Monday, June 25, 2001		Article

THE Haryana Government is on the threshold of e-governance by laying special emphasis on network-centric governance. The Secretariat has been networked and all financial commissioners and secretaries of the government have been connected to this network. Also, e-mail accounts have been created for all government officers and an e-mail directory of the state has been published.

Now the state government has planned to extend this network to 30 Bays Building in Sector 17, Chandigarh, where a number of Haryana Government offices have been located. These shall ultimately form a government Intranet, where all the connected offices will be in a position to share the data across the network. It has also been planned to access to provide the Internet to all heads of departments in the 30 Bays Building.

Even all departments, boards and corporations have been asked to prepare their IT plans in the first place. The guidelines for the preparation of the IT plan and administrative re-engineering have been finalised to facilitate the departments, boards and corporations in undertaking this exercise.

IT application in transaction automation and creation of information databanks will be mandatory for all departments, boards and corporations to achieve accountability and efficiency in administration. This process is scheduled to be completed by 2003 A.D.

For funding the e-governance projects, instructions have been issued to all departments, boards and corporations to earmark 5 per cent of their budget for IT applications.

An IT initiative fund for e-governance has been established with an initial corpus of Rs 10 crore by contribution from profit-making state PSUs, cooperative institutions and other public sector organisations. This initiative fund will be utilised for developing and reusable models of e-governance.Smart card-based citizen ID with multi-functions that enable citizens to interact with services, make payments, act as a voter ID, obtain ration card, passport, driving licence and vehicle registration, will be introduced in association with the private sector by 2003 A.D. The government has taken technical demonstrations from the leading companies and the modalities for introducing the Smart Card are being worked out.

A portal of the state has been set up by Hartron by interconnecting existing Web site of departments and organisations. This is being updated dynamically and all government tenders, employment news, public domain information and notices issued by the government for general public will be published on this Web site.