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ASSOCHAM's formula for e-governance

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Supriya Rai
New Update

NEW DELHI, INDIA: The ASSOCHAM emphasised the need to focus on empowerment and social inclusion through ambitious e-governance initiative at the eighth international summit on e-governance in New Delhi today.

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In order to facilitate delivery of e-services, close to 70,000 common service centers (CSC) are operational in the country.

Umang Das, chairman, ASSOCHAM National e-Governance Council, said there is a need to improve delivery of government services to citizens and the Ministry of Communications and IT are playing an important role to accomplish this agenda.

"With ICT infrastructure in remote areas we can bring in empowerment and eliminate corruption," Das added. ASSOCHAM is bullish on e-services and said that it's optimistic on social empowerment through e-governance.

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Dilip Modi, president, ASSOCHAM, said that three areas are of paramount importance: removal of disparity to bring services to common man; bridging the digital divide with digitization of land records; and decentralization of e-governance so as to bring trust among all the stakeholders.

BK Sinha, secretary, Ministry of Rural Development, said that proliferation of programs is important. For government's ambitious National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme, biometric signatures are crucial to facilitate transparency.

The department of rural development is mooting a program in which handheld or mobile devices can be used to transmit attendance to central server so that senior officials would access all the information. "We are running pilot project for 1 lakh households in the country for data entry operations for the Census," Sinha said.

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The ministry of HRD with Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) has developed a handheld device for such initiative. The ministry of rural development has initially placed an order for six lakh such devices. Shankar Aggarwal, Additional Secretary, DIT, said that India is the second largest growing economy in the world and if some industry sources are to be believed, the country would grow at par with China by 2012.

Sushil Kumar, joint secretary, Ministry of Panchayati Raj, said that they are bringing the accountability systems at the panchayat level. He said that the ministry is dedicated to improve governance. "The expenditures at local levels can be viewed by all and officials would be accountable," Kumar added.

Sanjiv Mital, CEO of NISG said there is a major need to adopt technology in government's initiatives. In some areas of governance, we are not able to achieve excellence to deliver services to the citizens, believes Mital.

However, some of the painpoints include; integration of G2C services in CSCs and revenue sharing. Each center is now earning an average of Rs. 12,000 a month. SREI and Spanco are some of the private players who have set up CSCs for government's prestigious e-governance program.