Advertisment

AP State govt. officials go mobile

author-image
CIOL Bureau
Updated On
New Update

HYDERABAD: The state government officials in Andhra Pradesh will go ‘mobile' soon, with Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu deciding to provide each of them with a mobile phone, so that they can interact with each other and their respective senior authorities on a more convenient and regular basis.



The facility would be made available to more than 10,000 official functionaries including secretaries, heads of departments, directors, commissioners, assistant commissioners, district-level and mandal-level departmental officials, who are directly involved in the policy implementation process.



Under this scheme, the officials of a particular department will be categorized and included in a common user group, so that the officials within the group would have incoming and outgoing calls free of cost. If they want to make calls outside the group, they would be charged at the rate of Rs 1.20 per minute, which the individual official has to bear.



"We are negotiating with the mobile phone companies for providing a package of services to the government. We are trying for an average rental of Rs 750 to Rs 1,000. The overall monthly expenditure for the government will be just around Rs 75 lakh to Rs 1 crore. We are expecting to strike a deal in a couple of weeks," said a high-ranking government official.



The state government is also planning to extend the tele-conferencing facility to these mobile phones, so that the Collectors could interact with the district and mandal-level officials simultaneously. At present, only four to five persons could participate in teleconferencing through mobile phones, but the government had asked the mobile companies to modify the software suitably so that 20 or 30 or even 100 members could participate in the conferencing.



The Chief Minister has already announced that the government was contemplating the introduction of call centers in every district headquarters. People could lodge complaints or pass on any vital information from these centers, from where it would directly go to the officials concerned within seconds.

tech-news