contact the call centre. The call centre for the first time caller will create a master data which will be linked with the caller’s number,” said G K Sharma, officer on special duty, IT department.

 

 

as published in TOI-Jan-2013

CCTNS launched in the state!

In a major step towards making FIRs and other police data online, the state government launched the ambitious Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & System (CCTNS) project in Jaipur and Jodhpur on Friday. In the first phase, the CCTNS pilot project has been launched in 25 police stations of Jodhpur, west and Jaipur west police districts, and 13 offices of senior police officers in the state. The CCTNS is being developed by the Union ministry of home affairs for sharing information on crime and criminals among nearly 16,000 police stations in the country. It was formally launched in the state by the Additional Chief Secretary home, Ashok Sampatram and DGP Harish Chandra Meena in the presence of senior police and administration officers from the Bani Park police station in Jaipur on Friday.

    With the launch, making the FIR and other police data online has started across all pilot police stations. Sampatram said the remaining police stations and higher offices in the state would be connected in phases by end of 2015.
Ministry of home affairs joint secretary Rashmi Goel said during the function that CCTNS project would help in providing better policing services to citizens. DGP Meena said the project aims at creation of a nationwide networking infrastructure for evolution of IT-enabled sophisticated tracking system around investigation of crime and detection of criminals. He also said that CCTNS will help in building transparency across the police system in state and will build trust among the citizens.
The state nodal officer of CCTNS project, Rajasthan, Sharat Kaviraj said the CCTNS would provide a comprehensive database for crimes and criminals in Rajasthan, which will be integrated with central database and it will help in better tracking of criminals in the region. Both CCTNS and manual entry at police stations will continue simultaneously till March 1, 2013. CCTNS would be implemented in three phases in all the police stations and higher offices in all 33 districts across the state.

Meeting the Demands of the Public through e-Governance

ICT can serve as a big enabler by providing the tools that can facilitate better service delivery by myriad departments and thereby meet the expectations of the public

Sanjay Malhotra,
Secretary, Department of Information Technology & Communication,
Government of Rajasthan

e-Governance is basically about the new ways in which services can be delivered to the public. Today we are witnessing a huge rise in the expectations that the public has from the government, municipal administration and from all the bodies of government. It is immensely challenging for us to cope up with the rising expectations.

The country is in the middle of a catharsis, as the Civil Society is demanding more and more from the government. The government in turn is trying its best to live up to the expectations of the common citizens of the country. In such an environment of rising expectations, ICT can serve as a big enabler. It provides us with the tools that can facilitate better service delivery by myriad departments and thereby meet the expectations of the public.

All of us present here have definite roles to play – the role for those of you from the private sector is to maximise profit and the role of those from the government is to deliver services to the public. But ultimately, we are all citizens of this country, and we too are amongst those who will derive benefits from ICT initiatives of the government. So despite the position we may occupy, it is in our interest to keep implementing new innovations in governance.

If you are not replicating, the process of implementing new ideas in e-Governance can become very long

Mantras of e-Governance
For both the public and the private sector who are working for the government, the field of e-Governance is fraught with challenges.  Software development is very complex, tedious, time-consuming, requirement gathering, etc. So replication becomes important. The successes that we have had lately have been faster on the replication side. Arogya Online is a wonderful example of replication of software. The software was already running in one of the private hospitals in Maharashtra and we replicated it in Rajasthan.

In e-Procurement, we are using e-Tendering which is software of the National Informatics Centre (NIC). We are replicating the success  of e-Office, which is again an NIC product. Along with replication, knowing your requirement is also very important. You have to tell them what you want. This is generally absent. When we want to do something, we just do it for the sake of doing it or it comes more from the side of the people who are selling it. The project shouldn’t be vendor-driven.

If you are not replicating, the process of implementing new ideas in e-Governance can become very long. You have to start with business process re-engineering. The thing is that software development takes time. Lot of changes have to be made. We also need to change the mindset of the people who are going to use the new ICT based systems. We have taken certain measures to reduce the time. We have tried to adopt the philosophy of not trying to re-invent the wheel. This cuts down drastically about 60-85 percent of implementation.

Urban development
As the cities are growing, problems of pollution, traffic, garbage collection, municipal services, etc become larger. As more and more population is coming to cities, it becomes more important to deliver those services through a seamless online process.

The pressure  on municipal bodies and other bodies is increasing with growing population. And there are many areas where IT can be used. For example, Andhra Pradesh is using IT for efficient garbage collection, whereby they are using mobile technology and photographs to monitor if the concerned people are doing their job.

Challenges in Taking IT to the Grassroots!

An article published in http://egov.eletsonline.com

The Government is striving to provide its services to the common man in an efficient, transparent and reliable  manner. e-Governance is one of the major tools deployed for this task

Says, R K Sharma, Joint Director, DoIT&C, Government of Rajasthan

Until the last decade, non-IT enabled environments prevailed and the service delivery mechanisms were largely dependent on manual processing. Manual processing meant human dependency, which led to long queues, procedural complexities, complicated processes for liaisoning with various government departments, etc.

A common man associates such complex and time-consuming features with the working of the government departments. Consequently, a visit to government department by a citizen to make use of any service was a taxing experience. Several factors such as lack of resources, supportive infrastructure, etc contribute to such a bleak picture of the government sector.

Metamorphosis to an IT-enabled environment has added a new silver hue to this bleak picture. Now the quality of delivery of services to the citizens by the government has been more pronounced in recent years with the advent of e-Governance. Use of ICT in  -Governance is also transforming citizens’ interactions with the public sector by improving efficiency, effectiveness and accountability of governments.

A paradigm shift

e-Governance, which is a paradigm shift over the traditional approaches in public administration, means rendering of government services and information to the public using electronic means. Prior to this shift, the common man had to stand in long queues and visit various government departments for availing any government service but with the advent of ICT, not only has the footfall to the government departments has lessened, there has also been a significant reduction in time as well as efforts for availing any service.

This new paradigm has also brought about a revolution in the quality of services delivered to the citizens. It has ushered in transparency in the governing process; saving of time due to provision of services under one roof; simplification of procedures; better office and record management; reduction in corruption and improved job handling capacity of the dealing personnel.

e-Governance in India has steadily evolved from computerisation of Government Departments to initiatives that encapsulate the finer
points of Governance, such as citizen centricity, service orientation and transparency. Lessons from previous e-Governance initiatives have played an important role in shaping the progressive e-Governance strategy of the country.

Several social sector e-Gov schemes such as UID Aadhaar, CSC/e-Mitra, e-District, Redressal of Public Grievance – Sugam, etc. aim at rural upliftment and provide an improved and accountable system to the masses.

Government is making all possible efforts for maximum reach out of the e-Gov initiatives so that these benefits filter down to the last mile. True challenge lies in the successful implementation of these schemes to the grassroots.

“The biggest impediment in effective implementation of e-Governance is change management”

Ensuring IT readiness

Government set up should ensure its ITreadiness for building conducive e-Gov environment. IT-readiness implies infrastructural upgradation as well as capacity building at the individual level, which recognizes the need for reforms in processes using modern technology.

Nevertheless, the biggest impediment in effective implementation of e-Governance is change management. Change management is important, not only in terms of cultural change, but also in terms of changing operations and processes workflow that the IT-driven environment will induce. Government scenario is such that there prevails an IT phobia at the back of the minds of the government officers, making them afraid of this transition and also hesitant in adaptation to this change.

If the will to change from the traditional decade-old procedures to automated environment is developed within the government machinery, the digital divide can be reduced to a large extent.There is a need for training and capacity building of the government officials. The success of any well-structured e-governance programme depends on a unified backend infrastructure and sufficient capacities planned at all levels. However, there are specific gaps such as inappropriate institutional and policy framework and guidelines in the area of capacity building that may lead to failure of any e-Gov project.

The e-Governance initiative necessitates the end user i.e. the common man to be an aware citizen. It is important to educate people at all levels about the benefits of technology. The various benefits and advantages of e-enabling the system should be rightly and clearly communicated at the beginning to ensure popular support which will lead to greater chances of success.

Selection of a right service partner: The Government, to a large extent, has been able to convert the above-stated challenges into opportunities. Adopting the public private partnership mode has greatly helped in meeting out the challenges. PPP model like BOT (Buildoperate- transfer), BOOT (Build-operate-owntransfer) in which private players partner with government departments to design, implement and run various flagship programmes, provide attractive propositions for the private sector to work closely with the governments.

It is assumed that the inherent issues faced within the government departments will be  reduced, if not eliminated completely, when involving private players. Where PPP model has been adopted to replicate the private success stories of project implementation  within the government, it has also become challenging to identify and select the right service provider for requisite quality of service delivery, manpower, project implementation experience in a government scenario etc. along with sufficient check on the private partners.

Incentivisation

Shifting government entities from the mechanical application of technology to adoption of e-Governance tools requires incentivizing e-Governance among different entities and individuals. Incentives and rewards can be used as an effective means of increasing motivation and engaging employees in the change process.

Motivating can be effected not only in terms of monetary benefits but also by streamlining of archaic processes. Enabling backup and digitization of official records also eases down the burden. e-Enablement is a liberation from manual record keeping and maintenance of work log.

Today e-Governance is no more an option or something to be experimented with. It is an important tool for transformation, as is evident with the growing number of e-Governance initiatives. The need of the hour is to search for the right blend of technology and management that makes e-governance a success.

Project Monitoring Information System (PMIS) to be launched in JDA soon!

JDA’s Project Monitoring Information System(PMIS)  will keep a tab on all files. With the help of the new software, the authorities will be able to know the status of each file. The system will be implemented by 15 of Jan,2013.

According to Arvind Arya (Project Manager), with PMIS system we are planning to make JDA a paperless zone. Initially all the files will be uploaded online which can be opened by all the concerned persons through a password. Once the file is transferred from one level to next, a sms message will be received about the location of the file through PMIS. The concerned person can put remarks immediately even from home thus saving precious time .

File will be automatically transferred to the higher level after the expiry of three days. The system will help in tracking the file at any moment of time and for any delay concerned person can be held responsible also.

With the help of the new software, the authorities will be in a positing to monitor the status of each file and can also keep a record .