A retrograde move

R Jai Krishna

NEW DELHI: In the age of paperless offices and the country moving towards ambitious e-governance, a move by the Jharkhand government to take back-up copies by printing files on paper has made many eyebrows rise.

The move in itself has nullified the very essence of digitization and also will prove costly for the State exchequer.

The department of information technology, under the Jharkhand government has recently completed the digitizing of its index registers of the registration department. The index registers, numbering two, were digitized year-wise and district sub-registry-wise and arranged in a dictionary index.

The Index Register-1 is arranged party-name-wise and the Index Register-2 is arranged property-location-wise. Now, with the digitizing of the exhaustive list completed, the state government has decided to take a hard-copy of the Index Registers to work as reference document.

According to the Jharkhand IT department, the document contains on an average of two crore records running into about eight lakh sheets of paper, which will involve four lakh pages on a back-to-back printing. The government has decided to outsource the printing and binding work to an external agency, at an approximate cost running to about Rs 20 lakh, a heavy cost on the State exchequer.

IT experts criticize the move by the Jharkhand government and opine that the move foregoes the very essence of digitization and moving forward in a paperless society. The State principal secretary for information technology, was unavailable for comment.