The delivery of services and information to the citizens though e-Governance is facing hurdles at the institutional, personnel and infrastructure level. The facts were brought up by Nodal Officers (NO) of as many as 27 departments in the first workshop on e-Governance called by Jharkhand Agency for Promotion of Information Technology (JAPIT) on Friday.
Addressing the NOs, N.N. Sinha, Principal Secretary, Department of IT-cum-CEO, JAPIT said the NOs should be futuristic leader for imparting better facilities and improved administrative systems to citizen through e-governance. The NOs will have to locate areas where e-governance can be used in the better way, added Sinha.
While e-Governance is more about governance than infrastructure, the nodal officers were disgruntled with infrastructure rather than the non-delivery of services and resulting deterioration in governance. The NOs brought up the issues in the behaviour of the system which they felt needed to be made user friendly by introducing a number of amendments.
Addressing the application related issue, A.K.Singh, Senior Consultant, State e-Governance Mission Team (SeMT), Jharkhand said, “The system took wrong path right from the stage of conceptualisation” and interaction between developer and ultimate user never happened resulting in a gap between what was envisaged and what is being delivered.
Significantly, considering the delivery of services the process of filling the gap needs to be done in an expedited manner so as to minimise the impact on the overall delivery of services.
Interestingly, NOs also complained about institutional apathy such as late delivery of documents containing information which they need to upload on websites for public consumption, providing insufficient documents and neglect by senior officials of the department.
But the SeMT has found a solution to the problem of neglect and apathy in departments where such issues are prevalent and causing heartburn to the NOs. “We will organise a workshop in which the secretaries of all departments will share space with NOs of their department and we will introduce the former with the later,” said Singh.
It will aim at informing the officials at higher echelons the importance of e-Governance and the role of an NO in making the goals of e-Governance become a reality. The Government framed National e-Governance Programme (NeGP) under which 31 Mission Mode Projects (MMP) to be implemented State & Central Government. The MMPs are being implemented in the State Department of Food & Civil Supply, Commercial Tax & Agriculture.