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"e-gov will lead India towards innovation"

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CIOL Bureau
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NEW DELHI: An application like e-governance will lead the country into a dimension of knowledge based innovation and that will ideally position India to have a developed knowledge society. President of India, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam stated this while inaugurating the International conference on e-governance at IIT in New Delhi.





"Innovation is the key and when coupled with knowledge, it becomes a force to reckon with, as far as knowledge society is concerned. An information-based society connects a family, different families connect communities and communities connect different regions and regions then go forward to connect the whole nation. Connecting different people with the help of a single platform is the prime idea behind any e-governance related objective," he added.





Citing security as one of the hurdles facing different e-governance models, the president emphasized the need to have a proper security policy in place before going in for any e-governance initiative.



"We should have a citizen centric approach towards designing applications and security is one such issue. We should have a management policy towards e-governance security. All the e-gov initiatives have to be designed in a citizen-friendly way and the software should not be too difficult for the common people to understand," he explained.





Talking about the different languages that India has, he mentioned that it becomes necessary for different software vendors to provide their solutions in all 14 national languages. "Language independent software is a necessity towards having a national e-governance platform. Institutions like IIT, should take the lead in developing such platforms having language intelligence," he added.



The way forward



Although, there are a number of examples for proper e-governance practices within the country at



present, there is still has a long way to go when it comes to having centrally located e-governance applications.





"There are a lot of things which we need to do. Firstly, the country should have a national citizen database. We should also have a proper VPN based network to connect various states to a central server where different applications can be accessed. Then, we need to have a data center both at the center as well as the state level. All these things will lead us to have a better e-governance atmosphere within the country," the President informed.





He also mentioned the importance of a national grid between different state governments and the center to ensure safe and sound data transfer. "I do not think that the government should go out and implement all this work. Ideally, more than 90 percent of this work should be outsourced to different system integration and service providers. Government should only be made responsible for the maintenance and the updation of these applications and networks," he explained.



(CyberMedia News Service)

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