Public services in Chandigarh would be just a click away. In a move aimed at giving boost to e-governance in the city, the UT Administration has decided to provide over 100 public services to the city denizens in electronic form.
Come 2014, the citizens of Chandigarh would be able to get services like birth certificate, bus pass, death certificate, senior citizen certificate, paying bills among others without having to move out of their home.
A high-level State Apex Committee chaired by KK Sharma, Adviser to the Administrator on Thursday approved two flagship e-Governance projects namely e-District and State Portal/State Service Delivery Gateway for the city.
And, the UT Department of Information Technology has been designated as nodal agency of the projects. The IT Department would look after the implementation of these two major e-Governance projects which are expected to give a boost to the quality of life of the residents of Chandigarh.
In electronic form, the delivery time of these public services is likely to reduce significantly.
These two projects would provide over 100 public services which would be delivered to the citizens of Chandigarh in electronic form. The projects would be implemented on a total budget at around Rs 120 million and would be funded under the National eGovernance Plan of Government of India.
The projects were conceptualized by the Department of Information Technology earlier this year and were approved in principle by the Centre.
Under these projects, all the associated Departments would be provided with desired IT infrastructure to enable the provision of electronic services to the citizens. The e-forms on the official website will enable citizens to submit their applications electronically on the State Portal which would in turn transmit these electronic applications to the corresponding Departments where the officials would process them electronically.
After the citizen received an SMS from the corresponding Department, the citizen would then download the applied certificate, digitally signed by the authority of the line Department.
“The public services in their electronic form would be implemented in a phased manner and efforts would be put in to launch first set of high volume eServices within 2013,” said a senior official of the UT Administration.
The UT Administration has also set up a Chandigarh e-Governance Society designating Deputy Commissioner as its chairman. The Society would closely work with the Department of Information Technology and would also act as the hub for all the line Departments of Administration whose services are being transformed into electronic form.
While assessing the scope and deliverables of the projects, KK Sharma, Adviser to the Administrator on Thursday said that the two state of the art e-Governance projects have the potential to enable Administration to match world class standards in terms of quality and speed of public service delivery. These projects should be implemented expeditiously and in line with the service levels specified by the Department of Information Technology.
The UT Department of Information Technology which has designed the specifics of these two projects, gave a detailed presentation covering the scope and deliverables of these two landmark projects during the meeting which was attended by UT Home Secretary Anil Kumar, UT Finance Secretary VK Singh among other UT senior officials.