e-governance policy on the anvil, says Naveen

BHUBANESWAR: Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Monday directed that the e-district programme should be extended to all the districts by September, 2012. The State Government is preparing a e-governance policy and road map for the next five years and putting in place a cyber security policy. Besides, a hardware policy is also being prepared. The Chief Minister on Monday reviewed the implementation of e-district programme in the State at a meeting at the Secretariat. The programme is being implemented in two districts, Ganjam and Mayurbhanj, on a pilot basis. The e-district programme has been successful in Ganjam. Centre will provide ` 90 crore for the implementation of the programme in the State. Additional funds required for its implementation will be provided by the State Government. After implementation of the programme, people will get the benefit of different government services in electronic mode. Registration of birth and death, income, residential and caste certificates, land records and pension papers can be availed of in e-mode. Official sources said the State Secretariat has been connected with 30 district headquarters and 279 block offices under the State wide area network (SWAN) programme. Other leftout blocks will be connected with SWAN soon.  Similarly, 4,710 other offices including tehasils, health service institutions, agriculture offices and treasuries will be connected through internal (horizontal) connectivity under SWAN. A highly modern video conferencing facility and a data centre have been set up in Bhubaneswar. The data centre will have 80 TB (tera byte) storage system, 24 hour security system and biometric access procedure. There will also be several state-of-the-art facilities in the centre. The data centre will start functioning from next month.  Work to set up state service delivery gateway has been started to provide all services under one portal. This will be completed in the next eight months. Besides, payment of commercial taxes, availability of land records, crime tracking system and implementation of Unique ID programme ADHAR was also discussed. Minister of State for Information and Technology Ramesh Chandra Majhi, Chief Secretary Bijay Kumar Patnaik, Secretary in the Information and Technology Department Pradip Kumar Jena and senior officials attended the meeting.