Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya organised on Tuesday another chapter of its popular series, Museum Popular lecture where Dipankar Sengupta, Senior Technical Director & Scientist ‘F’, NIC and Accounts Informatics Division, office of Comptroller General of Accounts, Dept of Expenditure, Ministry of Finance, GoI spoke on ‘ICT Initiatives in Accounting & Financial Management (with emphasis on Public Financial Management- The Indian Government Experience)’.
Sengupta commenced his lecture by sharing an incident, where an employee posted in remote region of Mangalore, who was habitual of receiving his salary between 10th -15th of month due to it was sent by demand-draft from Mumbai later few days of clearance time at bank. Once he didn’t received his draft, hence anxiously he went to bank where he was informed that his salary has been credited on the 1st of month. He approached Sengupta’s office in New Delhi and telephonically thanked him for the miracle. With this he informed how Government of India is achieving great success in making payments easier and fast.
The lecture was broadly about three major projects of GoI – Compact Accounting software, E-lekha accounting portal and E-payment. He informed with the help of a power-point presentation, how most of Central government’s departments and ministries are saving time and man-power by using the Compact software for managing accounts. He explained the time duration of a bill payment had decreased from 22 days in avg. to 4 days avg. in present.
Speaking about e-lekha, an online accounting system he said “By using e-lekha the departments and ministries are able to prepare the monthly budget in a day’s time, where daily account is uploaded at the end of the day.
Describing e-payment, Sengupta said by using this method government is successfully making payments to vendors in matter of minutes and also monitoring where the payments are struck, making it impossible for government officials to delay payments of private vendors. In the end, a Q&A session was organised, where all account officials clarified their doubts.