Chandigarh, December 2 : The Punjab Government’s drive on administrative reforms has drawn full throated national applause as the government of India has given the top billing to Punjab’s e-governance initiatives.
Disclosing this here today a spokesman of the Punjab Government said that The Union governments’ Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEIT) in its quarterly ranking released on October 31 this has rated Punjab as the best in the country in e-district project, a term used to denote an e-zone as geographical area.
In these rankings of the government of India, Madhya Pradesh ranked second and Uttar Pradesh third. Surprisingly, Punjab finished 14 ranks above the educationally high profile and better reputed, Chandigarh which had to be content with the 15th position in the country. The Punjab Governance Reforms department is the nodal agency of the State for e-governance initiatives launched in different departments.
He informed that this development would certainly give a huge boost to the efforts of Punjab Deputy CM Sukhbir Singh Badal to eliminate corruption by minimizing the discretionary powers and role of government offices and officers in the delivery of services to the common man.
Mr Badal has set his eyes on establishing a system in which people get routine services such as driving and armed licenses, property transactions , agriculture land farads, Police complaints and FIR s, police clearance for passport and visa purposes etc online sitting at home without having to visit any government offices. He said that Deputy CM had already made major headway in ensuring that services such as issuance of driving licenses, vehicle registration papers and other such services are made available online and in a totally simplified process.
He said that success in these areas has earned Punjab the top rank in the country and Sukhbir Badal has declared that the entire governance in Punjab would become totally online and paperless within a year.
He informed that Governance Reforms the department is executing various e-Governance projects under national e-Governance Programme (NeGP) and State e-Governance programme to improve service delivery to the general public.
He said that e-district Punjab project was adjudged as best in the country for its effective pilot project implementation, backend computerisation of maximum number of services among all states, on-time selection of system integrator, delivery of hardware and connectivity in more than 1,000 field offices, robust governance structure in the form of district e-governance society and other best features.
The spokesman said that Punjab government has been setting up 2174 Sewa Kendras in urban and rural areas that would provide 200 citizen centric services on the click of mouse. By implementing this service delivery mechanism across the state, Punjab will become the first state in the country to provide government to citizen (G2C) centric services online. The state has also interlinked all 147 departments with 143 branches to route intra common tasks online through IWDMS system. Besides, all 22 treasuries and 74 sub-treasuries have put on automated online processing through IFMS project, he added.
He informed that Sanjh Kendras (Community Policing) are bridging the gap between police and public and providing 22 police services under Right to Service Act. More than 20 lakh citizens have availed of the services.