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'E-governance will be a reality next year'

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CIOL Bureau
New Update

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Defending the right of citizens to efficient public services, Shankar Aggarwal, additional secretary, Department of Information Technology, said that e-Governance would play a significant role in citizens getting them without any intermediaries.

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He expects a set of initiatives rolled out by the government to make e-Governance a reality from next year. These include setting up of the 100,000th common service centre, making all State Wide Area Networks and electronic service delivery gateways operational and application roll-out.

In his keynote address at the Telecom Special Interest Group session of the Delhi-NCR chapter of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), Aggarwal indicated that a bill to legislate the delivery of all government services in electronic mode in the next five years was likely to be introduced in the next session of the Parliament.

The official, who is driving the e-governance efforts of the government, added that the Department of Information Technology would soon mandate mobile device makers to have Hindi and one more regional language options on mobile phones for m-Governance initiative to take off .

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Goa has launched a dozen of govt services on mobiles: Aggarwal

This step is expected to allow mobile devices to deliver a variety of services in their local language — the lack of which hitherto used to be a common complaint against mobile makers.

Aggarwal also divulged that Goa had already launched about a dozen government services on mobiles.

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In a bid to encourage small entrepreneurs to participate in tenders for e-governance and m-governance, he informed the TiE conference attendees that the department would soon be issuing model RFPs mandating 20 per cent of the tenders be reserved for small entrepreneurs.

Inaugurating the first session of the TiE Special Interest Group (SIG) on Telecom, army-officer-turned-entrepreneur Col H.S. Bedi of Tulip Telecom and chairman of TiE SIG on Telecom said that vast opportunities lay ahead of entrepreneurs, who were willing to look beyond the commoditized business.

Following government plans to take the broadband network to villages with population of 500 people, entrepreneurs would have enough opportunities in making use of these facilities to their advantage, Bedi added.

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